Le Brun, who spent parts of his youth at Canowie in the late 1850s, took an interest in the Aboriginal vocabulary of the district, and in 1886 was among the laymen who made submissions on this topic to a book by Edward Micklethwaite Curr (1820-1889).
Their word for water, cowie or kowi, appears quite frequently as a suffix within Ngadjuri-based nomenclature of the region, such as Yarcowie, Canowie, Caltowie, Warcowie, and Booborowie.
The Ngadjuri homelands covered roughly 11,500 square miles (30,000 km2), embracing Angaston and Freeling in the south and running northwards to Clare, Crystal Brook, Gladstone up to Carrieton and Orroroo in the Flinders Ranges.
[6] Source: Tindale 1974 Before European settlers reached the area, after British colonisation of South Australia, the Ngadjuri, who practised circumcision, were aggressively moving eastwards towards the Murray River, insisting that tribes there adopt the practice.
[8] As with other Aboriginal groups in South Australia, the Ngadjuri led nomadic lives and were decimated by introduced European diseases,[9] such as measles and smallpox, as colonisers took over their water and land resources, leading to their dispersion.
[8] Calculating from records on the supply of foodstuffs to the native population, in 1852 it is estimated that there were some 70 Ngadjuri people drawing rations, and the children readily joined in the introduced games by playing marbles, rounders and cricket,[11] but the spread of agriculture appears to have coincided with the disappearance of the central community within the following 20 years.
As the cannibal woman drew near to the game-rich and well-watered camping grounds at Karuna, the Ganjamata hill people decided to make a stand and try to kill the intruders.
[18] Tindale's version runs as follows: Crow, while joining Eagle in hunting was jealous of the latter for refusing to share the game it caught, and because it was powerful enough to smash the nests of the jerboa rat.
He then enticed Eagle to the nest, and asked him flatteringly to smash it so they might eat the contents, and the paija bone, at these words, made noises that confirmed the idea many rats were hidden inside.
Eagle then set about tracking Crow and his family as they moved northeast to Titalpa and then west to Waruni where his festering wound burst and pus streamed out, forming the reef of white quartz still visible today.
Turning into a bird, he swooped back down three times to the cave to feast on the blackfellow Crows, only to find his father always there, who blocked him, and kept throwing him some meat instead.
From that day onwards, the eagle swoops to earth for its prey, while the crow, descended from the smoked-out family, is black even to the point of bearing smokey eyes.
[19]When Anglo-European settlers first arrived in 1836 at Holdfast Bay (now Glenelg), the land was considered in the South Australia Act 1834 passed by the British Parliament and by Governor Hindmarsh as commander-in-chief in his Proclamation of 1836, to be a barren wasteland.