After a discussion in the family about what we should call this cache, it turned out that we knew very little about the town of Port Moorowie itself.
And after having a "Google" for several hours, it turned out that there was very little information on the township that I could access. After learning that there used to be a website for one of two conservation groups for Port Moorowie, and using the powers of the wayback machine (http://wayback.archive.org), I can now share the history of the town with you.
In the Beginning
After the arrival of white people the Yorke Peninsula was used exclusively for grazing sheep and the entire area was subdivided into several huge pastoral stations. One station was called Moorowie, which is Aboriginal for sandy water. Moorowie stretched from Hardwicke Bay to the south coast and its centre was so big that it contained a police station. The ruins of the old Moorowie homestead can be found approximately ten kilometres west of Warooka. Head north out of Warooka on the Hardwicke Bay Road for approximately one kilometre. Turn east onto the dump road and travel for about ten kilometres. Upon reaching an intersection you will see several ruins, most on the right.
The Beginning of Agriculture
The pastoral era came to an end when the then government decided to launch agriculture onto the Yorke Peninsula. At this time the land was cleared of trees. Prior to this many of the salt lakes in the area were fresh. Salt came to the surface as the water table rose. It was a time of dreadful environmental destruction.
First Survey
The town was first surveyed in the early 1870's at the same time as Edithburgh and Stansbury when agricultural selections were being surveyed. The towns were surveyed to service the new agricultural industry. Port Moorowie was to service the hundred of Moorowie, Edithburgh to service the hundred of Melville and Stansbury to service the hundred of Dalrymple. Hundred meant 100 square miles and these were formal survey areas.
Chart of Port Moorowie Bay
This remains the most historic document of Port Moorowie. It was completed in 1878 as a part of the original commissioning of the town. Surveyed by the British Admiralty it is still unavailable in Australia. We purchased a copy of the original from the British Admiralty in 1994. The survey is done in feet, shows detail of sand dune formations on the shore and gives heights above sea level. It is still surprisingly accurate.
Prosper or Die
Stansbury and Edithburgh grew rapidly but Port Moorowie did not. This was because in 1872 a hotel called the Melville was built at Weaners Flat and forty five acres were immediately subdivided. This subdivision was called Yorke. Thus the town of Yorketown developed and became the defacto centre for the district.
Port Moorowie Sub-division (The three towns)
Port Moorowie was developed in three stages or three separate "towns". Each section has its own lot numbers which makes it somewhat confusing as many lot numbers are triplicated.
The First Town
That section bounded by the Esplanade and Moorowie Tce. and consists of fifty allotments. It is called the Government Town as this section was the result of a government survey. At the eastern end on this "town" the allotments are two deep for eight allotments (lots 35 to 50). This town only is marked on the Chart of Moorowie Bay, indicating that it was the first town surveyed. Some of these lots were sold in 1878. Lots 2 and 10 were marked as reserve and several blocks were sold grouped into one title. The lots the Roundhouse is on (lots 3 and 4) were sold on one title together as lots 1,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,41 and 42. to a gentleman called Michael Kingsborough in October, 1878.
The Second Town
The triangle bounded by McEachens Beach Road, Marine Pde. and Moorowie Tce. This land was a private subbivision in 1876. It was owned by William Fowler. This town had 77 original allotments several of which have subsequently been sub-divided.
The Third Town
The last subdivision was also private and occurred not long after the second. It is bounded by Marine Pde. and Camperdown Tce. It has 114 allotments. Street numbers have not yet been allocated for any of the subdivisions.
Resurrection
In the late 1960's Port Moorowie was farmland. We have been told that some of this farmland was left in a will to a member of the Craigard group. He noticed that a town was surveyed on this land. Under Torrens Title once land is surveyed it is legal to sell it. This meant that building blocks could be sold from this land without any further approvals.
A consortium called Craigard was formed to develop this concept as a business proposition. Some of the blocks belonged to churches, banks, the Crown and the then Dept. of Marine and Harbours. Craigard set to purchasing as many of these blocks as possible in order to make a feasible business venture of it. That having been done a grand opening was organised. Craigard put a lot of money into the venture. They built roads, planted thousands of trees and built a two runway airport. (This is still used. It lies immediately to the north of Camperdown Tce east).
The grand launch of the new Port Moorowie occurred on Wednesday April 4th 1979 when breakfast announcers Bazza and Pilko and Ralph Bain unveiled a plaque to mark the town's re-establishment.
Port Moorowie Jetty and Grain Stacks
The Jetty
The jetty was built in 1882. It was the only way to get heavy goods into and out of the district and was the way to travel to Adelaide. It was active in this role for fifty years. It was today's equivalent a heavy freight terminal and a passenger terminal. It was removed in 1955-56. It was removed by Mr Doug Hart. Some of this information came from him. He is currently retired to Foul Bay but lived on a farm near Edithburgh which his son Graeme Hart now runs. He also dismantled the gypsum bin on the foreshore of Edithburgh.
Remnants of jetty material can still be seen at the farm. There is a pile of very old wood and parts of the railway track are incorporated into the roof of the piggery at the farm.
There were two jetty trollies. The remnants have been collected from the farm and are now at the Roundhouse. The Friends have made application for funding to restore one jetty trolly. If successful it will be mounted on a concrete platform somewhere near the centre of town.
The end section of the jetty had recently been repaired but the shoreward section was in a state of disrepair. The decking was rotting away and had become unsafe on the shoreward end. The then Department of Marine and Harbours considered that it was not worth the expense of repair as there was no town at the site at the time and the jetty had no commercial application. A decision was made to sell the jetty for demolishing. Doug Hart won the tender.
Doug started to dismantle the jetty. He needed to cut rusted steel bolts and steel RHS. He used oxyacetylene. The decking sat on 14"x6" jarrah planks. The end of the jetty was in mint condition but as he worked towards the shore the decking became rotten. Unbeknown to him molten slag was dropping into the rotting planks. After cutting he had to take the cylinders back to Adelaide as there was a shortage of cylinders at the time. During this time the jetty caught fire. The fire could be seen from a passing yacht. They thought that it was a lantern of a fisherman on the jetty. The fire burnt three sections of the jetty, (there were two sets of pylons per section).
It was fortuitous that a large storm came. It put out the fire and threw much decking and railway line off the jetty frame. Much of it finished on the beach at the end of McEachens Beach Road. Other sections finished on the sea floor beside the jetty. Doug cleaned all this up.
It was a condition of the tender that the jetty pylons had to be removed to sea level. Doug used diving gear and placed a few sticks of gelignite in cracks in the pylons below sand level. This did the job. On the last pylons, nearer the beach, he did not use gelignite. Instead he cut them off at the base. Sand movement has exposed these pylons which can now be seen at low tide protruding from the sand to the east of the boat ramp.
The Grain Stacks
The fence in the foreground was only pulled down in 1996. Its continuation on the other side on Moorowie Tce is still there as is the end post on the cliff-top The Port Moorowie jetty was build to ship grain from local farms. The grains stacks housed grain and a wooden shute was used to move bags of grain from the stack to the jetty trolly, (see photo from jetty). Grain was still being carted by horse and wagon to Port Moorowie in 1936 but in 1938 grain could be trucked to Edithburgh. The cost of shipping grain at Port Moorowie was a penny more per bushel than shipping grain at Edithburgh. The cost of trucking grain to Edithburgh from local farms was a penny a bushel. From this moment it became unprofitable to cart grain to Port Moorowie as it could be sent to Edithburgh for the same cost as getting it to Port Moorowie by the farmer's wagon. The grains stacks were then removed.
The stacks were made of vertical wooden slats. The sides were covered in hessian when the stacks housed grain. They sat on a low brick and plaster base about 400mm high. Remnants of this brick and mortar can still be found at the top of the cliff overlooking the boat ramp.
Some children used a chaff bag to slide down the wooden shute of the grain stacks to the beach. It was a dangerous thing to do as the shute was steep.
Viewing the site today from the same positon that the above photograph was taken reveals that then there was a gentle slope of ground away from the clifftop. Today all of this area is bed rock with virtually nothing growing on it. The original line of the soil can be seen from the "mounds" of soil on the clifftop, indicating that about a metre of topsoil is gone. Considering that this area was heavily used for half a century by horse and wagon this is not surprising. A token attempt at resoration was taken by the Friends when about forty tons of topsoil was replaced up to the walking trail when Moorowie Tce was realigned (to take it out of the recently sold Lot 1 Esplanade). However, more restoration work needs to be done in this area.
Acknowledgement:
This work was researched by Leon V Davey, and the original text is available at the below website.
(http://wayback.archive.org/web/*/http://www.netyp.com/member/moorowie/*)
The cache
Similar to another of my hides, it is a small cache that contains a logbook and small space for trickets, pathtags and geocoins.
FTF will find a pathtag and a FTF keyring.