Para / Perry / Parry

Abstract

“Parra or Perry” was a word recorded from anonymous ‘natives’ in mid-1837 by early explorers, one of whom was a man named Crouch, and another probably Stephen Hack. They mistook it for the name of one of the rivers north of Adelaide (probably the Gawler River). Over the next few years other colonists applied it in a confusing number of different ways to name the North Para and South Para rivers (which join to form the Gawler), and the Little Para River, and the general ‘Para district’. It was spelled ‘Parra’, ‘Parry’ and ‘Para’; the last form became standard early in the 1840s. However, it is beyond reasonable doubt that the original source ‘Parra or Perry’ was a mis-hearing or mis-remembering of Kaurna pari, ‘river, creek’, the common generic term for any such watercourse: i.e. it was not a place-name at all.