A particularly vivid childhood memory: visiting one of the woolstores in Port Adelaide, to see some of our family farm’s wool on display, prior to its auction.
At the time – circa 1960 – Port Adelaide’s woolstores were the world’s largest; the one I walked into was by far the biggest and most impressive man-made space I had ever seen.
Port Adelaide’s lighthouse – pictured above and below – pre-dated any of those woolstores.
Like them, this much more modest structure long ago lost its original raison d’être.
In recent decades, however, the lighthouse has been rather better looked after than have most of the woolstores.
Billed as “an iconic landmark”, the lighthouse was not Port Adelaide’s first, but it was the first “serious” one.
Only a small portion of its working life was spent in Port Adelaide!
From 1869 to 1896 it really was Port Adelaide’s lighthouse, until it suffered serious storm damage.
Subsequent inspections revealed that the whole structure had become unstable, “shaky”.
It was dismantled, and some of its components redistributed.
From 1902 to 1986 the (re-erected, shifted) tower became most of the lighthouse on South Neptune Island, southeast of Port Lincoln, at the “open” end of Spencer Gulf.
In 1986, the lighthouse tower was again dismantled, and taken back to Port Adelaide.
It was restored/reconstructed, and now functions as a “piece of history”/ “tourist attraction”/ “landmark”.
Click here for a fuller account.
If you drive from Adelaide, straight down Port Road, and its continuation as Commercial Road, the lighthouse is immediately opposite the end of the road, so to speak – overlooking the port, and adjacent to the Port River Cruises office.
Had Colonel Light’s original vision for Adelaide ever been realised, you would have been able to travel by barge or ferry from Adelaide’s “square mile” (which is not square) to the Port.
The grand canal – running through the middle of Port Road – was never built. However, you now know why there is so much mostly-green space in the middle of Port Road!
Never-realised “grand plans” have been a recurring theme in Port Adelaide for nearly two centuries.
There is every reason to believe this pattern will repeat and repeat for the foreseeable future.
Had the much-vaunted Multi Function Polis ever eventuated, this part of Adelaide would now be an utterly different place; proposed in 1987, the MFP was abandoned in 1998.
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