David Unaipon

Residence 1

📍Raukkan (Point McLeay Mission), Coorong, SA 5259, Australia

“I was born at the Point McLeay Mission — Raukkan — on the shores of Lake Alexandrina, Ngarrindjeri country, in 1872. My father James was a Ngarrindjeri leader and preacher, and our home held both the Yaraldi tongue of my people and the books and faith of the mission. I was a curious, exceptional child; the mission school could barely keep up with me, for I wanted to know how everything worked — light, motion, the flight of a boomerang. That meeting of two worlds on the lake's edge shaped the inventor, writer and preacher I became — the Ngarrindjeri man whose face Australia would one day put on its fifty-dollar note.”

Sources: Wikipedia: David Unaipon

Residence 2

📍Adelaide, SA 5000, Australia

“At thirteen I went to Adelaide, into service with a family of the Aborigines' Friends' Association who, to their credit, fed my hunger to learn. In the city I devoured literature, music and science — Newton and Milton, mechanics and philosophy — anything I could reach. Adelaide gave a Ngarrindjeri boy a library and a laboratory of the mind. I would go on to file patents, lecture on science, and write the first book published by an Aboriginal author. They called me Australia's Leonardo. It started with a curious child on a mission, and a city that, for once, let him read.”

Sources: Wikipedia: David Unaipon