Kanyaka, South Australia

Kanyaka is a rural locality in the Far North region of South Australia, situated in the Flinders Ranges Council.

Kanyaka Station, a prominent pastoral holding in the region, was taken up in 1852 by Hugh Proby. It became one of the largest stations in the area, reportedly employing up to seventy families at one stage. In 1856, the station owner built an eating house on the main road to divert visitors away from the main station. A government town of Kanyaka along the main road was surveyed in 1863, although not proclaimed; although the Kanyaka township itself would be a failure and the least successful of the four former towns in the modern-day locality, it allowed for the construction of a two-story hotel, the Great Northern Hotel, on the main road in 1865. Kanyaka Post Office had opened on 6 October 1858, and a general store would operate alongside it in the 1860s.

The Hundred of Kanyaka was gazetted on 6 July 1876 by Governor Anthony Musgrave; it was noted that the Kanyaka name reportedly stemmed from an Aboriginal name for a local waterhole. The Hundred of Kanyaka and the northern section of the adjacent Hundred of Cudlamunda roughly correlates to the boundaries of the modern-day Kanyaka locality. The District Council of Kanyaka was created in 1888 to represent the area of the station and cadastral hundred; its council seat, however, would lie outside its boundaries in the town of Quorn. The modern locality of Kanyaka was established in 1999, when boundaries were formalised and named after the former Kanyaka Station in respect of the long-established local name.