Glenelg, South Australia, Australia
Glenelg was the oldest European settlement on mainland South Australia — the beachside suburb on Holdfast Bay where Governor Hindmarsh proclaimed the colony beneath the Old Gum Tree in 1836. Long the favourite seaside resort of Adelaide, with its jetty, its tram down to Moseley Square, and its crowded summer foreshore, it was also a settled community of schools and quiet residential streets. In its later chapters it became the chosen refuge of the poet Heather Smith, who lived by its sea until her death in 2017.
Where the Colony Was Proclaimed
Long before it bore a Scottish nobleman's name, the stretch of coast that became Glenelg belonged to the Kaurna people, who knew the place as Pattawilya and the tidal creek behind it as the Pattawilyangga — the watercourse that European tongues would flatten into the Patawalonga. They had lived along Holdfast Bay and the wider Adelaide plains for thousands of years when, in the closing days of 1836, the bay became the site of a beginning that would remake it. On 28 December that year, near a venerable gum tree on the northern side of the creek, Governor John Hindmarsh — newly come ashore from HMS Buffalo — read out the proclamation that established the Province of South Australia. The tree survived as a monument, and the colony marked the spot each year thereafter; the suburb that grew around it never quite forgot that it had been present at the founding.
Glenelg took its name from Lord Glenelg, the Secretary of State for War and the Colonies, and through him from a glen in the Scottish Highlands — a name that happened, pleasingly, to read the same backwards as forwards. Established in 1836, it became the oldest European settlement on the South Australian mainland, and it wore the distinction with a certain pride. The surveyed town acres were sold by ballot in 1839; a post office opened in 1849 and a telegraph office a decade after; and a place that had begun as a landing ground settled into permanence on the shore of Gulf St Vincent.
The Bay and the Jetty
The making of the seaside town turned on the water. In 1857 work began on a jetty reaching out into Holdfast Bay, and when it opened in 1859 it ran some three hundred and eighty metres into the gulf — not merely a promenade but a working pier, taking cargo and the P&O mail and the steamers that plied across to Kangaroo Island, in the years before Port Adelaide claimed the colony's shipping for good. The jetty became the suburb's signature, the line it drew into the sea, rebuilt and shortened by storms over the generations but never abandoned.
Around it the town acquired the furniture of a proper place. The railway reached Glenelg in 1873, and in time an electric tram would run the length of the line down to the foreshore, delivering the city to the sea in half an hour and carrying it home again; the tram terminated at Moseley Square, the open plaza named for one of the suburb's early builders, where a handsome post office rose in 1912. A town hall had opened in 1877, the work of the same architect who gave Adelaide its own, complete with a lecture hall and a library. Churches, hotels, and shops filled in around them. By the close of the nineteenth century Glenelg had become a town in its own right, facing the gulf, with its back to the plains and the capital beyond.
The Pleasure of the Bay
What set Glenelg apart from the workaday suburbs inland was that people came to it for pleasure. It was Adelaide's seaside — the beach the city went to, the wide pale sands and the long shallow water of Holdfast Bay, the sunsets that drew crowds to the end of the jetty as the light went down over the gulf. Jetty Road ran from the foreshore back into the town, a parade of shops and cafés and hotels that filled and emptied with the seasons, thronged through the long hot summers and quiet in the grey of winter. There were amusements along the foreshore, pageants and festivals through the year, and the tram all the while ferrying day-trippers down from the city to spend an afternoon by the water.
It was a suburb of two faces, as resort towns tend to be. Along the front stood the grand villas and the better hotels, the addresses with a view of the gulf; behind them ran humbler streets of ordinary houses where the people who actually lived in Glenelg got on with ordinary lives. The holiday crowds came and went with the warm weather, but the resident town stayed on through the off-season, keeping its schools and its shops and its churches running while the foreshore dozed.
The Schoolhouse and the Settled Town
For all its holiday glamour, Glenelg was a community before it was an attraction, and it built the institutions a community needs. Among the oldest was its government primary school, established in 1881 and set near the commercial heart of the suburb, which taught the children of the whole bay — the families along the front, the working households behind them, and the migrants who came in growing numbers through the twentieth century — and went on doing so, generation after generation, long after its first pupils had grown and gone. The town hall kept its library; the churches kept their congregations; and in the latter part of the century a community centre on Partridge Street gave the suburb's clubs and groups a place to meet, among them a small circle of writers who gathered there on Tuesday afternoons.
This was the Glenelg that did not show up on the postcards: the year-round suburb of classrooms and committee rooms and quiet streets, where the sea was not a spectacle but simply the edge of the neighbourhood, the thing at the end of the road. It was this Glenelg, more than the resort, that drew the people who came not to visit but to stay.
The Poet by the Sea
One of those was Heather Smith. She came to Glenelg in the early 1990s, after a divorce had ended the life she had been living to the north, and she took a flat within reach of the water and lived there alone, by the sea, for the first time in her life. The suburb suited her. The bay gave her something to look at and something to write about, and in the company of the Tuesday writing circle at the community centre she began, late and quietly, to let her work be heard. The sea worked its way all through it — the tides and the shells and the shoreline that remembered every wave — and in 2001 she gathered the best of it into a slim book of poems she called, after the place that had given them to her, Reflections by the Sea.
She was never a public figure, and Glenelg never knew what it had in her; her readership ran to a couple of hundred copies and the patience of her friends. But the suburb gave her what the rest of her life had not — a measure of peace, a voice, and a kind of belonging — and she kept to it for the rest of her days, through the years when illness narrowed her world to the few streets between her flat and the water. She died in Glenelg in February 2017. The bay that had filled her poems was the last thing her life was arranged around, and it is hard, reading her now, to separate the woman from the shore she chose.
Bright Surface, Long Memory
Glenelg wore its sunshine lightly, but it was older and deeper than the holiday suburb it appeared to be. It was the place where the colony had been declared, where a gum tree still stood for a beginning; it was the jetty and the tram and the crowded summer sand; and it was, beneath all that brightness, a settled town of long memory, where generations of families had lived and schooled their children and grown old within sight of the gulf. People had been arriving at Glenelg since the first of them stepped ashore in 1836 — some to begin a colony, some only to spend a sunlit afternoon, and some, like the poet who chose it for her final years, to find at the edge of the water a quiet place to end. Facing west across Gulf St Vincent, into the sunsets it was famous for, the suburb held all of those arrivals at once.
