We Call This Place... Kaurna Yarta

We Call This Place... Kaurna Yarta is a series of daguerreotype photographs of places on the Kaurna nation. The Kaurna nation is an area predominantly on the Adelaide plains in South Australia, but it also stretches down into the south to Fleurieu Peninsula and the Mount Lofty Ranges, as well as Kangaroo Island. These places, when South Australia was colonized by the British in 1836, a lot of the indigenous place names were ignored, and the British renamed a lot of the places either after British people or British places. There’s a few German names as well from the German migrants. There wasn’t that many original Aborginal names recorded in the Kaurna region, because it really was the first place to be colonized by the British so they named a lot of the places after the first migrants. And so this series, I wanted to rename the places with Kaurna names. I used a combination of historical names that we know, but also the contemporary Kaurna language committee has been renaming places if they don’t know what the old name is, and giving dual names so there’s the British name and the Kaurna name. In this series I’m just laying the Kaurna name over, and taking control of our land and inserting our language back into the country and back into photographs. In these images, I’ve used a specific type of round hand from the 19th century with the Kaurna names laid over top. The round hand was used by the missionaries when teaching Kaurna people how to use Roman numerals with writing Kaurna language. We have a lot of letters written in Kaurna language taught by German missionaries in this type of round hand. In some way, I was trying to reinvigorate the time when those languages were spoken using this type of writing. The images are displayed on Kaurna design, these geometric shapes such as this wavy line which references riverways. These designs all mean something to us and they are all part of our identity, so I wanted to overlay them on top of our imagery. The tones in the images are gold, which refers to the gold that was around daguerreotype photographs in the 19th century, as well as the red which refers to our most precious resource, which was red ochre, which to us is like gold.