Ngadjuri

The Ngadjuri people are a group of Indigenous Australian people whose traditional lands lie in the mid north of South Australia with a territory extending from Gawler in the south to Orroroo in the north.

Wilhelm Schmidt proposed that, together with the languages of the Kaurna, Narungga and Nukunu, Ngadjuri formed one of the elements of a subgroup he called the Miṟu languages. It is now classified as a member of the Thura-Yura language family. Elements of the vocabulary were recorded by Samuel Le Brun, stepson of one of the Canowie Station proprietors R. Boucher James. Le Brun, who spent parts of his youth at Canowie in the late 1850s, took an interest in the Aboriginal vocabulary of the district and in 1886 was among the laymen who made submissions on this topic to a book by Edward Micklethwaite Curr (1820-1889). Le Brun's vocabulary has in recent times been attributed to the Nukunu near Spencer Gulf, but he himself states it originated from 'forty miles east of Port Pirie', which places it near Canowie, with which he was intimately familiar, and is therefore the vocabulary of the Ngadjuri people. Their word for water, cowie or kowi, appears quite frequently as a suffix within Ngadjuri-based nomenclature of the region, such as Yarcowie, Canowie, Caltowie, Warcowie, and Booborowie.

The Ngadjuri homelands covered roughly 11,500 sq. miles, embracing Angaston and Freeling in the south and running northwards to Clare, Crystal Brook, Gladstone up to Carrieton and Orroroo in the Flinders Ranges. To the northeast, they took in the area Waukaringa and Koonamore. The districts of Peterborough, Burra and Robertstown were in Ngadjuri territory. The eastern boundaries coincide with the area of Mannahill.

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