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Adelaide That Was: Monarto (Dunstan's Folly)

In the 1970s, following the early successes of the new Satellite city of Elizabeth in the 50s and 60s, the South Australian Government began planning another city development for the 1980s in Monarto, a farming community east of Adelaide. As with the northern plains, the site on which Elizabeth stands today, the SA Government started buying out local farmers, some of which were reluctant to leave. In speeches given at the time, then premier Don Dunstan, promised that Monarto would be a uniquely Australian city, more liveable than Canberra and more diverse in both population and industry than Elizabeth. The federal government of Prime Minister Gough Whitlam gave $10 million worth of funding to the Monarto project, worth about $66 million in today’s dollars, as part of a wave of spending on new cities. In the end though, the new town at Monarto would never be built, needlessly uprooting an entire community. This was not the first time Monarto’s residents had been dispossessed, of course. The area got its name from Queen Monarto, a local elder who lived in the area when the first European colonists arrived in 1847. “Older settlers remembered with apparent glee that their families had hunted off the Aborigines from their land with stockwhips,” historian Robert Linn wrote more than a century later. The descendants of the German, Scottish, Irish and English settlers did not have such a physically brutal experience; and they were financially compensated for their losses. Nonetheless, the acquisition of the first properties, which had belonged to two farmers who had been struggling financially, created a snowball effect, with the SA Govt. quickly swooping in and acquiring more properties as locals saw their neighbours pack up and move away, adding pressure for them to do the same. Some locals had purchased properties elsewhere, subject to finance, only for the government to turn around and offer them 75 per cent of the value they’d originally promised, putting land owners in such a position that, in the finish, they had to either sign off or lose their deposits,” Original projections for Monarto’s eventual population were for 100 to 200,000 people. Today it stands at just over 200 people. It is ironic that a government which wanted to massively increase Monarto’s population wound up driving so many people out of the district, absolutely destroying it. Perhaps Dunstan had been trying to match his predecessor, Sir Thomas Playford, whose founding of Elizabeth had been one of his crowning achievements. But by 1974 it became clear that the baby boom had ended, the Post WW2 immigration boom was winding down and that the new contraceptive pill had all significantly reduced population growth. That, in turn, meant there was no need to build a new city on the plains and Federal funding for the Monarto project dried up after Labour’s Gough Whitlam was replaced as Prime Minister by Liberal Malcolm Fraser in 1975. The original Monarto site is today home to a massive Safari Park, the largest Safari Park outside of Africa. And I can’t help but wonder what the Northern Plains might look like today, had the plans for Elizabeth also fallen through. The following footage tells the story of the people who lived in that original farming community, their way of life and the impact of having to leave their land. It also gives us a glimpse to what life may have been like on the Northern Plains before Elizabeth was built.