Until now, a list of som e eighty w ords has been considered to be part of the corpus of m aterial on the languages of Tasm ania.Plomley, the m ost com prehensive source on the docum entation of the languages of T asm ania,1 attributes these K aurna w ords, com piled by Charles Robinson, the son of George A ugustus Robinson, to the Ben Lomond area of north-east T asm ania.2In this paper I will dem onstrate that these eighty w ords are irrefutably Kaurna, the language of A delaide and the A delaide Plains of South Australia.Further, I will put forw ard a probable explanation as to how these w ords came to be included w ithin the Robinson papers.F urther I will identify the Kaurna w om an w ho w as the probable source. Kaurna words first noticed within Tasmanian materialsEarly in 1993, I first noticed the K aurna w ord kauwe 'w ater' w ritten as cow.ive w hen flicking through Plom ley's 1976 A Word-list of the Tasmanian Aboriginal Languages.O ver several decades of painstaking work, Plom ley has collated alm ost all of the w ords ever recorded on the languages of Tasm ania.Plomley compiled his w ordlist from the records of at least thirty different observers, gathering together all the w ords from the various sources and listing them u nder an English headw ord.So under the w ord for 'w ater' for instance, Plom ley lists w ords recorded by these different observers and has taken care to specify the source, location and inform ant, w here such inform ation is available.Cow.iue seem ed out of place am ongst the other w ords recorded for w ater.It w as shorter than m ost of the other Tasm anian w ords w hich are often polysyllabic.Variants of other term s for w ater w ere given by a n um ber of observers, w hereas cow.we stood out on its own.Interestingly, other w ords lar.cun.er and la.un.er for w ater w hich are cognate w ith other Tasm anian languages are provided also for the Ben Lomond language.No other Tasm anian w ords for w ater were rem otely sim ilar to cow.we.I didn't think much of it at the time.At that stage I suspected that it m ight have been a K aurna w ord that 1 Plomley 1976.' This list of Kaurna words is insignificant in number relative to the total corpus of Tasmanian materials.Plomley (1976) lists some 1400 English head words.Under each of these head w ords are numerous alternative terms and minor variations of spelling as recorded by the different observers of the various Tasmanian languages.
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