Adelaide Hunt Club sets the upper social scene with its first hounds in 1840s for meets chasing wild dogs, roos or emus

An Adelaide Hunt Club meet in the 1870s. Inset: Hunt Club members at Walkerville in 1905. Those identifed are – Front: Neil Campbell; Hedley Todd (host); Bert Sanders (master), Charles Wakefield, Ken Bakewell, Dave Fulton. Second row: Carew Reynell, Leonard Bakewell, Charles Hargrave, Frank Toms, George Bagot. Third row: Bill Pile, Peter Bright,Tom Wigley, Reuther Clarke. Back row: George Braund, Bert Hamilton, Jack Tennant, Mr. Howard.
Image courtesy State Library of South Australia

The vision for South Australia as “a new Britannia in the antipodes” gained focus with the arrival of a pack of hounds to 1840s Adelaide, a few years after the colony was founded.

This enabled the Adelaide Hunt Club, originally the Adelaide Hounds, to be founded. In July 1841, South Australia governor George Grey, along with about 25 horsemen, hounds and “ladies in carriages” met for a day’s hunting, with a wild dog as the quarry. Without foxes to hunt, the wild dogs, as well as kangaroos and emus, were used.

The club’s “superior class” set the colony's social scene with its annual ball and steeple chase. It imported horses from India for polo and from Arabia, or England, for horse racing and hunting.

Hunting declined in Adelaide and the pack was dispersed in the 1850s but was revived in 1869 by a group of wealthy sportsmen led by noted horse breeder and horse racing entrepreneur William Blackler, who imported enough hounds from his brother in England to form a pack.

Blackler acted as master of the hounds but in 1871, after a dispute with the club, withdrew his support and, instigated by James Ellery, sold the pack to the new South-East (later Mount Gambier) Hunt Club, donating proceeds to Mount Gambier Hospital. Adelaide Hunt Club attempted deer hunting but the most challenging riding was drag hunting where an aniseed scent trail was dragged over a course.

The first hunt club race meeting at Thebarton race course featured what became the prestigious Hunt Club Cup event, amateur flat race, hunters’ stakes and hurry skurry. The meeting transferred to the Adelaide Old Racecourse (later Victoria Park, and run by Blackler’s Adelaide Racing Club at that time) from 1870 to 1874, before alternating between Morphettville and Victoria Park until 1919.

 Simpson Newland was club president in 1901, when it held regular meets in the Erindale area. The hound pack was originally kennelled at locations on the Adelaide plains but although urban expansion meant a move in the late 1900s and eventually to Woodside in the Adelaide Hills in the 21st Century.