Koonibba is a locality and an associated Aboriginal community in South Australia located about northwest of the state capital of Adelaide and about northwest of the municipal seat in Ceduna and north of the Eyre Highway.
History
Aboriginal community
Koonibba was formerly an Aboriginal mission, founded in 1901 by the Lutheran Church on land comprising which they bought in 1899. The mission was established near the traditional lands of the Wirangu, Mirning, and Kokatha peoples. A school was built within a year, with the church following in 1903. The church was built by two Aboriginal men named Thomas Richards and Mickey Free. Aboriginal people came to the mission seeking employment, for which they were paid, but conversion to Christianity was a pre-condition for wages, food and housing. The South AustralianRoyal Commission on the Aborigines gathered evidence from the mission in 1914, and recommended that the mission be taken over by the government. In 1914, the Koonibba Children's Home was opened. After World War I ended in 1918, the mission stopped growing wheat, and started grazing sheep instead, which needed less labour, so people moved away for work. In 1931 the Lutherans decided to sell the station, without any prior consultation with the residents. The residents petitioned the Church to work the land autonomously, but their request fell on deaf ears. No buyers were forthcoming, and farming ceased in 1993, but the church continued to control the lives of the residents until 1958, when the residents staged a walk-off as a protest. In 1963, the mission was taken over by the South Australian Government, and then in 1975 it was transferred to the Aboriginal Land Trust, which leases the site to a local Aboriginal community organisation, the Koonibba Aboriginal Community Council, Inc., which manages the community. "Koonibba Lutheran Children's Home" was listed in the 1997 Bringing Them Home report, as an institution housing Indigenous children forcibly removed from their families, leading to the Stolen Generations.
The locality of Koonibba
Boundaries for a locality were created on 28 January 1999 for the long-established local name of Koonibba. The Eyre Highway forms part of the locality's southern boundary. In 2013, a portion of the locality which was located in the Yumbarra Conservation Park was removed and added to the new locality of Yumbarra to ensure that all of the conservation park was located within the new locality.
In 2019-2020, a private space company, Southern Launch, consulted with the Koonibba Community Aboriginal Corporation before developing a test range site, the Koonibba Test Range, which will occupy of uninhabited Aboriginal land about north-west of Ceduna. It will be used for space research, launching and recovering rockets before their final launch into orbit.
