Historic Hackney and The Billabong: In the Adelaide City region of South Australia
It could be virgin bush land with a billabong disturbed why by the stabling black ducks…well, once upon a time, but now it is just around the corner from rush hour. If you are on the O Bahn bus way driving across the Hackney Bridge and you blink you could miss the pocket handkerchief of a park that celebrates something big.
Just downstream along the Torrens, it marks the location of the first major intrusion here - a giant flour mill, and the bronze plaque depicting it tells us this is the Mill Reserve.
When the colony was only months old, if you were the South Australian Company handing out land parcels, you'd have saved some of the best bits for yourself wouldn't you? This strip is one of them, with Col. Light's city square mile just across the parklands and on one edge water supplies the River Torrens. And so this became the Company's Park Farm, with the four storey mill and tall brick chimney towering over thirty acres of wheat and the first Company Bridge spanning the river.
The only sign of Park Farm now is the old barn with its ornate bargeboards the Adelaide Caravan Park entrance. It is in the little suburb that grew on me of our first market gardens, dairies and wheat farm. Hackney is a mix of modest row cottages and grand houses facing Hackney Road… a locket of 1880's Victorian Adelaide.
Just a river bend upstream along the linear park, however, we can now walk into a scene almost as the first dairy hand saw the Torrens - on its original course.
"Its pretty well followed the line of the curving billabong we now see. The river did an oxbow through here, hit the cliffs and swung back." For our guide Viesteurs Cielans and other Friends of the St Peters River Park it is a longtime dream still coming true, with a bit of hard Yakka adding more native plants to join the old river red gums. The Council would have liked the walkers enjoying the green haven to have been welcome as far back as 1912, but it took another sixty years and a legal fight all the way to the High Court to buy up several privately held parcels of land.
Several old corrugated iron fences sit close to the cliff tops, with their houses turning their backs on the park below. They indicate another nightmare along the way, because where East Adelaide Primary School now plays cricket, there was an ugly and smelly dump.
"Well, they used to burn off every Thursday!", laughed Viesteurs as we surveyed the site. The rubbish tip closed in 1971, and so a new wave of residents are deliberately looking in on the swans and coots and designer dwellings. Then again, they could have been living next door to birds of an entirely different feather.
"You know the story - they were thinking of putting Football Park, the home of the Crows, here. Really"
Instead, a short cut for the Torrens was cut, two weirs were added to form long pools along its new course, the O Bahn whizzed through at one end, and this round patch was linked up with the gorge-to-the-sea Torrens Linear Park. Most of the funds for the new, second generation, bigger billabong that surrounds the eastern side of the green have came from our city wide catchment clean-up campaign.
A quaintly ugly bluestone wall and large drainpipe outlets on one side of the lagoon marks the pathetic end of Second Creek that once tumbled a picturesque crease all the way from the foothills at Stonyfell. It hardly sees the light of day any more, gathering storm water and debris and silt and all that is dangerous to the gulf.
"It is one of the problems of nay creek entering the Torrens," explained Viesteurs. Beneath the pipe was a discolored retaining pond with weirs of small rocks allowing the water through into both sweeps of the billabong. "This is all a filtration zone, where the water can split both ends of the pond and slows down. The rocks that are spreading across the shallows will filter the storm water before it eases over the end weirs and goes underground into the Torrens itself." On a small service causeway, Nature's own river red gum nursery is thriving with thickets of self sown saplings on the water's edge. And for the black ducks, grebes, moorhens and coots, this is their 'Field of Dreams' too.
There is a touch of the timeless again as the big bend grows back towards the way the Kaurna people would have known it. There is little recorded about their activities here sadly, but we do know the cows from the South Australian Company's first dairy are long gone and so has the rubbish dump. Instead, there is time and space for all of us to think about old man river, the Torrens, and its great oxbow bend that now clasps the St Peters River Park.
Details:
St Peters River Park
Enter off:
Eighth or Rover Street
St Peters
Torrens Linear ParkFriends of the Billabong
C/o St. Peters library
101 Payneham Road
St Peters, South Australia, 5069Torrens Catchment Water Management Board
5 Greenhill Road
Wayville, South Australia, 5034
