'Taperoo'

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.