Wasleys

History

The town is named after Joseph Wasley, who arrived in the colony of South Australia in 1838. After having been a successful miner at Burra in South Australia as well as the Victorian goldfields, he took up five sections in the Hundred of Mudla Wirra (which had been established in 1847), known as the Mudla Wirra Forest. The name mudla wirra comes from the Kaurna language, but may have been misinterpreted in multiple sources, perhaps arising from the online version of Manning's Index. It has been reported that mudla means" implement", giving rise to the translation "a forest where implements are obtained", but in a newer publication (revised in 2012), Manning writes "Professor Tindale says that an alternative derivation is based on the word mudla meaning ‘nose’" (as in the Kaurna name for the Lefevre Peninsula, mudlanga. and other sources confirm this. Tindale and many others based their work on the work of German missionaries Teichelmann and Schürmann, who compiled a grammar and wordlist of the Kaurna language in 1840. In this work, mudla is recorded as meaning "nose", while mudli means implement. After British colonisation of South Australia, some early settlers in the region made notable contributions to Australian agriculture: *In 1843, John Ridley invented a machine known as "Ridley's Stripper", which removed the heads of grain, with the threshing being done later by a separate machine. *In the 1860s, a local farmer named Charles Mullen, an Irish immigrant, created a method of ploughing which was known as "mullenising", using what became known as a scrub roller or mallee roller. Mullen invented an implement, used throughout Australia, which was the precursor of the stump-jump plough. *In 1866–1877, farmer Richard Marshall's experiments with cross-breeding various…

Most-observed species

• Australian Magpie

  Gymnorhina tibicen (Latham, 1802) · Aves
  555
• Crimson Rosella

  Platycercus elegans (Gmelin, 1788) · Aves
  533
• Crested Pigeon

  Ocyphaps lophotes (Temminck, 1822) · Aves
  470
• Willie-wagtail

  Rhipidura leucophrys (Latham, 1802) · Aves
  468
• White-plumed Honeyeater

  Ptilotula penicillata (Gould, 1837) · Aves
  459
• European Starling

  Sturnus vulgaris Linnaeus, 1758 · Aves
  418
• Galah

  Eolophus roseicapilla (Vieillot, 1817) · Aves
  414
• Red Wattlebird

  Anthochaera carunculata (Shaw, 1790) · Aves
  337

Most recent

• M 3 — 2022-03-29
  3 km ESE of Macclesfield, Australia
• M 4 — 2022-03-05
  3 km SW of Mount Barker, Australia
• M 4.4 — 2020-05-14
  15 km WSW of Burra, Australia
• M 3.2 — 2018-08-08
  11 km WNW of Mannum, Australia
• M 3.9 — 2017-02-01
  9 km NW of Murray Bridge, Australia
• M 3.3 — 2011-10-18
  3 km ESE of Hawthorndene, Australia