South Australia does lap of honour after motor race

Press, 30 August 1986, Page 33

South Australia does lap of honour after motor race

By

CHRIS PETERS

NZPA staff correspondent Adelaide

It took a motor race to put South Australia back on the map both in Australia itself and worldwide. -i

Until November 3, 1985, South Australia was the forgotten state, the Festival State best known for its biennial arts festival, its wines, and its capital known as the city of churches. The Australian Grand Prix in Adelaide ran at a sAustl.6 million . actual loss, but pumped an estimated sAust4o million into the state’s economy, brought thousands of visitors to the city, and was seen by a worldwide television audience of 750 million.'

As a dollop of icing on that cake, the race through the streets on the outskirts of Adelaide was voted the best organised Formula One grand prix of 1985, meaning there will be no trouble filling the contract for six more annual events. The fact South Australia got the race rather than the more powerful New South Wales, the more exotic Queensland, or the business centre of Melbourne, is a measure of the new image the state has claimed for itself.

On top of the grand prix Adelaide is home to a casino built in the centre

of the city’s 1929 central railway station and rated the most opulent in Australia. To celebrate its 150th anniversary the state has been host to the World Three Day Event, equestrian championships at Gawler, and will launch the country’s largest riverboat the Murray Princess. South Australia has other, more tangible claims to fame, including Roxby Downs, the biggest uranium/copper mine in the world which also has a huge deposit of gold, and the Cooper Basin, site of the biggest on-shore oil field in Australia and extensive natural gas reserves.

South Australia also has links with New Zealand that go beyond its Christ-church-like capital, the fact that the next stop due south is Antarctica, and an aversion to traditional Aussie brashness.

Like Wellington and Christchurch, South Australia was subjected to the experimentation and dealings of Edward Gibbon Wakefield and his colonising theorists who didn’t let facts like location or availability and condition of land interfere with their zeal for putting their theories into practice.

South Australia’s forbidding coastline and desert interior — where the British centuries later tested atomic bombs and rockets — had discouraged explorers from the time of the Dutch in 1627.

But with the French taking an interest in the place during the 1800 s, the British Government decided to act and Wakefield, whose penchant for eloping . with young heiresses had earned him three years in Newgate in 1827, fired off a pamphlet extolling the virtues of the place — even though he had never sf i it.

Years of p ssure led to a founding :t in 1834, and the ant lof the first colonists under the autocratic Captain John Hindmarsh on December 28, 1836. The final shove for the proposal through the British Parliament had come from the Duke of Wellington, and while for political reasons South Australia’s capital had to be named after King William IV’s wife Adelaide, Wakefield remembered his mentor when naming his next windswept enterprise that was to become the capital of New Zealand. While Wakefield’s dream of the huge Murray River becoming the cargo highway of Australia — largely because he ignored explorers’ reports that it reached the sea via a series of shallow lakes and sand dunes — the colony got off to a precarious and often acrimonious start with its initial wealth in agriculture.

Once farmers in the 1880 s discovered what phosphorus and superphosphate could do to their cropping of the dry

interior and the invention of the combine harvester, South Australia became the wheatbowl of Australia and later supplied the bulk of New Zealand’s needs.

The state is now divided into three main farming areas — the pastoral zone to the north, comprising 80 per cent of the state’s area, where there is less than 250 mm of rain a year and given over to beef cattle and sheep; the cereal zone between Port Augusta and Adelaide; and the high rainfall zone along the south coast which carries the highvalue cash crops like fruit and vegetables. The state also supplies 57 per cent of Australia’s wines thanks to early Lutheran settlers in the famous Barossa Valley, and emulators who spread over several areas round Adelaide.

New Zealand’s main import from South Australia is refined petroleum and petroleum products, and oil provides the main portion of the state’s mineral production. An 1841 shipment of silver ore to Britain saw the birth of the Australian mining industry, and the following year the first of several copper deposits was discovered, making the state a mineral province of world significance.

Iron ore mining began in 1898 and has been a main income earner since with another 80 million

tonnes of reserves estimated to be still in the ground, while coal is also abundant with brown coal being tested in West Germany for use in power stations.

But the big daddy of them all is the Olympic Dam project, better known by the name of the nearby town of Roxby Downs.

In this giant venture in the state’s central north, an estimated 2000 million tonnes of ore contains 32 million tonnes of copper, 1.2 million tonnes of uranium, 230 tonnes of gold, and significant amounts of silver. With the controversial go-ahead for the mine making it the only uranium mine still open in Australia, the state is set to cash in in a big way.