A nice Camps Bay Beach image:
Elliston on Eyre Peninsula. The town harbour with the grain silos in the background.
Image by denisbin
Elliston.
This superbly sited town on Waterloo Bay on Eyre Peninsula was named by Governor Jervois in 1878 when it was founded. Governor Jervois named 36 South Australian towns and they usually had names drawn from his friends and acquaintances. On the plan for the town he simply wrote Elliston. It is believed he named the town after his friend Sir Henry Ellis who died of his wounds at the Battle of Waterloo. It was Captain Matthew Flinders in 1802 who named nearby Point Wellington and Point Wellesley. (Field Marshall Wellesley who led the defeat of Napoleon in 1815 was also the Duke of Wellington.) The bay between the two points was named Waterloo Bay in 1865 on the golden anniversary of Wellington’s defeat of Napoleon. Thus it is not surprising that Governor Jervois named the place after a person associated with the Battle of Waterloo. But local legend has it that Elliston was named after Ellen Liston who served as a governess on a nearby property Nilkerloo station between 1867 and 1872 after which she left Eyre Peninsula for ever. Like other places on Eyre Peninsula the pastoralists took up runs here in the late 1850s and they were surrendered to the government for closer settlement as the Hundreds were declared. The Hundred of Ward was declared in 1876 and the first town in the Hundred was Bramfield a few kilometres inland from present day Elliston. Elliston was established on Waterloo Bay which offered great protection from wild seas for ketches and sailing boats calling at the jetty. The old jetty was completed in 1881 just three years after the town was established. Early structures in the town were the Anglican Church completed in 1881, the former Wesleyan Methodist Church which opened in 1883 (demolished in 1966 and replaced with a modern church), the old Post Office built in 1880 and at its rear an identical building which was the old Police Station which was finished in 1881. The District Council of Elliston was formed in 1888 but the old Council Chamber was not built until 1913. It is now at the entrance to the caravan park. Other buildings included the Institute and hall which opened in 1893 but was demolished in 1970 and the old state school. The school began in a wooden classroom in 1880. That school was closed and a new stone and brick school erected in 1921 but it too has been demolished and replaced by a third state school. A few stones of the 1921 school room are used as a decorative feature in the reception area of the current Area School. Today the town is a popular place to visit for tourists because of its fine beaches, high cliffs and spectacular coastal drives.
The history of Elliston is not complete without reference to the Elliston Massacre of 1849. The first white people to traverse this region and come into contact with the local Aboriginal people were the men who comprised the exploration party of Edward John Eyre in 1839. Eyre’s account of the Peninsula with no rivers and not a lot of fresh water and Mallee scrub everywhere deterred even the pastoralists for many years. Only a few ventured beyond the Port Lincoln area in the 1840s and even into the 1850s. But some did and conflict with the local Aboriginal people resulted. Dr William Browne of the Booborowie run and others took out a pastoral lease for Talia station in the Lake Newland region in the late 1840s. He employed two brothers named Hamp to manage the station and he employed them as shepherds. According to legends and reports one Hamp brother was murdered by Aboriginal people on 23 June 1848 after several months of skirmishes and conflict. A neighbouring shepherd visited the hut and found it had been rifled and the body of John Hamp was lying a few yards from the hut. He reported the finding to his manager who just happened to be entertaining the local police trooper who had visited a ship wreck on the coast. Trooper Driver inspected the hut and noticed that John Hamp had been waddied to death and his skull partly sawn in two by a hand saw. Aboriginal tracks were evident and followed by Police trooper Driver and the manager of the station for a day before they were lost. When the Resident (Commissioner) of Port Lincoln wrote his report in July he was critical of the Police for wasting time by trying to track the Aborigines when they should have returned to report the incident in Port Lincoln. Two Aboriginal men were apprehended and tried by the Resident of Port Lincoln one year later before being tried in the Supreme Court of South Australia where the sentence was upheld. They were sentenced to death but given a reprieve by Governor Young.
But following the trial the Resident of Port Lincoln recommended that police stations be established at Lake Hamilton and Franklin Harbour(Cowell). But the murder of Hamp was not the end of conflict. In August the Aboriginals attacked the area of Hamp’s hut again and one shepherd was speared and one Aboriginal shot. Another report followed and the police troopers and other station hands went out on a punitive trip but with no reported incidents emerging. Perhaps this is where the story of the “Elliston Massacre” emerged but not according to later government reports. Following two murders of white settlers in May of 1849 Inspector Tolmer (later the Police Commissioner) gathered a party of men and riders together to search for the culprits of these murders. They found four Aborigines who were suspected of being responsible for the two murders in May of 1849 and of John Hamp in June of 1848. They were tried in the Supreme Court of South Australia and convicted but given a reprieve from the death sentence. There was no official or police attempt to round up groups of Aboriginal people and drive them to their death but stories of a massacre emerged. The area that was named Waterloo Bay in 1865 was a popular camping spot for Aboriginal people in the 1840s. Aboriginal oral traditions tell of a massacre of a number of people in 1849 when white men tried to round up Aboriginal people accused of crimes. The Aboriginals’ story goes that the white expedition party found Aboriginal people near a lake south of what is now Elliston. As the Aboriginal people fled some were followed through the scrub towards the coast. Shots were fired and several Aboriginal people were killed. When the white horsemen reached the top of the cliffs the group they were following had disappeared. It was presumed that some Aboriginal people had jumped 150 feet to their deaths into the ocean. There were no official reports on this expedition which is unusual to say the least for 1849 when all incidents with Aboriginal people were reported to the police, the Resident of Port Lincoln and the Protector of Aborigines in Adelaide. In fact the Protector of Aborigines Mr Moorhouse travelled to Port Lincoln to hear of the search for the murderers first hand in June 1849. Perhaps some Aboriginal people had heard stories of Police Inspector Tolmer and his party looking for murderers and translated that into a major punitive expedition with drastic results for a large group of people. The government was always assiduous about protecting the legal rights of Aborigines even if they did not treat them well. But the lack of any government or official report does not mean that such a punitive expedition by white men did not occur but there is no way that it would have been Inspector Tolmer’s party. A local pastoralist of Lake Newland Mr Horne also led a punitive expedition against Aboriginal people in 1849 and this incident is more likely to have been the basis of the coastal Elliston Massacre. The first written report of an Elliston Massacre appeared in an Adelaide newspaper in 1880 with the story presented by someone who only gave their initials. Since then it has been repeated many times but with little real evidence to support the existence of a massacre. But whether or not a massacre occurred there were certainly numerous incidents of conflict between white settlers and Aboriginal people but they were usually reported to the police and investigated by the authorities. Deaths occurred among white settlers and Aboriginal people before violence subsided after the Hamp and other murder trails of 1849.
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