Yarta-Kurlangga

Abstract

Yarta-kurlangga was the Kaurna name of a small area centred on the well-favoured campsites at Rapid Bay, around the mouth of what we know today as the Yattagolinga River. Yarta means 'earth, land, country'. Here kurla (a word with a range of recorded meanings) probably means ‘separate’ and/or ‘last’. The name therefore means ‘place of the separate or last land’. This may refer to the remote and rather separate position of Rapid Bay away from the bigger population centres and frequently-used travel routes, and perhaps to a tendency of the resident groups here to be more socially isolated than others. The name was obtained onsite by Colonel Light’s survey team in 1836, from people of the ‘Cape Jervis tribe’ (i.e. the tribe of Fleurieu Peninsula) whose members included a woman known to us only as ‘Doughboy’. She was the ‘wife’ of Kangaroo Island sealer Cooper when Light hired both of them for his first survey voyage up the east coast of St Vincent’s Gulf.