Mayor's Proclamation Day speech 2025

Nina Marni

We gather today on sacred ground - Patha Yukuna, the Old Gum Tree - a place where stories of foundation, resilience and identity intertwine.

I am honoured to be here once again as the Mayor of Holdfast Bay – a position I have proudly held for the past 7 years.

But I also stand here today as a proud resident of Glenelg - Pathawilyangga, meaning "swamp gum foliage place.

I’m a proud South Australian and proud friend and ally of Kaurna elders - Aunty Lynette Crocker and Uncle Jeffrey Newchurch as well as Merle Simpson and Allan Sumner.

It was at this meeting place, on Proclamation Day in 2017, that I first met Uncle Tamaru. He gifted me the Kaurna Acknowledgment of Country and taught me to speak it in language.

And on Australia Day 2018 at Glenelg, I became the first politician to deliver that Acknowledgment publicly in the Kaurna language.

Today it is spoken by premiers, mayors, senators and ministers - but its journey, our journey, began right here.

Council’s relationship with Kaurna – and the relationship we as elected members have with our Kaurna friends as individuals – is one of our great achievements and will remain as one of Council's great legacies.

The relationship between Council and Kaurna has been built on mutual respect, truth-telling and the privilege of helping to return Old People home to Kingston Park.

Repatriation was never an act of politics - it was an act of humanity. For those of us who were present, that day will remain with us always.

On this Proclamation Day, we hold all our history – as a state and nation, with its triumphs and its truths. We hold our history not only in books, but in our hearts and minds.

We honour the past, we learn from the past, and we take lessons from the past to help shape the future to create a better place for all.

Every year we come together here, we become part of the state’s history.

But who were the people who came before us? Who were the people who helped pave the way for us to be here today?

Who were the people who showed great courage and bravery, who embraced opportunities, who faced significant change, upheaval and perhaps grief?

Those people were ancestors of our Kaurna friends, and they were the ancestors of very many of us too.

Among them, my own family members, who also bore the Wilson name.

I often think of those women who came before me and the experiences and encounters they faced.

And I think about the surprising, often confronting parallels between the lives of those women, who left their homeland, their family support and ventured to the other side of the world to a foreign land… and the Kaurna women whose connection to this land and knowledge of country, stretched back tens of thousands of years.

Yes, their cultures were profoundly different.

Yes, their languages, beliefs, spiritual practices and social structures were worlds apart.

Yet the female experience - its burdens, its responsibilities, its unrecognised strength - brought the women together.

They both fed families and protected and raised children in fragile worlds.

They both grieved deeply and kept going, navigating danger, scarcity, illness and loss.

They both built community with whatever they had and through labour that was never recorded.

That was the experience of my foremothers, among them Elizabeth Wilson who arrived in Adelaide in 1839, with her husband John Wilson and their five children.

Their young daughter, little Anne, died at sea during the 17-week voyage. Another child, Edward, died aged just 4, shortly after they arrived in their new home.

They disembarked the Buckinghamshire at the mouth of the Patawalonga, followed the creek past this site through Plympton and Cowandilla to Emigration Square. They lived in dugouts along the Torrens and then in huts on what now is West Terrace. John made the bricks and helped to build the Adelaide Gaol.

Elizabeth died young, worn down by the weight of survival - another woman who built a future she never lived to see.

John Wilson quickly re-married a woman called Emma – my great-great-great grandmother.

Emma had arrived on the John Kerr and was a widow, with five children of her own.

In the late 1830s, John and Emma travelled by bullock cart to Aldinga and later Port Willunga, becoming one of three pioneer families to settle the district.

Two other families were the farmers and the fishers and the Wilsons were the builders.

While John built some of the Port Willunga’s first buildings, including the Lewis Hotel, Rosa’s Cottage and the now destroyed Port Willunga wharf, Emma raised all the children in a blended household.

When John was injured, it’s widely regarded that Emma held the family together while managing a fledgling hotel and accounts, feeding travellers and continuing with her domestic chores like washing, cooking and keeping communities alive.

None of it - not the hotel, not the homestead, not the community - could have stood without Emma.

While John built the walls, she built the life inside them. Behind every colonial man, there was a woman doing the real pioneering and one of those women was Emma.

The women who built this place – the Kaurna women and the colonial women - teach us that survival never came from avoiding difficulty.

It came from facing it.

Working through it.

And standing steady in the storm.

And that is the leadership we must continue with.

When we speak of builders or leaders, we often picture men with tools in their hands, or men in suits.

But this city – this community – was built by both men and women, from a myriad of diverse backgrounds.

As the first female Mayor of Holdfast Bay, and Glenelg, I hope that I have honoured our ancestors by helping to build something that would all be proud of:

Stronger and mutually respectful relationships with Traditional Owners

A city that respects its past while shaping its future.

And a foundation of integrity and a vision for the leaders who come after me.

Thank you for allowing me to be part of this culturally important state event which commemorates how South Australia came to be.

Even after I step down as Mayor next year, I will continue to cherish my relationship with our Kaurna friends, and I will watch on with great pride as the City of Holdfast Bay, and its people, continue to be leaders and champions for our community, our environment and our culture.

Ngaitalya