About The Yartapuulti Football Club

The Port Adelaide Football Club is proud to announce it will be known as the Yartapuulti Football Club for all future games played during Sir Doug Nicholls Round and AFLW Indigenous Round.

The decision to rename the Port Adelaide Football Club for these significant occasions is designed to further elevate First Nations culture and language onto the national stage to educate, generate awareness and encourage productive and meaningful conversations.

The change to Yartapuulti has been developed with extensive consultation with the Kaurna Language Committee, Kaurna Senior, and past player, Uncle Mickey Kumatpi Murrutya O’Brien, and Aboriginal Programs Manager, Braedon Talbot, who has also played an important role educating the staff and playing groups on the significance, reason and meaning behind the name Yartapuulti.

The club will also release a limited-edition Sir Doug Nicholls Round merchandise range, with a portion of the profits going towards the club’s Indigenous programs.

Why Yartapuulti?

 Yartapuulti is the traditional Aboriginal name for Port Adelaide.

In Kaurna, ‘Yarta’ means place or land and ‘Puulti’ means sleep or death, which is the name the Kaurna people gave the land around the Port River.

The Yartapuulti Football Club Logo

 The Yartapuulti Football Club logo has been carefully crafted by Brooke Rigney-Lively (Kaurna, Ngarrindjeri artist) in collaboration with Ochre Dawn, a 100% First Nations owned and managed creative agency, dedicated to celebrating art, culture and heritage in commercial projects.

The three lines located around the edge of the logo represent songlines, the River Torrens which runs next to Adelaide Oval and the Port River, which is integral to the identity of the Port Adelaide Football Club.

The songlines represent the connection to stories from this place to First Nations peoples' stories across South Australia.

The kangaroo and ibis tracks follow these songlines as two representatives from Kaurna Dreaming, and the cross hatching represents weaving connectedness of the waterways to those stories.

Port Adelaide has a long and proud history of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander players at the club.

As well as having 70 First Nations men representing the club at AFL or SANFL level over its history, five proud Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women have represented the club's AFLW program.

The club currently has 10 listed Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander players – seven men and three women.

See a full list of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander footballers to have played for Port Adelaide

The Santos Aboriginal Power Cup is an education-based strategy that engages First Nations secondary school students in their education and career pathways with a competitive AFL carnival as its centrepiece.

Delivered in partnership with the South Australian Aboriginal Secondary Training Academy (SAASTA), the program explores and embraces Aboriginal culture and is designed to address National Closing the Gap targets aligned to health, wellbeing, education, employment and economic participation.

Delivered during Reconciliation week, the annual carnival aligns with the AFL’s Sir Doug Nicholls Round which sees the AFL community celebrate and recognise Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people and their contribution to Australian Football.

To be eligible to attend the carnival, students must meet the 80% minimum school attendance requirement and rank highly in both the academic and behavioural components of the program.

The Santos Aboriginal Power Cup is the longest running joint education and AFL community program for Aboriginal students in the Australian professional sports industry.