Story of Pine Gully by Helen Ward (nee Trott)
28 November 2018
The following information about Pine Gully is to tell, and remind you that history should not be forgotten. My parents built the last house on the clifftop behind the Life Savers Clubrooms in 1951. My Mum, Mary Trott, is with us tonight. Please chat to her afterwards as she knows a lot of Seacliff history. I was lucky to grow up here. Back then the creek, which rarely flowed, came out of Pine gully and flowed behind the Yacht Club and went to the beach by the current boat ramp at the bottom of the zigzag. This is so different now because of so much ‘tar and cement’.
Did you know that these sports grounds are built over an old rubbish dump? I guess it explains why this area has not been sold off for houses. A developer on the upper southern side of Kingston Crescent built a pipe from the railway embankment and it opens out just down from the last house on Myrtle Road. That infill was from Brighton Road rebuilding. Mum stood in front of the bulldozer to stop it from entering Trott property. Kingston Crescent stormwater used to dribble straight over the western cliff into the caravan park, which was unstructured camping behind a wide dune system. Have you ever wondered why that high fence was built on the northern side of the gully? My parents had that built to stop campers helping themselves to firewood from their property! The caravan park was levelled and the dunes were removed allowing the current formal layout. Another pipe was built starting in my parents’ property at the bottom of all those steps making the water gush out to the beach next to the Life Savers building.
Too much sand was removed from the caravan park and an area west of the northern amenities block flooded. That is why there are a couple of cabins there. Because the caravan park got flooded another pipe was built just east of the steps from Kington Crescent directly into the gully near the entrance to that other pipe. These two pipes did not join but in rainy weather their conjunction caused a swirling erosion mess in my parents’ property. Every year the council burned the grass on the plateau area on the southern side of Pine Gully. It was an ugly desert. In 1971 My Mum helped organise the Girl Guides to plant native vegetation there. Rotary paid for the plants. The Adelaide Botanical gardens advised which species to plant.
Tourist Bureau, who used to own the caravan park and surrounding public land, organised water pipes and 3 taps to provide water coming up from the caravan park. Mum used to nurture those plants. That meant regularly going down her northern side of the gully and up the stairs on the southern side several times a day to turn on, or change hoses. That all stopped when the hoses were stolen. Please read the plaque at the top of the stairs. My parents used to try and maintain the gully but were thwarted by the developer who built the 3 storey apartments at the base of those steps. He managed to get the council to lower the road, and a barrier was built so that my parents could no longer have vehicular access to bottom of their property. My parents then gave up fighting the council. Old age caught up with them. The drains were an erosion mess. The pine trees, which they did not plant, grew too large. The vegetation was, and is, a fire hazard. Mum asked the council to fix the drains. The response was they couldn’t do it because it was on private property! The council built those pipes! So… Mum has GIVEN all her gully property to the community. This explains why the council has at last fixed the drain and pipes at the base of the steps.
By 2014 the council had spent a great deal of money for professional advice to produce a great master plan to build rocky stormwater retention dams to slow the flow in Pine gully, and grand plans for better indigenous planting, and paths. The Pine gully problems have been put in the “too hard basket”. Nothing has been done to reduce the amount of water entering the gully, or, fix the erosion. It is not on the council’s budget. Please be aware of this history of increasing stormwater with ever-increasing smaller blocks of land with less chance of rainwater soaking into the ground, not just here, but all over Adelaide to be dealt with by coastal councils. Never let council sell, or developers build, on THE Pine gully. Mum is grateful that Friends of Pine Gully has taken up her fight to save the environment.