Burial Practices

Burial sites are sacred ground to the Kaurna.

"On the Lefevre Peninsula at the site of the Naval Base and Largs Bay Primary School were burial grounds. Wherever a Kaurna person died, their people would stay with them for a few days to mourn but they would leave them at that spot because “they couldn’t cart them anywhere, they couldn’t pick them up and carry them anywhere so they just buried them.
(Brodie V, pers.comm., 2006)

Aunty Veronica recalls that at the back of Captain Harts cottage is a big Morton Bay fig tree with a waterhole underneath. Behind that place is a boarding place where carriages used to be stored but “there are two Kaurna graves that are haunted with the ghosts and spirits of the people who died there.”(Brodie V, pers.comm., 2006) Burial sites are sacred ground to the Kaurna but unfortunately there are so many burial grounds scattered around the Port that knowing their exact location is difficult.

Aunty Veronica tells of the ‘Italian fella’ out at Greenfields who commenced digging on his newly acquired land only to unearth Indigenous bodies, being the ancestors of Kaurna people in the area. The bodies were reburied by the Kaurna descendents of Salisbury.

When dredging began at the Glanville site of the Newport Quays, it was aimed to remove contaminated soil but Aunty Veronica maintains there was no monitoring of the site for bones or remnants, therefore anything could have been removed and no person would have been the wiser." Kaurna Cultural Heritage Survey - interview with Veronica Brodie