Rare Letters Sent by Kaurna Children From Adelaide Mission School to Germany in 1840s Returned 170 Years Later

MORE than 170 years ago, Kaurna children sat in a missionary schoolhouse by the banks of the River Torrens, writing letters in their own language and in exquisite penmanship to send all the way to Germany.

They were giving thanks for gifts of toys sent from the base of the Lutheran mission, and hoping for more.

Those innocent letters from two young boys in 1843, and a page of written work by a female student from two years earlier — now considered priceless rarities of indigenous history — were yesterday returned to Kaurna country for good.

In an agreement backed by Kaurna elders, the Leipzig Mission has delivered the three documents to Adelaide University on permanent loan to its Barr Smith Library.

According to the university’s Head of Linguistics, Dr Rob Amery, they are three of just five known surviving documents written by Kaurna people in their language in the 19th century.

Dr Amery translated one of the letters, from a boy of about 12 called Wailtyi.

“To my friends, I have sent you a letter. Would you please send me toys. I will play with them for a long time. I will play with my household things that you send here. Please send some more,” it read.

The other letter was penned by a boy of the same age called Pitpauwe and contained a similar message.

The page of classwork belonged to a girl named Kartanya, repeating the lines: “Always worship Jehovah. He is our Creator. He saves us from sin.”

Dr Amery said the documents were are “a tangible connection for Kaurna people via their language to their ancestors”.

“Leipzig Mission still own them but I guess they will remain here forever,” he said.

“Having the originals here is a wonderful gesture of reciprocation. Being three of just five known documents, they are of great significance to the Kaurna people.”

A handing over ceremony was conducted yesterday in the library where the documents will be housed in the special collections area and available to view on request.

Kaurna elder Dr Alitya Wallara Rigney said she was overwhelmed with emotion when she travelled to Germany to see the letters in 2011, and she expected other Kaurna people who viewed them here to be similarly affected.

“I was ecstatic about it because it is about our history and our ancestors,” she said.

Elder Dr Lewis Yerloburka O’Brien said the documents demonstrated the sophistication of the Kaurna language and the children’s mastery of it at a young age.

“These kids wrote in perfect Kaurna, which is very difficult to do because it has more declensions than Latin,” he said.

Reverend Hans-Georg Tannhauser, Asia-Pacific program co-ordinator for the Leipzig Mission, which had held the letters as part of the archival collection of the Dresden Mission Society, said it was a great privilege to deliver them as they “touch the hearts” of Kaurna people.

“This is something you can see and touch from the people here many years ago,” he said.

Dr Amery said it was the missionaries’ Lutheran philosophy that the children “needed to transmit the Lord’s word in their own language” because if they were just “parroting” in English, they probably wouldn’t mean what they were saying in their prayers.

He said without the missionaries’ efforts to understand and record the Kaurna language, it would never have survived the near extinction of the Kaurna people through disease and dispossession in the mid-19th century.

The university’s Dean of Indigenous Education, Professor Lester Irabinna-Rigney, said the process of acquiring the letters had helped build a “collaborative rapport” with the Kaurna community.

“It will also enable our students to learn from vital and important documents like these that are rare and special,” he said.