Keith - Culture and History

Prior to European settlement the area around Keith was part of the lands occupied by the Ngarranjeri people who spread from the Ninety Mile Desert down to the Coorong and across to the waters of the Murray River and Lake Alexandrina.

Although the town is relatively modern (the site for the town wasn't surveyed until 1884) Europeans were passing through the area as early as the 1850s. Near the present town there is a memorial to the Gold Escort Route - the famous route which brought gold into South Australia from the Victorian goldfields. The inscription reads: 'Along this track Commissioner Alexander Tolmer led the first of 18 police escorts which under various commanders transported from Mount Alexander, Victoria to Adelaide, South Australia from March, 1852 to December, 1853 528 509 ounces of gold.'

It was around this time that land was taken up in the area but there was no suggestion of the building of a town because the land was marginal and the population was sparse and scattered. In fact for the next fifty years the area was known as Mount Monster after a large granite outcrop near the site of the present town.

It wasn't until 1884 that the town was surveyed, and not until 1889 that the town was officially proclaimed. The town's unusual name is the result of the town being proclaimed at a time when Lord Kintore was the Governor of South Australia. Kintore's home in Aberdeenshire in Scotland was called Keith Hall and he was also known as Lord Keith. There is another version of the origin of the town's name which claims that it was named after the eldest son of a local grazier named Sir Lancelot Stirling but there is not strong evidence to support such a claim whereas the Lord Kintore explanation is backed by both his presence in South Australia at the time and the tendency to honour Governor's by naming towns after them.

In fairness it seems to have been no great honour for the town to be named after the Governor because, although it was proclaimed in 1889 it wasn't until 1894 that the first resident, a Mr McIntyre, built the first house and it wasn't for a decade that the first public building - the Congregational Church - was constructed.

Most of the early development of Keith occurred in the next decade. A general store was opened in 1905 and such was the prosperity of the district that a second general store opened two years later. The Keith Hotel opened for business in 1910 and in 1912 Keith's Provisional School became a full Public School.

The district's prosperity is a result of the CSIRO's discovery, in the 1940s, that with the addition of vital trace elements, the land around Keith was potentially very productive. The AMP Society provided money for the project and over the next two decades Keith became the centre of a productive area where cattle studs, grain crops and lucerne were grown with considerable success.

In 1969 the district's problems were completely solved when a pipeline from Tailem Bend brought water from the Murray River to the town.