Goolwa

Population is 4000 and 83km South of Adelaide. Goolwa is the gateway to the Coorong a magnificent environment of narrow salt water lagoon separated from the Southern Ocean by a majestic band of sand dunes, the Mighty Murray river and Lake System. 

The town of Goolwa, an Aboriginal name meaning  elbow,  was one of the earliest towns of South Australia, having been surveyed  in 1853 by Sappers and Miners of the Royal Engineers in 1839. 

Goolwa was chosen as the handling port for goods to and from the upper river towns and adjacent interior towns. 

In the heyday of the river trade, it was an important manufacturing town with its iron foundry, ship building works, brewery, and flour and sawmills. 

As the mouth of the Murray River (Port Pullen) was frequently unnavigatable, the government decided to develop Port Elliot. 
 

Eleven kilometres west of Goolwa. The seaport for the river trade, and connected the two towns by a horse drawn tramway to run on iron rails, the first such system was completed in 1854 and proclaimed a port in 1851. 

The development of the port facilities at both towns, with construction of the railway connection, constituted the first public works carried out in South Australia, the final cost was 31,000 pounds. 

The town was surveyed in in 1852 by Corporal Richard Brooking and was named after Sir Charles Elliot who was at that time Governor of Bermuda, Trinidad and St Helena. 

A total of seven shipwrecks to 1864 proved the harbour to be unsafe for shipping. With the extension in the same year of the rail line to Port Victor, five kilometres to the west Port Elliot was closed as a port, with all facilities being transferred to Port Victor. The railway continued to be horse drawn until the advent of steam power in 1885. 

The importance of Goolwa waned after the rail link between Morgan and Adelaide was opened in 1878. The construction of the barrages in 1940 brought a brief revival of prosperity to the town. 

James Harding arrived in Port Elliot during 1853 and 
 homesteaded there. He constructed Duxford Cottage in 1860.
 

Half way between Port Elliot and Goolwa was sited on land taken up by Thomas Walker Higgins in 1849. He later had it surveyed for a township. Middleton boasted a large steam flour mill, a brickworks, a blacksmiths and a carpenter shops It was the changeover station for horses and drivers on the tramway. 

Was planned for closer settlement in 1853, but until the second world war was held mainly by farmers and graziers. An early landholder, Charles Price,  introduced Shropshire sheep and Hereford cattle to South Australia. The Island is connected to Goolwa by a ferry. 

Mount Compass was surveyed in 1840 and the Square Waterhole Inn was the recognised resting place for those traveling on the rough road from Adelaide to the south coast via Willunga. The vegetable growing industry flourished in the alluvial soils until 1945, when the area turned to dairying as a more secure means of livelihood. 

Named after the first boat into the creek, the Currency Lass. A fine bridge was constructed over the creek and is  still used today. 

Part of the present area of the District Council of Alexandrina was the District Council of Port Elliot and Goolwa and was originally part of the District of Encounter Bay, the name commemorates a meeting in 1802. The meeting was between Mathew Flinders sent to explore the coast of Australia and the French explorer Captain Nicolus Baudin. 

With the upsurge of tourism, there has been extensive development of land adjacent to the sea and on river frontage and many rural properties have been subdivided into small hobby farms. Large areas of fragile sand dunes have been replanted with marran grass in an effort to control the sand erosion which has taken place between Goolwa and the Murray Mouth. 

A $2.8 million River Murray Interpretive Centre, Signal Point, was built in Goolwa as an Australian Bicentenary project.
 




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