Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item:
https://hdl.handle.net/2440/113970
Type: | Text |
Title: | 'Taperoo' |
Other Titles: | Place name Summary (PNS) 8/25 |
Author: | Schultz, Chester |
Publisher: | Chester Schultz |
Issue Date: | 14-May-2018 |
Abstract: | ‘Taperoo’, the gazetted name of a suburb and railway station on Lefevre Peninsula in Adelaide, is not a Kaurna word. In 1920 the SA government’s Nomenclature Committee took it from a 1912 newspaper citation of Aboriginal words which had been lifted from unknown wordlists for use by settlers in naming their properties. The Committee used it to re-name an existing railway siding which was then serving the new housing development of Silicate Beach – which in turn had been named after the Silicate Brick Company operating a few years earlier near the site of today’s Taperoo Railway Station. Although at first contact the Kaurna-speaking women of the Adelaide Plains beat a possum-skin pad or ‘drum’ called tapurro (New Spelling tapurru) in their corroborees, and although this word could easily be spelled ‘taperoo’ by a linguistically untrained settler, there is no evidence to support the idea that this local word was ever used as a place-name, nor that it had any special association with the place now called Taperoo. |
Keywords: | Taperoo Lefevre Peninsula Kaurna language Silicate Beach tapurro possum-skin drum Aboriginal place-names South Australia geography Kaurna Warra Pintyandi |
Appears in Collections: | Southern Kaurna Place Names Essays |
Files in This Item:
File | Description | Size | Format | |
---|---|---|---|---|
Taperoo.pdf | 498.38 kB | Adobe PDF | View/Open |
Items in DSpace are protected by copyright, with all rights reserved, unless otherwise indicated.