In the mid 1950s, 14 miles north of Adelaide, South Australia, the South Australian Housing Trust, along with then Premier Sir Thomas Playford and their Town Planners, were busy building a new city from the dirt up, in a region formerly known simply as the Gawler, or Adelaide Plains.
Birthed with great enthusiasm, a set of loosely defined objectives and deemed “the City of Tomorrow”, the attempt to construct and then guarantee the success of the Housing Trusts’ original vision, frame the early history of the town that would come to be known as Elizabeth.
As participants in the new-town venture, those who came to populate Elizabeth - employers, residents, landowners - were expected to conform and to confirm the wisdom of those early objectives. Objectives which were predicated on two essential assumptions:
First, it assumed that residents would and could conform to the Town Planners objectives and would not bring their own ideas, histories and objectives to bear down upon the town.
Second, it assumed that employers (Pinnocks, General Motors Holden etc) could and would be loyal to the Planners version of the town, that physical design (such as well supplied designated industrial areas) and the careful selection of firms could isolate Elizabeth from the consequences of economic decisions in which planners (and more importantly Elizabeth) had very little influence.
But while these assumptions were vital to the new-town vision, neither had any real influence beyond the planning ideology stage itself. In one sense, the Housing Trusts’ version of Elizabeth was under threat the moments the first residents, employers and landowners started arriving because the planners expected conformities and certainties where there could be none. They had not anticipated that their version of Elizabeth might be hijacked by the very people they themselves courted to occupy the town.
For the South Australian Housing Trust and its Town Planners, Elizabeth was to be an entirely new town without a history. A entirely clean slate. What the planners failed to consider was each new occupant that came to populate the area, brought with them their own history, which would immediately become Elizabeth’s history and that it was those histories, in the end, along with shifting economies and a winding down on immigration itself, which would have the greater influence over The Housing Trusts’ City of Tomorrow.
In the end, the loosely defined, yet well intentioned City of Tomorrow the Trust had hoped for would not eventuate. Neither would the tomorrow hoped for by Elizabeth’s original residents, employers and landowners.
In the 1960s, the South Australian Housing Trust would drive visiting luminaries through the town. By the 1980s it would be social workers who would come here for tours of inspection. The model community the original Town planners had envisioned became a lesson in social breakdown and the inherent failures in Utopian visions. And this all happened inside one generation.
Elizabeth That Was is a history channel that celebrates the history of one of the greatest urban endeavours of 20th Century Australia - Elizabeth. Not everything went according to plan. There was failure, there was success. We celebrate it all - the good, the great, the bad....and the downright ugly!
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