Wellington Square, North Adelaide

The Adelaide area was inhabited long before European settlement in 1836 by one of the tribes which later came to be known as the Kaurna people, or Adelaide tribe.[2]

The square was named on 23 May 1837 after Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of Wellington, Irish-born field marshal and statesman, victor at Waterloo and Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1828 to 1830,[3] who is credited with securing the passage of the South Australia Foundation Act through the British House of Lords in 1834.[4] Colonel Light, first Surveyor-General of South Australia and a member of the Street Naming Committee, had briefly served under Wellington as a junior staff officer,[5] a Deputy Assistant Quartermaster General (DAQMG), during the Peninsular War. Light's 1837 plan of Adelaide included Wellington Square.[6]

In March 2003, as part of the City of Adelaide's dual naming project in association with the University of Adelaide, the square was assigned the name "Kudnartu",[7][8] to commemorate a Kaurna woman from the Clare District (Crystal Brook area) called Kudnartu, also spelt Kudnarto,[1] who married a settler, a shepherd named Tom Adams, in January 1848 at the Registry Office in Waymouth Street.[3] This was the first recorded official Aboriginal/settler marriage in South Australia.[9]

The name Kudnarto/Kudnarto means "third born if female".[10] Also known as Mary Ann Adams, Kurdnatu had attended the "Native Establishment School" (later re-purposed as the Destitute Asylum) in Kintore Avenue, Adelaide, to learn "the arts of domestic life and household duties", and subsequently taught the illiterate Adams to write. They had two sons, Tom (born 1849) and Tim (1852), but they and their father were left destitute after Kudnartu's death at about 23 years old, around 1855, after land allocated to Kudnarto was repossessed by the government. Kudnarto still has ancestors alive today.[3]