Waterfall Gully is an eastern suburb of the South Australian capital city of Adelaide. It is located in the foothills of the Mount Lofty Ranges around 5 km (3.1 mi) east-south-east of the Adelaide city center. For the most part, the suburb encompasses one long gully with First Creek at its center and Waterfall Gully Road running adjacent to the creek. At the southern end of the gully is First Falls, the waterfall for which the suburb was named. Part of the City of Burnside, Waterfall Gully is bounded to the north by the suburb of Burnside, from the north-east to south-east by Cleland Conservation Park (part of the suburb of Cleland), to the south by Crafers West, and to the west by Leawood Gardens and Mount Osmond.
Historically, Waterfall Gully was first explored by European settlers in the early-to-mid-19th century, and quickly became a popular location for tourists and picnickers. The government chose to retain control over portions of Waterfall Gully until 1884, when they agreed to place the land under the auspices of the City of Burnside. 28 years later the government took back the management of the southern part of Waterfall Gully, designating it as South Australia’s first National Pleasure Resort. Today this area remains under State Government control, and in 1972 the Waterfall Gully Reserve, as it was then known, became part of the larger Cleland Conservation Park.
Over the years Waterfall Gully has been extensively logged, and early agricultural interests saw the cultivation of a variety of introduced species as crops, along with the development of local market gardens and nurseries. Attempts to mine the area were largely unsuccessful, but the region housed one of the state’s earliest water-powered mills, and a weir erected in the early 1880s provided for part of the City of Burnside’s water supply. Today the suburb consists primarily of private residences and parks.
History
The Mount Lofty Ranges, which encompass Waterfall Gully, was first sighted by Matthew Flinders in 1802.[3] The gully itself was discovered soon after the establishment of Adelaide, and Colonel William Light, the first Surveyor-General of South Australia, was said to have “decided on the site for Adelaide when viewing the plains from the hills near Waterfall Gully”. Nevertheless, the gully had seen human visitors long before the arrival of the Europeans, as the native population had lived in the area for up to 40,000 years prior to Flinders’ appearance on the South Australian coast
Ethnohistory
In Australian Aboriginal mythology, Waterfall Gully and the surrounding Mount Lofty Ranges are part of the story of the ancestor-creator Nagano. Travelling across the land of the native Kaurna people, Nganno was wounded in a battle and laid down to die, forming the Mount Lofty Ranges. The ears of Nganno formed the peaks of Mount Lofty and Mount Bonython, and the region was referred to as Yur-e-billa, or “the place of the ears”. The name of the Greater Mount Lofty Parklands, Yurrebilla, was derived from this term, while the nearby town of Uraidla employs a more corrupted form.
Although Hardy states that the Kaurna people did not live in the ranges themselves, they did live on the lower slopes.[8] An early settler of the neighbouring suburb of Beaumont, James Milne Young, described the local Kaurnas: “At every creek and gully you would see their wurlies [simple Aboriginal homes made out of twigs and grass] and their fires at night … often as many as 500 to 600 would be camped in various places … some behind the Botanic Gardens on the banks of the river; some toward the Ranges; some on the Waterfall Gully.”Their main presence, demarcated by the use of fire against purchasers of the land, was on the River Torrens and the creeks that flowed into it, including Waterfall Gully’s First Creek.
The land around Waterfall Gully provided the original inhabitants with a number of resources. The bark from the local stringybark trees (Eucalyptus obliqua) was used in the construction of winter huts, and stones and native timbers were used to form tools. Food was also present, and cossid moth larvae along with other species of plants and animals were collected. Nevertheless, there were only a few resources that could only be found on the slopes, and “both hunting and food gathering would in general have been easier on the rich plains”.
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