Angaston - The British Corner of the Barossa

The Barossa Valley’s Silesian beginnings are still evident, with Germanic names and flavours like Kaiser Stuhl and lachschinken, but there is one corner that is stamped with British origins. Angaston is blessed with a rural village main street that has escaped the ravages of bland modernisation and if you are armed with their heritage walk brochure you’ll enjoy it all the more.

At the top of the rising Murray Street, the Angas Park Fruit shop is a compulsory stop on most Barossa tours and just below it is a handsome two storey classical-fronted building that was built as a boarding school, became a bank and is now in private hands. The residents are living near the site of the locale’s first European structure. They say Johann Schilling lived in a hollow gum tree here while he worked on his dugout with a thatched roof.

That was in about 1842 when the area was still called “Koorianda”. In the language of the Peramangk people of the hills it meant “a round area”, all wallaby grass by the creek.

Then, before Angaston came the name German Pass. It was inscribed high above the new settlers of all denominations who came to the rough stone Union Chapel and worshipped their way. That was a fundamental principle for a founder of South Australia and a giant in Angaston’s history. George Fife Angas gave the money for this first public building in the Barossa, in which he had purchased vast acreage, and his son John Howard Angas helped complete the chapel after he had been sent out from London at the age of 19 to look after the family’s affairs. The striking Zion church and others followed in the growing community to supercede this little house of worship, but 150 years after its first sermon and service in the meantime as a shearing shed and fruitpackers barn it was restored and returned to the community.

Next to the grand Angaston Baptist Manse in the downhill end of town (it was built for the son-in-law clergyman of Angas) is the War Memorial Garden. Its apex is dominated by bedded- annuals - surrounded statue of St. Michael. The strikingly unusual symbol represents “right over might” and the names on the memorial panels show that this was the English end of the Barossa Valley. Nearby is the often photographed statue erected by the local Agricultural Bureau in its centenary year to celebrate the vital role of the workhorse in the region.

A watercolour by the founder’s son, George French Angas, shows several huts along the creek and to serve the thirsty pioneers the town’s first hotel was licensed in the late 1840’s. The street layout came several years after the original Angaston Hotel. Over its back lane is the home of revered local quack, Dr. Horace Dean … at least, it was until they discovered he was not a former United States regimental surgeon as claimed. Fortunately his abode now offers fine fare for visitors as the Seasons of the Valley restaurant. A stroll after lunch takes in nineteenth century pride and substance in the old stone Mechanics Institute and Masonic Hall (again, Angas gave the land), and across the main street is a fine classically designed bank building by Edmund Wright of Adelaide Town Hall, GPO and Parliament House fame. It is now home to the Barossa Music Festival. Early in the twentieth century, Angaston raised its handsome manor house fronted Town Hall in locally quarried marble that also features on the façade of Parliament House in Adelaide and in the rustically finished War Memorial further along North Terrace.

With about 2000 people living in this neck of the Barossa, Angaston’s Murray Street shopping and commercial section is thriving, and just up the hill is a landmark of nearly 120 years. Mr. Edwin Davey built the Eureka Rolling Mills and many years later it was acquired by Friedrich Laucke who had come out from Germany originally to serve as head miller here. The last flourbags left here in 1976.

Other landmarks nearby, however, stand as monuments to ongoing success. Melbourne Cup winners and millions of dollars of horseflesh have emerged, for instance, from Lindsay Park. The late Colin Hayes established the thoroughbred training shed in 1965 at the Barossa seat of English banker and devout Baptist, George Fife Angas. Crucial to its birth, he finally came to the colony in 1851. He had assisted the region’s German Lutheran dissenter immigrants with loans to get here. As a result, he was known to some as “philanthropy plus 10% and more recently it has been noted ironically that as an M.P. he was a vigorous campaigner against gambling and horseracing.

Closer to the town, his son’s famous cattle stud Collingrove is now managed as a very special B&B for the National Trust. Angaston also means the internationally known wine company, Yalumba, of course. Still in the family, its founder Samuel Smith came out from Devon as a free immigrant to work in the garden of … guess who. Back in town, however, just to prove Angaston has its own Germanic flavour too, Schulz’s Butchershop has been making wursts and jagerbraten the Barossa Deutsch way for more than sixty years.

In its own nook of the Barossa Range, Angaston is always adding to its charms. The extensive gift shop and café, The South Australian Company Store adds yet more supping and shopping, and the name comes from the region’s great landowner George Fife Angas. He formed the commercial company in London that helped push the very idea of a South Australia thong.

Even before he arrived, the town’s original cemetery was laid out on his land. It is worth walking behind the Murray Street shops to find it and sense the hardship and heartbreak of the early years. The first internment was in 1847, and for the next twenty years, six out of every ten funerals here was for babies, for children under the age of two.

While there’s many a pioneer graveyard, a working main street blacksmith shop is as rare as a team of clydesdales. William Doddridge brought his bellows to Angaston more than a century-and-a-half ago (he had been one of the colony’s early arrivals, landing at Kangaroo island in 1837). His first smithie was further down the street next to the “New Inn” that he also built as the hamlet’s second pub. Several additions and name changes later, it is known as The Brauhaus.

Three generations later, Hardy Doddridge stud his last horse in the front farrier’s shop in 1965. He was 80 years old then, and kept other parts open for several years. The forge is now fired again, and we have the local folk who rallied and bought it as a going concern to thank for this walk back in time. Thanks to a team of volunteers, it is open again on Sunday afternoons. Armed with your heritage walk brochure, you can wander the rest of this British end of the Barossa anytime of the week.

See you soon in historic Angaston.

Details

Angaston Heritage Walk
Brochure from: Most Murray Street shops - Angaston

The Old Union Chapel
Penrice Rd, Angaston

Tours, bookings per: Barossa Council, Angaston SA, 5353

Web: www.barossa.sa.gov.au
Ph: 08 8563 8444
Email: barossa@barossa.sa.gov.au