Adelaide
The first European settlers in South Australia were impressed by the variety of environments they found on the Adelaide Plains. Most of the area was wooded, with the dominant species, red gum and peppermint gum, standing in open woodlands that became denser along the many intermittent watercourses. Between Glenelg and Adelaide lay a dense forest of gums, Callitris pine and thick understorey that was aptly called the Black Forest. Pines also grew thickly in the West Lakes and Enfield areas. Grass trees were common along the foothills, and fruit-bearing trees such as the quandong and native cherry were widespread. In some places the timber cover thinned and wild grasses grew vigorously. Coastal environments were dominated by sand-hills among which grew sheoaks, gums and acacias. Behind the dunes, extensive areas of swamp and reedy marsh drained into the mangrove-lined estuaries of the Port and Patawalonga river systems.
The Adelaide area had probably been occupied by Aborigines for a least ten thousand years. However, it is not possible to build up a detailed profile of these early occupants. The range of stone artefacts indicates that there had been significant variations in technology through time. In 1836, the Kaurna people who occupied the Adelaide Plains utilised the numerous natural resources with skill and efficiency, and had a well-developed pattern of guardianship of the land.
The landscape seen by the first Europeans had been partially shaped by human activity. The Aborigines had used fire to trap or flush out game. This firing also promoted the growth of particular types of vegetation, which enriched the plant and animal food resources.
To the Kaurna, the landscape was the product of activities of the Dreamtime Spirits. One of the few surviving stories describes the Mount Lofty Ranges and the body of a dead giant. The Kaurna travelled the various environments of the Adelaide area, utilising each one for a variety of purposes. Movement was more common in the warmer and drier months when local flooding had eased and the sand-dunes offered congenial campsites.
The Kaurna made extensive use of skins and fibres. Wood technology was not as strongly developed, possibly because the local quartzite was not effective for working with wood. Skins of marsupials were tanned and used for garments, bags and water containers. Reeds were used for making baskets; and reeds and animal tendons were made into a wide range of nets for use in hunting and fishing.
The territory of the Kaurna extended north towards the head of Gulf St Vincent and south towards Cape Jervis. They had close times with the Narungga people of Yorke Peninsula, and had language, cultural and trading links with people of the western Flinders Ranges; but they professed some antipathy to the River Murray people, who differed linguistically and culturally.
The Kaurna, consisting of several mobile groups, probably numbered no more than three hundred people. The arrival of the European settlers in 1836 had a lasting and destructive impact on their population and culture. Contact with common European diseases led to a rapid depletion in the size of their population. The Europeans treated the Aborigines as primitives, failing to understand their complex social, religious and legal systems. European domination of the Adelaide plains eroded the control the Kaurna had over their social organisation and economic environment; they became refugees in their own land.
The Kaurna people were the first group to suffer the full and immediate impact of the European settlement of South Australia. Consequently, our knowledge of their culture is incomplete, although archaeological and linguistic research is active. Their culture was destroyed within thirty years, but today a number of people can still trace their descent to the Kaurna.
European settlement of the Adelaide Plains quickly followed the survey by Colonel Light of the original town allotments in 1837. The first dwellings were merely tents and huts strung out along North Terrace as close as possible to the only ready source of water, the River Torrens. By 1840, Adelaide had the markings of a town, with brick buildings replacing tents and mud huts among the trees and stumps.
Because speculation drove up the price of land within the surveyed town, labourers and artisans sought cheaper rural land beyond the parklands fringe. Throughout South Australian history, sub-dividers have quickly responded to a potential market, and by the early 1840s, about thirty small hamlets and villages were growing along traffic routes or near water-supplies. Hindmarsh and Prospect were favoured by those in the carting trade to Port Adelaide. Thebarton grew as an industrial village with tanneries and brickworks. Others such as Burnside, Unley and Kensington were rural service centres. These villages formed the nuclei for further expansion.
The growth of Adelaide was marked by boom periods of residential subdivision and building with intervening periods of stagnation. It is therefore difficult to map precisely the extent of the urbanised area until the advent of aerial photographic coverage in the 1930s. For the earlier periods of growth, the sources of information for the map of Adelaide urban development included estate agents' subdivision plans and topographic maps depicting surveyed roads. However, in many cases the formation of streets and survey of housing blocks were not immediately followed by erection of buildings.
There were building booms from about 1875 to 1882, from 1910 to 1014, and from 1920 to 1929. However, even during periods of rural depression, the population of Adelaide increased with the influx of farm labourers and others in search of work. Adelaide's ability to sustain its pre-eminence over all other settlements was fostered by the policy of centralising the rail system on the capital, and by the dominance of Port Adelaide which tied the outports to the capital. With its influential position in commerce and administration, Adelaide became the logical place for industrial expansion and for the consolidation of formerly rural industries, such as flourmilling and brewing.
Until 1914, contiguous suburban growth spread out rather evenly in all directions to a distance of about 3 kilometres from the parklands margin. There was a major separate growth area around Port Adelaide, small beachside development at Glenelg, Henley Beach and Grange, and scattered developments at places such as Mitcham, Woodville and Magill. The intervening plains were intensively farmed vines, vegetables and fruit.
With the exception of the early railway to the Port, public transport routes in Adelaide tended to follow, rather than promote, residential expansion. Horse tramways were begun in 1878 by private companies, and by the end of the century Adelaide probably had the best development network of tram routes in any Australian city. However, it was a slow and antiquated system, and in 1908 the private companies were taken over by the Municipal Tramways Trust, which undertook the electrification and extension of the lines. The Glenelg tramway is the sole survivor of that era.
In the 1920s and 1930s, peripheral expansion continued, especially on the better drained land to the south and east of the city, while an urbanised 'corridor' through Woodville linked the city with Port Adelaide.
The spectacular expansion of low-density housing after the Second World War almost completely filled the Adelaide Plains and the alluvial fans along the foothills, displacing the State's oldest vineyards, orchards and market gardens. Occasional protests against 'sterilising' productive land by building, or the destruction of 'heritage items', failed to halt the pressure of market forces. Adelaide Airport was established on low-lying land which had been avoided by early subdividers because it was subject to periodic inundation, but the coastline was entirely building up from Marino to Outer Harbor. Two significant overspills beyond the contiguously built-up areas of the plains were in the Noarlunga areas to the south, and the Salisbury-Elizabeth area in the north. These recent extensions of urbanised land have tended to give Adelaide the form of a linear city, constricted between the gulf to the west and the face of the Mount Lofty Ranges to the east.
The previous haphazard process of residential subdivision on the fringes of the city was replaced by a more controlled framework of authorised development plans and subdivision regulations. Much of the remaining land zoned for future residential use is government-owned, the inheritance of the purchasing activities of the South Australian Land Commission in the mid-1970s.
Land-use 1984
The only detailed survey of land-uses of metropolitan Adelaide ever undertaken at the one time was made in 1957 by 220 students of the Department of Geography, University of Adelaide, for the State Government's Town Planning Committee. The results were published in the committee's Report on the Metropolitan Area of Adelaide, 1962.
There have been at least four significant changes in the pattern of land-use since 1957. First, most of the market gardens, orchards and vineyards within and on the fringes of the urban area in 1957 were displaced by housing. Second, there was an expansion in the area set aside for industrial use at the northern and southern extremities. Third, several major suburban business centres were established. And fourth, the area set aside for public open space was increased considerably. Two features were the direct consequences of recommendations of the 1962 report - the establishment of the Hills Face Zone along the western slopes of the Mount Lofty Ranges, and the designation of specific areas of rural land at the northern and southern margins for future urban growth.
In 1957, the major categories of land-uses were: residential, 36%; roads, 16%; vacant land, 13%; public utilities and government purposes including education, 12%; industry, 6.6%; agricultural land and recreation, each 6.4%; business, including storage, 2.4%. Recent comparable data have not been assembled for the enlarged urban area; however, it is unlikely that the proportions in 1984 differed greatly from those of 1957, except for reduced percentages of agricultural and vacant land.
The following paragraphs define some of the principal land-use categories:
Residential: Housing occupies the largest proportion of land in the urban area and typically consists of low-density, single-storey, detached dwellings. Adelaide lacks the extensive areas of terrace housing that characterise inner Sydney and Melbourne, probably because the price of land in Adelaide in the nineteenth century was substantially lower than in the eastern capitals. There are remarkably few high-rise apartments, these being restricted to a few developments in North Adelaide and along the beach front at Glenelg. In the older residential districts developed before 1914, gross population density is approximately thirty persons per hectare, with about twenty persons per hectare in the newer residential developments.
Business: This category includes retail shops, public and commercial offices, hotels, motels and restaurants, wholesale facilities, transport and storage. The distribution of this category over the urban area has three components. First, the principal shopping and office area, with significant warehousing and light industry, which is the traditional central business district in the City of Adelaide. As late as 1957, it transacted over 50% of the total urban retail trade, but since then its share has been steadily reduced. Second, the linear shopping strips which grew up along the horse and electric tramway routes in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Third, the pattern of business land-use in the outer suburban shopping centres established from the late 1950s onward and surrounded by extensive car parks. In addition to their retail shops, some of these centres have acquired offices and cultural and social facilities, such as the Noarlunga Centre which contains the terminus of the only recent extension of a suburban passenger rail service in South Australia.
Industrial: Extractive industry, with its extensive space demands, such as the salt-pans in the north-west, and rock quarries and sand-pits, is distinguished from the manufacturing industrial zones. The older industrial zones lie to the west and north of the City of Adelaide and are almost completed built up. After the Second World War, new factory areas were established adjoining South Road at Edwardstown and Clovelly Park, in planned developments at Salisbury and Elizabeth in the north, and at Lonsdale in the South.
Public Purpose: This category includes land used for airports and rail terminals; educational, health and welfare service institutions; sewage treatment works and waste disposal sites; experimental land used for the Department of Agriculture and the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation; the Royal Australia Air Force base at Edinburgh and the adjacent Defence Research Centre.
Hills Face Zone: The western face of the Mount Lofty Ranges has been designated in the Metropolitan Development Plan as a special zone to retain an essentially rural character. The western boundary along the foothills was defined as the level below which water and sewerage services could be supplied economically. Special restrictions apply to further residential construction, including controls on colours and materials, together with requirements for planting screening vegetation. No further subdivision is permitted in this zone.
Rural: All non-urban land-uses which are not otherwise specifically designated are included in this category. Most areas would be described as 'general farming', including market gardening, arable cropping and grazing. Considerable areas are devoted to horse grazing and breeding, to various forms of hobby farming, and to areas of non-productive vacant land.
Rural (Zoned Future Development): Several substantial tracts of land on the northern and southern fringes have been designated for future urban growth. Pending conversion to urban use, they may be used for farming. Current government policy is to provide services such as roads, power, water and sewerage to a few specific areas in a programme of phased development, rather than allow conversion from rural to urban uses to proceed simultaneously in many localities. The two main areas for urban expansion in the late 1980s will be near Golden Grove in the north-east, and near Morphett Vale to the south of the Happy Valley Reservoir. Much of the land in this category is already in government ownership.
Public Open Space: These areas comprise public parks and playing-fields, recreation parks and conservation parks.
Woodland and Forest: These areas include plantations of exotic pines as well as areas of native eucalypt woodland which lie outside the designated conservation parks and recreation parks. In addition to their aesthetic properties, these areas play an important part in checking run-off into the metropolitan reservoirs.
