Martindale Hall an 1880 mansion in Mintaro, South Australia, subject of dramas beyond film 'Picnic at Hanging Rock'
Martindale Hall was left as a bequest to Adelaide University by John Andrew Tennant Mortlock and his widow. The university passed it on the South Australian government. Inset: Martindale Hall as featured in the South Australian Film Corporation's Picnic at Hanging Rock.
Martindale Hall, a Georgian-style mansion with Italianate influenced sandstone, near Mintara in South Australia's mid north, featured in the 1975 film Picnic at Hanging Rock – and featured in real-life dramas over its heritage status into the 21st Century.
It was built for £30,000 in 1879-80 for Edmund Bowman Jr, part of a family with extensive pastoral holdings in South Australia and other colonies. The Martindale Hall architect was Ebenezer Gregg of London, with Adelaide architece Edward John Woods as chief supervisor and R. Huckson as builder. Due to the work’s specialist nature, 50 of the 60 tradesmen were brought from England. They returned when it was completed in 1880.
Martindale Hall (the name came from the valley near Dalemain Estate, in England’s Lake District, where the Bowman family traced its 16th Century origins) had 32 rooms and a seven-room cellar. A bachelor, Bowman also had a polo ground, racecourse, a boating lake and cricket pitch, where the England Xi played at least once, installed. Fourteen servants, four living at the hall, were said to be on the staff. Edmund Bowman’s finances took a severe hit from 1885, due to drought and economic depression, that cut wool prices dramatically.
Bowman sold Martindale Hall to William Tennant Mortlock (son of William Ranson Mortlock) in 1991. His son John Andrew Tennant Mortlock, developed Martindale Station and built up an impressive collection of artwork displayed at the hall. In his will, Mortlock, who died childless, bequeathed 400 acres of farmland and the hall to the University of Adelaide and the Libraries Board of South Australia, while providing a life interest in the estate to his widow Dorothy Mortlock. His wife, as heir to the Mortlock fortune, bequeathed Martindale Hall and the estate to the University of Adelaide when she died in 1979. A year before, Martindale Hall was listed on the later-defunct national register and on the South Australian heritage register in 1980.
Opposition to the push to privatise Martindale Hall began in the 1970s when the university started selling off the surrounding area. A crowd of 5,000 attended the hall in protest. Martindale Hall, along with 19 hectares, was handed to the South Australian government by the university in 1986. The land was proclaimed as the Martindale Hall Conservation Park in 1991 under the National Parks and Wildlife Act 1972 for "the purpose of conserving the historic features of the land".
From 1991 to 2014, the property was managed under lease as a tourism enterprise, offering heritage accommodation, weddings and other events, and access to the grounds and hall to day visitors. The property was managed by the state government’s environment and water department that, in 2015, received an unsolicited bid from the National Trust of South Australia to buy or long-term lease Martindale Hall.
In 2016, a major public outcry quashed Labor state government considering a plan to convert the hall into a private luxury resort. That year, the National Trust put forward a proposal for how it could create a world-class tourism at Martindale Hall and preserve the buildings in accordance with the original bequest to the people of South Australia.
The National Trust continued to pursue its plan, along with a campaign spurred on by the South Australian parliament’s house of assembly passing the Martindale Hall (Protection and Management) Bill 2021 that the trust saw as allowing the government minister in charge to grant restricted use of the hall to a lease holder.