City 1: Adelaide, Queen of Wine and Salt...and Shade.

City 1: Adelaide, Queen of Wine and Salt...and Shade.

Nearly 65% of Australia’s population live in the five biggest Greater Capital City Stastical Areas/Significant Urban Areas, which is Australia’s fancy-schmancy govspeak way of saying “the city and its surrounds” which is itself a fancy-schmancy way of saying “the city” which is itself a fancy-schmancy way of saying “this city right here” which is...all right, bad attempt at infinite regress stops here.

Of those five, all are the capitals of their respective states.

They are each highly independent cities, often thousands of miles away from each other (for instance, Perth to Sydney by air is 1,919 miles, just shy of the 2,059 miles from Washington, DC to Caracas, Venezuela...yeah, Australia is huge.) To know Australia and its people begins with knowing these five cities, so this week’s focus will be on them. Sorry, Gold Coast, Cairns, and Albury...I know you were just ITCHING to have a spot on this blog post (though, Rod Francisco, if you comment on this blog post saying “HERE’S THE THUNDER FROM DOWN UNDER APPROVING THIS MESSAGE” I just might throw in another city of your choosing. Kidding. You don’t have to say that. Just tell me what a drop bear is and why I should be afraid of it, that’ll do. ;) )

So, we’ll start from the bottom up (in the time-honored American tradition of cheering for the underdog) and begin with smallest city on my list: Adelaide.

I believe that in order to understand something, one must understand its context. So before Adelaide, I give you Goyder, and no, I’m not talking about the health condition.

In 1865, George Goyder, the surveyor-general of the new colony of South Australia, was tasked to give new farmers reliable information on the most arable lands in the colony. After collecting climactic information from his office and making a 3200 km horseback ride across the territory, George Goyder submitted his reports to the government. From his climate data and observations of changes in vegetation, Goyder drew a line across the new territory and discouraged farmers from settling north of it, declaring it too dry for reliable cultivation.

Of course, they ignored his reports: to their tragedy. Almost invariably, anyone who settled north of that line soon abandoned their farms in failure. What is now known as Goyder’s Line has provided a remarkably reliable boundary between the parts of the state that are reliably fertile, and the parts that are not.

The result? South Australia is effectively divided into two parts. South of the line are all the fertile areas: the Riverlands where the Murray, the Mississippi of Australia, waters a vast level plain with relatively fertile soils; the fertile Eyre, Fleurieu and Yorke peninsulas, separated by great sounds and indented with sunny, pleasant valleys; and the temperate, wooded Limestone Coast to the far southeast. This is warm, pleasant land, irrigated by the Murray and runoff from the various hills, dense with vineyards. Seriously. Like, every single article I read talked about the wine. Okay okay I get it. It's wine country. Don't stop talking about it and I might have to have a word with y'all about your habits.

North of the line gives way to the great Outback, starting with the semi-arid mallee and the slopes of such hills as the Flinders, merging into the great deserts: the Simpson, Strzelecki, and the Great Victoria, their great red dunes covered in little but sparse grass, broken only by gibber (desert pavement) mulga woodlands and the occasional swamp or river red-gum gallery forest along what few ephemeral watercourses thread through the dust to empty in the great salt lakes of central Australia, full only a few times a century. Many things are said about the Outback, but FERTILE! Is not one of them. Aside from pastoralists running the great sheep and cattle stations, feeding their cattle on the arid grasslands, there is little that can thrive here. This is salt country.

It sounds almost as if north of this red line is nothing but salt, and south of it is nothing but wine.

So there you have it, folks. The early settlers first began arriving in the 1830’s, and they had a choice between wine or salt, and of course, they chose the wine.

So, these are the circumstances in which our dear Adelaide came into being.

On the 28^th of December, 1836, South Australia was declared a British Colony, a date now celebrated as Proclamation Day. Little is known of how the existing inhabitants of the land felt about such a proclamation, as their culture had already been ravaged by smallpox epidemics and was all but destroyed within a few decades of the proclamation, but nonetheless, the colony began.

Unlike other colonies in Australia such as Sydney or Brisbane, which started as convict settlements, Adelaide began as a free settlement. Organized by Edward Wakefield and his associates, the British Parliament passed the South Australian Colonisation act, wherein a group of colonists would buy land and offer free passage to skilled laborers, who would work for wages and buy their own land after three to four years, thereby ensuring a continual supply of labor for the expanding colony. Named for King William IV’s wife, Adelaide of Saxe-Meiningen, the site of Adelaide was chosen by one William Light, a visionary surveyor who arrived in 1836 His decision came with much controversy with other high-ranking members of the colony, who wanted coastal locations, but even against their opposition, his own illness, and a lack of resources, Light surveyed the city and established its plan, the first planned city in Australia.

Located north of the Fleurieu Peninsula, Light’s location put the new colony on the Adelaide Plains near the Adelaide Hills (how's that for unique).

William Light’s vision of the city laid the city center out in a grid astride the River Torrens from which it would draw its water, and surrounded by parklands. Despite some encroachment by development, to this day the center of the city remains visibly separated from the suburbs by green spaces. Not just the queen of wine and salt, she is the queen of shade.

Everything North of Goyder's Line: "Adelaide! How did you become so livable?"
Adelaide: "It was a walk in the park. You ever tried trees, m'dear?"
ENoGL: "You know FULL well why I don't have trees, you shady..."
Adelaide: "You bet I'm shady, that's why I'm liveable and you're not."

The first few years were bumpy, but despite these initial setbacks, Adelaide quickly expanded in the 1840’s. Silver and copper were discovered in the Mount Lofty ranges east of Adelaide, and agriculture expanded, leading to exports of wool, wine, fruit and wheat.

Adelaide grew from its original founding into a major center of munitions manufacturing during WWII, which grew from there into the center of manufacturing, arts and education while the surrounding areas of South Australia continued to come under cultivation. However, its isolation and location in an area of marginal suitability serve as constraints that have prevented Adelaide from experiencing the sustained levels of growth experienced in the other cities of the Big Five.

Today, Adelaide is the crowned queen of Wine and Salt. With an estimated population of 1,333,927, the city contains 75% of the state’s population; the city with nearest size is Mount Gambier, with less than 30,000 people. It stretches twelve miles from the coast to the foothills, and fifty-six miles from Gawler in the north to Sellicks Beach in the south. Consistently ranked the most livable city in Australia and one of the most liveable in the world, Adelaide is a significant economic and cultural center, and I was very happy to learn a little bit about it.

Hope you enjoyed!