Port Adelaide and other South Australian ports taken over by state government from 1913; run by harbors board
A view of Port Adelaide inner harbor, about 1905, showing vessels including the Kanowna, Indore, tug.Yatala, Newton Hall and.barque Manurewa. The pressure of bigger ship sizes and more cargo handling forced the Harbors Act 1913 that transferred South Australian ports ownership to the state government.
Image courtesy State Library of South Australia
South Australia’s ports were effectively nationalised by its state parliament passing the Harbors Act 1913.
By the 1910s, with the rapid growth of ships’ sizes and the volume of cargo, Port Adelaide’s infrastructure was under increasing pressure. As the wharfs were largely privately controlled, the state government was unable to make significant changes to improve efficiencies. The Harbors Act 1913 came after a royal commission into these inefficiencies. The Act fundamentally changed Port Adelaide from fragmented individual operations to a unified system.
Under the Harbors Act, the first government South Australian Harbors Board commissioners were Arthur Searcy as chairman and John Bagot Labatt deputy chairman, who bought the former National Mutual Life Insurance building on the west of Victoria Square that was the board office until 1966.
The board started to compulsory buy of all privately-owned waterfront land, docks and wharfs in Port Adelaide, although this was fought by owners, including the South Australian Company, in court for years. By the 1920s, the board began deepening the Port River to 27 feet at low water and widening it to a minimum 350 feet. This meant reclaiming several hundreds of acres of mangrove flats along the river’s margin.
Seeing the inadequacies of the verandah-type timber wharf (timber decking set over timber piles knocked into the river floor), the harbors board introduced a timber pile/concrete platform hybrid construction. The first of these came with widening No 2. Dock and wharfs to its north (Berths 16 and 17). Interlocking steel sheet piling was first driven into the riverbank, and afterward, timber piles were driven in front. A second line of steel sheeting was sunk forward of the timber piles. This effectively sealed the timber piles within the riverbank, protected from marine organisms. By 1938, the board had constructed 5,700 feet of concrete wharves on the same method, and eight transit sheds had been erected.
By the late 1940s, with planning for more Port Adelaide development riding on the surge of post-war activity, the board’s chief engineer and general manager Heinrich Charles Meyer, with mechanical engineer G.A.J. Manuel, visited 24 ports in the United Kingdom and nine principal ports in Germany, France, Spain, Holland, Sweden and Denmark. In America, they visited 21 ports and several in the Pacific. In 1950, the board published a 50-year plan including more deepening of the Port River and using dredged material (20 million cubic metres) to reclaim 2,212 acres on the Port River’s for an industrial estate (later Gillman) and new suburbs to the north and along Lefevre Peninsula.
For about £23 million, the board promised to make the Port the principal gateway to South Australia, “unrivalled for convenience elsewhere in Australia”. It said the £8.5 million investment so far had placed Adelaide third in Australia by shipping volume. The board had built three and a half miles of wharf, mostly concrete, and 30 transit sheds. By 1959, the harbors board reported that, although it had completed the more urgent wharf expansion projects and improved accommodation, “the more ambitious schemes for further port developments included in the original plan must, for the present, remain in abeyance”.
No.2 Dock was completed in 1958 at a cost of about £1 million. The project was to cater primarily for importing steel, timber and other bulk cargoes. The wharves were equipped with four six-ton double hook travelling electric cranes and two medium-sized transit sheds.
In 1966, after the first Labor government in South Australia in 33 years was elected, the board’s powers transferred to a new marine and harbors department under the government’s marine minister. The other major change to the inner Port Adelaide harbor would come from the upsurge in using shipping containers
