SOUTH PARKLANDS HISTORICAL TRAIL
For more than a century, Colonel William Light's south parklands were more like paddocks, complete with sheep and cows. Forty years ago, however, the Adelaide City Council began a transformation along South Terrace to create Veale Gardens. The new Paddocks to Picnic Grounds Historical Walking Trail brochure takes us through the rosy, leafy greenery and beyond.
At the King William Street end where the Glenelg tram glides by, an eye-catchingly different restaurant sits on a mound rather than a mountain despite its first name - The Alpine Restaurant. A hill of old street sweepings holds up the hyperbolic paraboloid roof of what's now called Pavilion on the Park. Town Clerk Brigadier William Veale brought back its design from Cincinnatti, Ohio. A lot of his parklands beautification ideas came from an overseas trip in the late 1950's.
By 1961, he and the council were planning the creeks and pools here and quibbling over taste and trivia (sound familiar?). It all came together to be named Veale Gardens, which the longstanding engineer and Town Clerk didn't argue about at all. His vision incorporated an alpine theme, but as one councillor pointed out "you can't call a mound an alpine garden". And so planting on the introduced hills on the Torrens riverbank dirt changed a tad.
The Town Hall elders were keen on a Vienna-like statue as a centre-piece for the terraced rose garden, and Adelaide's fondly regarded "sculptor laureate" John Dowie was commissioned to create a bronze casting of the god of shepherds - Pan, an apt choice given the resident sheep and cows we'll learn about later. It broke in the making and had to be stuck together before its spraying fountains were added. It is surrounded by a superbly scented and colourful collection of more than sixty rose cultivars, with about two thousand plantings in all.
Between roses and restaurant, a contemporary larger-than-life sculpture by Dutch immigrant Berend van der Struik still bemuses those who wander in for lunch on the grass. He had some strife with his creation too! The first Waikerie stone carving cracked, and so the one we see is cut from Sydney sandstone. Sadly, it is now chipped and scarred to render it almost featureless.
Morphett Street becomes Sir Lewis Cohen Avenue once it passes through the south parklands. Now refreshed with recent plantings of Moreton Bay fig trees, it's named appropriately for a multi-term mayor who fought for Light's envelope of open space. The historical trail crosses the avenue into….the paddocks!! They retain some of the feel and landscape that surrounded the city for almost a century. Behind the South Terrace business houses and apartments, there is still a residential south-west corner of the "square mile".
But they don't bring their cows out to graze any more. Late in Queen Victoria's reign, they counted 606 cows and 1100 horses, with a further 2200 sheep in the parklands. As late as the 1950's a migrant couple made the news by erecting a tent over their sick cow in this park. "They saved her", quoth the vet.
There is a poignant and historic side to a busy grove of straggly wattles near the open space. They are 1990's replacements for the first wattle plantings here in memory of our ANZACs at Gallipoli. They went in during September 1915, only months after the first landings.
The Governor-General came to Adelaide to unveil what is probably Australia's fist ANZAC Memorial…a simple tribute in the shape of a cross on a plinth, hewn from Murray Bridge and Monarto granite. The digger companions of the thousands of fallen were still stuck in the trenches of the Turkish Dardenelles. Their heroic failure was still only beginning to create the myth. About sixty years back, their lonely memorial was shifted into the lawns along South Terrace, close to the beginning of ANZAC Highway.
The Glenelg tram now stops conveniently at one end of the historical trail. Up until 1929 there was a steam train service chuffing through on its way to the Bay from the Supreme Court in Victoria Square. It's not the only South Parklands phenomenon that's disappeared. The old rifle butts, however, at least scored a Jubilee 150 plaque near the restaurant drive - Sir Lewis Cohen Avenue corner.
The South Australian Rifle Association had its target range on a strip of parkland several hundred metres wide - all the way across the marvellous open view of Mt Lofty and the nearby foothills to Greenhill Road and Annesley College. The volunteers, after all, might be needed to "aid and defend the colony" against the anticipated Russian invasion.
The residents of the young villages of Unley and Goodwood weren't so keen about wayward bullets that mussed the mounds of butts through, and a grand plan in 1880 envisaged instead aggregated high mounds for all-round viewing instead.
It took until the 1960's for the smaller mounds of Veale Gardens to appear - and fulfil Brigadier Veale's dreams of lively fountains with "splashes of water leaping from pond to pond". He gained his dolphin effects in one suite of pools near the restaurant. Again, however, nitpicking councillors didn't want circus stunts upsetting diners' digestion, and so he scored a burble rather than an energetic spurt in front of the establishment. Nevertheless, his numerous babbling streams and waterfalls attract wedding groups and waddling onlookers galore.
The joys of this area of the parklands are revealed in the Council's brochure, which is one of an excellent series. As usual, the more you know about what you're seeing and where you're strolling, the more enjoyable is the tour. With roses to smell and admire and four-season plantings to enjoy, it's beckoning you to step onto the historic trail "from Paddocks to Picnic Grounds".
Details:
"Paddocks to Picnic Grounds Historical Walking Trail"
Brochure produced by the Corporation of the City of AdelaideCopies/information via:-
City of Adelaide Customer Centre
25 Pirie Street, Adelaide. SA 5000Phone: 8203-7203
Website: www.adelaide.sa.gov.au
