Goolwa - Culture and History

The area of South Australia which now stretches from Lake Alexandrina and the mouth of the Murray River around through Goolwa to Port Elliot developed as a unified whole. By 1829 Captain Charles Sturt had made his historic journey down the Murray River and there was a feeling that a settlement should be established near the mouth of the river so that the inland could be opened up.

In 1837 Colonel William Light, responding to this interest, inspected the area around the mouth of the Murray and concluded that the land was poor and the mouth of the river was probably not navigable. The following year Sturt endorsed Light's view that the mouth of the Murray could not be made safe for navigation. This led to the establishment of Adelaide on Gulf St Vincent but there was still a body of support for the utilisation of the Murray River and a number of proposals (most involving safer harbours and moving goods overland to points further up the river) were suggested.

Eventually a decision was made that Goolwa would become the last point for shipping on the Murray River (it was located on the last bend before the river entered the sea) and there was a debate as to whether Victor Harbour or Port Elliot would be the ocean port. It was eventually decided that Port Elliot was the best location but this was probably based on its proximity to Goolwa and the belief that a canal could be constructed between the two locations. In 1851 it was agreed to build a railway between Port Elliot and Goolwa at a cost of £20,000. It ended up costing £31,000 and wasn't completed until 1854. It was, by any conventional measure, a bit of a disaster. It rarely made a profit and the trains carrying the goods travelled at about 10 km/h and had to be unloaded before the goods could be moved to the ships because the waters at Port Elliot were too shallow and the jetty was not long enough. After a decade in which no fewer than seven ships were wrecked off the coast, the port was moved to Victor Harbor.

By 1853 paddle steamers were operating on the Murray. The first two steamers were the 'Mary Ann' captained by William Randell and the 'Lady Augusta' captained by Francis Cadell. Both left from Goolwa and travelled up river as far as Swan Hill.

The town of Goolwa had been surveyed as early as 1840 but it was resurveyed in 1853 and blocks were sold for around £20. That same year a road was constructed between Goolwa and Port Elliot and by 1860 there was a road over the hills to Adelaide. In 1857 it was officially proclaimed a port (the first inland port in Australia) and, with the construction of wharves and stores, it grew quickly servicing the vast inland of western New South Wales and Queensland. At its peak in the 1880s about 25 000 bales of wool per year were passing through the port. A decade later, because the railway had taken away most of the business which had previously operated on the river, Goolwa's importance as a port had all but disappeared.

The Goolwa Barrage was completed in 1940 at a cost of £700,000.