Brighton - “The Riviera of the South”: On the coast of Adelaide, South Australia

Bubbly, resurgent Brighton on our suburban coast was once a rural holiday resort touted as the “Riviera of the South”. Standing on the Norfolk Island pine-lined beach drive, it’s hard to imagine there was once a battle against shifting high sand hills waged by its first holiday house pioneers. The namesake of the famous English Channel resort-town, our South Australian version was once a distinct haven for beach retreats of the rich and day-trippers. On Brighton Road, however, it is hard to pick where it starts and stops today (Look out for the old churches and primary school clustered near the Jetty Road corner.)

On Jetty Road near the railway crossing the 1930s Council Chambers are very distinctive - a significant piece of art deco design - and with Brighton’s amalgamation with Glenelg to form the City of Holdfast Bay, this is now the new Council Headquarters. They are keen on their heritage, and with the help of their bright yellow “Brighton - A Walk Through History” booklet, we chose our Postcards locations.

In addition to the obvious landmarks, it took us off the beaten track past a coach house close to the site of an old smuggler’s tunnel, or so they say. “The Olives”, the grand old house it served, is gone. But Brighton’s own castle still stands. Built for the town’s Anglican priest (he obviously had a few bob of his own), it is based on a wing of a castle in Northern Ireland. It too is called Dunlace, and this is where a young lady grew up only to become a much-lamented shark victim on her local beach.

At the inland end of Jetty Road, stands the contemporary version of old St Jude’s Anglican Church. The original chapel at the rear never gained the ten storey church spire intended when it was built in the 1850s, but it makes up for it in tall stories…only these are true. Many have the name William Voules Brown written all over them. A footman in old England and a success in early Adelaide, he swung a land deal that helped St Jude’s happen. It included a right of way for all to his cemetery at the back, and so he was curator, grave digger and even host to the wake. Parts of today’s Brighton Metro Hotel nearby hark back to the “Thatched House Tavern”, and he owned it. Our Mr Brown also gave St Jude’s its church bell…on the condition that he could toll it at all the funerals. Appropriately, he is buried in the cemetery that legally stayed in the family until special legislation resolved an impasse in 1980.

Predictably, there are many more stories in St Jude’s Cemetery. Four out of the first five burials were infants in the cruel 1850s. The great geologist and Antarctic explorer Sir Douglas Mawson’s simple grave slab is here, along with a huge pre-Federation figure, the novelist-social reformer-political campaigner, Catherine Helen Spence. Known as the “Grand Old Lady of Australia”, she is depicted on the five dollar note.

Along the beach front, we found a knoll that looked down on shoreline dunes and framed shots that could easily have come from the remote and vast Coorong. These were a last remnant of what all this suburban coastline was like, however. Six thousand years old, they ran in two or three ribs along the gulf up to ten metres high. The Kuarna people knew where the natural springs were and when the bush berries were ripe during their summer sojourn here. This little patch in front of the Minda grounds is now precious, but to the nineteenth century land-owners keen to emulate the British Brighton and attract health-seeking holiday makers they were an obstacle. A curse, even.

Crowds like the Christmas holiday throng at Glenelg would come, they supposed, if they drove roads in past the few houses at Brighton and on to the sea. And so the tracks were cut into the steep sand hills, sometimes with precarious results. An old photograph shows an early house perched high above battens holding its sand hill base together. It took nine years to persuade its resident to sell so that her sandy rise could be flattened. That levelling went right to the beach itself as more arrivals braved the consequences of living on the Esplanade, and they could be drastic. A 1904 photograph shows a house buried to the gables as denuded sand hills in South Brighton took their revenge.

While we were digging out believe-it-or-not black and whites, what about the one showing a coastal railway running along just above the high-tide mark? It ran from the Bay to Brighton for all for sixteen months round 1880, complete with Scottish locomotives. Three fatalities didn’t help, but neither did the constant sand drift - and building all over the sand hills that were a vital supplier of replenishment to our storm stripped beaches has left us with a perennial problem too.

On the Esplanade, the landmark Arch of Remembrance that is the gateway to the jetty is the second, constructed in 1964 after the original did a Leaning Tower of Pisa impression after a storm. To one side of it, there is a poignant memorial. Kitty Whyte, the youngest daughter of the Anglican Minister of St Jude’s, loved swimming - and teaching children to swim. She was 35, with two children, when she dived off the jetty with a class of kids watching and into the jaws of a great white shark. The simple monument marks that awful day in March, 1926.

On a happier note, if we had stayed with Col. William Light’s country survey, Brighton’s Jetty Road would have been further south, in line with Sturt Road, but the final alignment is looking bright and bubbly again at the beach end. It is enjoying a cappuccino renaissance in shops that bobbed up mainly in the 1920’s, prompted by a burst of building on the corners facing the jetty. The three-storey Pier Building with its verandahs still clinging on was new in 1922, and we hear it could be undergoing an 80th birthday refurbishment. Opposite, the handsome old two-storey kiosk and guesthouse complete with iron lace verandah fencing became a hotel about then, too, and it’s now sporting a total new look that lets in the gulf views. This “favourite place of resort for pleasure seekers” as it was described in the 1860s fell off the pace - it needed a jetty! The Brighton Council couldn’t persuade the government to fund it, and so it undertook the task, uniquely, on its own, and the original wooden jetty was opened with acclaim in 1886 (mind you, the hefty ratepayer jetty levy wasn’t popular). It lasted more than a century until a 1994 storm splintered it beyond repair.

The new 1996 concrete model was also unusual in its financing. The nautical tower at the end is doing a telecommunications job for Telstra…and the jetty is distinguished by its giant sculptural and sound plays on light, wind and water. A stroll along it is essential, of course, on your guided walk round what was described over a century ago as one of the healthiest seaside towns in South Australia…Brighton.

Details

“Brighton - A Walk Though History” booklet
City of Holdfast Bay Administration Centre
24 Jetty Rd
Brighton, South Australia, 5048
Ph. (08) 8229 9999

Thanks to:
Holdfast Bay History Centre
Ringwood Community Centre
14 Jetty Rd
Brighton, SA, 5048
Ph. (08) 8296 7500

Brighton Historical Society
c/o City of Holdfast Bay
24 Jetty Rd
Brighton, South Australia, 5048
Ph. (08) 8229 9999

Email: mail@holdfast.sa.gov.au
Web: www.holdfast.sa.gov.au

Reference: The Vanishing Sands Averil Holt (pub 1991)