VICTORIA SQUARE: The Centre of Adelaide with Keith Conlon
Queen Victoria came to the British throne just months after the site of Adelaide was chosen. She ruled for all of the colony's nineteenth century and her statue has stood for all of the twentieth in the middle of the city's central square. What shenanigans has she seen then as Adelaide's civic leaders have battled over the shape and purpose of Victoria Square?
Our central park is smack bang in the middle of Colonel Light's city street grid. He set aside eight town acres and with the street lines added, it comes to over 15 acres in the old money - or about 60 old-fashioned houseblocks. We've paved well over half of that for the traffic by now. In the tents and huts first years of the town, however, Light's idea was criticised because you could come across a parrot shooter here…..it was scrub!
His intention of a civic focus was confounded by the shopkeepers huddling down near the Torrens and the port traffic. And 160 years later, Hindley Street and Rundle Street are still where the action is. When, however, the Treasury Building was built on a government acre at one end in the 1840's, and then the first court building at the other, Victoria Square started to gain some ceremonial and public standing.
During Queen Victoria's remarkable reign, bullock teams were replaced by steam trains, electrification paved the way for trams and by her death in 1901 the horseless carriage - the car - was beginning to exert its pressure on the park. Mind you, Townsend Duryea's famous panoramic photograph of the city in the 1860's shows that it wasn't exactly peak hour back then - or peak anything. But by the 1870's the Glenelg Tram Company wanted to run its iron horse through the Square, down King William Street and off to Norwood. It failed, but the new horse tram from North Adelaide looped around to meet it by the Supreme Court.
At this time, the Square was one big central park surrounded by a rustic fence and planted with hundreds of trees and shrubs - from aloes to almond trees. It was a forest. Pressure from the South King William Street landowners and traders saw a popular poll agree to a swathe cut through the middle in the 1880's. The full width of King William Street combined with the wide border streets to produce four skinny green bits between them. All the more room to let the trams through early in the twentieth century. The MTT ruled! The Council was scared to narrow the streets on each side for fear of being sued by the shopkeepers, and so the recreational role of the park has been on the back foot for a long time.
While the cars-and-commerce versus people-and-parks battle has had its dramatic moments, the biggest yike of all was back in 1855. Can you imagine another cathedral next to St Francis Xavier's - plonked in the square itself? A building as big as St Peter's Cathedral? That was the plan. Governor Robe had given the go-ahead, and the marker stones had been placed. But the new Council dug in and took on the Anglican Bishop of Adelaide in the Supreme Court. Several very senior colonists claimed Light had put a cross in the Square on his original map (unfortunately lost in a fire). He meant it to be, they argued for the Bishop Short. Several other VIP's said he didn't. And he couldn't. And the jury bought their version.
The next BIG IDEA was completely different. Legendary Town Clerk, Thomas Worsnop, tried to swing the City Council to his radical scheme which would see Victoria Square shifted westward. Thus, King William Street could flow through on one side of it to become “one of the finest streets in the Southern Hemisphere”. Continuing in a line from the Adelaide Town Hall and Treasury Building would be a Parliament House and perhaps a University. Meanwhile, they would look over a square that stretched over to, say, the Central Market.
The road went through, at least, and a sturdy cast iron fence surrounded the truncated parks. This was dismantled in the 1920's, but you can still see it in Adelaide. The University took it away and re-erected around its perimeter it along Victoria Drive and Frome Road.
In recent years, the Council has copped flack for expensive flag poles, knocking down the old tramways loo while no-one was looking and subsidising an ill-fated restaurant in one corner. They are simply joining a long tradition of meddling. The City Elders have aroused controversy every decade or three.
Great plantings in the nineteenth century, for instance, meant deep shade. There were more than sixty Moreton Bay Fig trees added in about 1870, for instance. One grew to become known as the Tree of Knowledge. On a circular seat under its shady boughs old codgers would gather to ruminate on the issues of the day. Not quite what some city dignitaries had in mind. They wanted Victoria Square to be about “show” so down came the tree.
By 1930, tidiness was very much the order of the day. The marigold mafia had moved in, and the layout was all flowerbeds and lawns. Then World War Two saw the area dug up for air-raid trenches - more than a kilometre of them, enough for more than fifteen hundred people. When they were filled in, it left a bare canvas in 1944. The result? More circular flowerbeds and “keep off the grass” signs.
The next great transformation was nigh in 1960. The trams were gone. The Festival of Arts had begun. Perhaps there would be a new surge of civic pride and Victoria Square would assume importance as a great park for the people! Perhaps.
Instead, the three-rivers-inspired fountain was placed in the northern half of the domain to commemorate the visit of Queen Elizabeth II in 1963. And then the cars ate Victoria Square. The diamond-shape through-roads were a compromise at the time, and they didn't like them then, as now.
But wait! Then there was the 1970 committee and a new plan. Townplanning Professor Winston's scheme envisaged a light rail transit system running under the Square and down and under King William Street and the traffic would go one way only round the edges. It put the people and the park first. “Few cities have so great an opportunity” wafted the Lord Mayor. You guessed it. We didn't take it. Maybe we couldn't afford to.
But we are going again. In 2001, the Adelaide City Council is involving the public, seeking your views about what you want in Victoria Square. Soon, a number of designs will be offered for detailed discussion about what it's hoped will become an “attractive and memorable central park”. Watch this space…..Victoria Square.
Information about the Adelaide City Council's Urban Design for Victioria Square:
Information Line (08) 8223 3006Display and details at:
ACC Customer Centre
25 Pirie Street, Adelaide, SA 5000 (until 28 September, 2001)
information and feedback also via the Postcards Infoline: info@postcards.sa.com.au
Write a letter about Victoria Square to:
E. Button GPO Box 2252
