DIVETT STREET, Port Adelaide

For visitors from near and far, Port Adelaide is at the top of the tide for heritage and colour. And there are plenty of both in just one stretch - Divett Street, in the heart of the historic precinct. It even boasts a couple of ghosts.

It's easy to find, opposite a famous portside line-up starting with an elaborate red brick police station-turned-Visitor Centre, with the Courthouse and substantial Customs-house reaching towards the reconstructed iron structure of the Port Lighthouse. Opposite that array, Divett Street begins with its own longstanding two-storey pub on the corner. The original burned down in the 1850's, and in the following year the high tide flooded through here. Divett Street is consequently higher now - backfilled with bottom-of-the-harbour dredgings.

This narrow thoroughfare, named for a Manager of the South Australian Company that founded the state, was once a bustle of sights and noises and smells of commercial trades and bankers and agents. The old walls here show there is an occasional continuing link with its maritime past (a shipping agent sign here and a pleasure cruise office there), but they are mostly home to a bunch of residents with a sense of history. Some of them are so keen about it that they volunteer as walking tour guides to tell a yarn or two. We'd catch up with a couple eventually on our Postcards ramble.

The nearby Port Adelaide inner shipping basin is a tranquil pond in this new century, but 120 years ago it was hectic. It was a conduit for everything - and everyone - coming and going from much of South Australia. Our Divett Street crawl soon brought us to a grand quartet from those times, with architecture as different as their original portside purposes.

A handsome two-storey shop has served a timber merchant and jeweller. More recently, it has housed an antique dealer, and now it awaits its next tenant. A glazed brick building reveals its early twentieth century origins in its detailing and tells its own tale on etched window signs. The Melbourne Steamship Company booked freight and passengers until about forty years ago when the age of flying took off.

Still serving the seagoing side with shipping agency tenants, the old National Bank has impeccable breeding…its high renaissance revival features are probably the work of Adelaide's Christopher Wren. Architect Edmund Wright shared in bringing us the Adelaide Town Hall, the GPO and Parliament House as well as the old bank building in the city that now bears his name.

To complete the quartet, there's a 120-year-old gothic commercial two-storey number. With a new-fangle telephone connection to the city, "The Advertiser" port reporters dictated the news from within these paired lancet windows. Divett Chambers has now become two private apartments.

In Port Adelaide's heyday, Divett Street's bond stores and warehouses created horse and cart traffic aplenty. On an historic intersection with Lipson Street, there is now time to admire a visiting ship docked just a block away. On one corner, a fine building has stood for a century-and-a-quarter; its six-paned windows with fanlights let staff of Port Adelaide Providers Pty Ltd look out…nice spot for an upstairs apartment today, overlooking another bank on the opposite corner. Its Doric columns and high parapets first welcomed seafarers and stevedores in 1891 for the Bank of Australasia. On the third corner, in a modest single storey building, there was once another newspaper office for the defunct South Australian Register. It's now work and home for antique dealers.

It is the bond store that really holds sway, however, on the fourth corner. Take the slight detour into the Maritime Museum - it's a substantial jewel of the Port. And admire the very historic two-storey bluestone building too! It went up in the 1850's for a big wheel of the time. Alexander Elder was a shipping agent, investor and founder of the great pastoral firm. It was a bond store almost until its transformation into the museum in the state's Jubilee 150 year, 1986.

If you come on a volunteer-guided walk down Divett Street, be sure to ask about the ghosts. There is one story about heavy footsteps in what is now the Gaff Gallery, but potter Peter Johnson says they haven't invaded his ceramics studio…yet. We eavesdropped on Divett Street residents Rhonda and David Nearmy as they took a group for an informative and entertaining stroll.

"It was like a black fluid motion…in the shape of a big cat".

They should know; they live in the old warehouse concerned. Is it the ghost of a circus panther, put down by a vet who once practised in here? Over the road, they told their gathering about the ghost in the Marine Engineers Building.

"At 10.30 at night, there's often a thud. The next door neighbour and others have heard it. And one visitor has seen a 1900's-dressed lady walk up the central stairs. Did she fall? Or Jump?"

It's easy to see how these Flinders University Cultural Tourism students got wrapped up in their research project for Postcards, and we thank Leah Standly, Anne Hander and Suzie Budd for their edifying efforts. As they found, Divett Street is an entertaining and very historic walk, especially with the help of volunteer guides based at the excellent Pt Adelaide Visitor Centre. I hope you can join them in their fascinating historic precinct and soak up the ambience of Divett Street.

Details:
Port Walks
Take an hour's walk around the Port with a local volunteer!
Times: 2pm Thursdays and Sundays (weather permitting) and other times and days by prior arrangement

Cost:
Donation Bookings: Call in or telephone
Visitor Information Centre
66 Commercial Road (cnr St Vincent Street)
Port Adelaide
Telephone: (08) 8447-4788
Fax No: (08) 8447-4112
Email: visitorsinfo@portenf.sa.gov.au
Web site www: portenf.sa.gov.au