Yorke Peninsula's Ketch Ports… Holiday Havens on Gulf St. Vincent
They are an easy drive round the top of Gulf St. Vincent and onto Yorke Peninsula, and their names now mean sunny holidays by the sea, not to mention a real estate boom. It promised to be a very pretty trip through the easy going romantic ketch ports on the gulf, born, by contrast, of hard yakka on the farms and back-breaking-wheat-bag-stacking on the jetties.
We started right down on the heel of Yorke Peninsula at Edithburgh where the clifftop walk on the edge of town offers views of a distant silo to the north, sandy Sultana Point the other way and always, on the horizon, tiny Troubridge Island with its lighthouse that has stood there for more than 140 years. You can take a half hour boat trip to stay over in the light house keepers cottage and commune with feathered visitors who like it so much they migrate annually from Siberia and Japan, and stay over in the lighthouse keeper's cottage.
Edithburgh, as ever, looks to the gulf. Past a picturesque and unusual tidal swimming pool, the old jetty was host to a daily bunch of hopeful anglers and a pod of scuba divers were enjoying the sparkling clear waters around the old wooden jetty piles. All very relaxed - but go back to round 1900, and nearly 200 dry lakes at the bottom end were supplying thousands of tones of salt to factories above the port. In summer, endless dray loads of wheat and barley added to the traffic, and the Produce Store just up the rise now preserves the commercial heyday in the Maritime Museum.
When the banks, hotels and guest houses went up a century or more ago in the Edithburgh's main street, it was all very prosperous and doubtless a bit noisy at times. The town's doing very nicely now too, as young and old come down the Yorke Peninsula to take it quietly.
It was time for us, however, to head north to find a small port town sitting on a spur into the blue waters of Gulf St Vincent. From the clay cliffs that rise just to the north, we marveled at the placid, beckoning scene, and concluded that Oyster Point was the place for a caravan park (the front row sits on lawns that dip down to a protected sandy beach). If they were selling blocks of land out there, we couldn't afford them, but for the tow-your-home travelers it costs less than $20 per night. For them, Stansbury is a smooth 2 ˝- hour ride from Adelaide to the other side of the gulf, but for a good part of its life, the only way in and out was by sea. The mosquito fleet - hundreds of coastal ketches - brought the news of the world and took out cargo of all kinds.
The first industry? Native oysters were harvested way back in the 1840's and touted as the best in South Australia. Out on the shallow flats today, Stansbury's pacific oyster growers are busily re-establishing that reputation. The jetty that projects diagonally from the base of the cliffs has already given over a century's service, but the first one (built in 1875), reached out from the town's shoreside hotel. As they didn't need it anymore, and the army wanted some World War II bridge demolition practice, they blew it up in 1941.
During the nineteenth century, the townsfolk watched the cargo come through to the old jetty, and it was busy with olive oil from the district, a jam factory's produce, even a local winery's exports. In addition, of course, came tonnes of wheat and barley for which the peninsula is still famous. Then, the white sand beach possibly offered a respite from the hot work of limeburning out on the farms. If your house is a few decades old or more and made of stone and brick, there's a chance it's held together with lime shipped from here. Mixed with sand and cement, the lime would make building mortar. There were fifteen lime. burning kilns extracting it from the plentiful limestone in the district, and the schooners were taking 2000 bags a week the 60 kilometres across the gulf to Adelaide. Today, the attractive seafront lures tourists this way instead.
Not far north, from the coastal cliff, Pt Vincent reveals its tale of three centuries. The old town wharf tells of its first life as a ketch port, the beachside kiosk and boat ramp are part of its well established holiday town transformation in the twentieth century, and just north of the town the earth movers are carving out the twenty first century marina, meaning more expansion and expensive real estate in the old port.
For a long time, yacht crews have loved the trip due west across the gulf named 200 years ago by Matthew Flinders after Earl St Vincent of the Admirally. It's a comfortable all-day sail under 50 kilometres from Outer Harbor into the protection of Surveyor Point (another brilliant site for a caravan park). A stroll from the wharf up the main street takes them past two important buildings that were built round 120 years ago. First came the seafront pub. The Ventnor (which, by the way, is a town on the Isle of Wight in the English Channel.) and then the Grain Store. Farmer Joseph Parsons needed it because pioneering phosphate on his crops had improved his yield dramatically, but come the twentieth century and its uses varied dramatically. It's earned a place on the state heritage list because of its central role in Port Vincent's life - as a bank, grocer, gallery, church and post office. And now you can stop in for a scone and coffee.
We saved the biggest for last. Ardrossan is the largest Yorke Peninsula ketch port on Gulf St Vincent, and it's also the closest by road from Adelaide - a smidge under 150 km. The name came from Ayrshire in Scotland, but mercifully not the climate. Ardrossan today means crabbing country, with big blue crabs for the taking (if you know how) along the flats below the red clay cliffs. A lone agricultural implement in the town park above is a reminder that this is also the home of the legendary stump-jump-plough-that revolutionized farming throughout the state's vast mallee regions. Richard Smith invented it in 1877, and Ardrossan's fine historical museum is housed in part of the factory that turned out fourteen per week. The town was thriving then, and it is again now.
Back on the cliff top, the two jetties stretching into the sea are crucial in Ardrossan's story. The first, the 400 metre port jetty stood sturdily under a horse-drawn tramway out to the mosquito fleet and much larger steamers. In 1926, for instance, 200,000 bags of wheat were loaded here. Then came an historic deal that lead to the dual-purpose monster jetty to the south. BHP needed their just-short-of-a-kilometre ship loaded for its dolomite mine opened at the back of town in 1948. Premier Tom Playford said "OK, as long as it can take bulk wheat loading facilities too," and so the BHP (now Onesteel) jetty also has South Australia's first bulk grain silo at the shore end. It was commissioned 50 years ago.
Thanks to the huge overburden dump at the dolomite mine and the lookout at the top of the "mountain", there is a captuating view of Ardrossan, its gleaming white silos and two jetties reaching into the blue waters of the gulf. The sea rode was the only way in and out for much of the Yorke Peninsula as the ketch ports grew, but now, we take an easy drive up round past Pt Wakefield and come down to holiday towns that are very easy to spend time in. See you soon in the gulf ports.
Details:
Yorke Peninsula Regional Visitor Information Centre
50 Moonta Rd
Kadina, SA, 5554
Ph: 1800 654 991
Email: tourism@yp-connect.netFor more info on the Yorke Peninsula visit the Copper Coast Regional Visitor Centre
