Snowtown

Snowtown is a town located in the Mid North of South Australia 145 km (90 miles) north of Adelaide and lies on the main road and rail routes between Adelaide and Perth – the Augusta Highway and Adelaide-Port Augusta railway line.

Snowtown is a town located in the Mid North of South Australia 145 km (90 miles) north of Adelaide and lies on the main road and rail routes between Adelaide and Perth – the Augusta Highway and Adelaide-Port Augusta railway line. The town's elevation is 103 metres (338 feet) and on average the town receives 389 mm of rainfall per annum.

The settlement of Snowtown by non-Indigenous Australians initially grew up around a railway station on the Brinkworth-Wallaroo line. Located on what was traditionally the land of the Kaurna, an Aboriginal people, the first pioneers arrived sometime between 1845 and 1869 due to the rapid expansion of grazing, then farming to the north of the area.Bailliere's South Australian gazetteer and road guide, published in 1866, contains a brief description of "Hummock's Run" located 28 miles (45 km) north of Port Wakefield. This farmland, according to the publication, contained the farming stations of Barunga, Bumbunga and Wokurna and consisted of "salt lakes and lagoons, dense scrub, with mallee, pine and bushes, grassy plains and saltbush, well grassed spurs and hills, with oaks and wattle on the Broughton River."

The hill to the east of Snowtown, Black Point Hill (and the nearby Black Point Lagoon) gave its name "Black Point" to the area by 1856 before Snowtown was established in 1878. This permanent waterhole and scrub-covered hill were then known as territory occupied by aboriginals, but claimed by Paddy Gleeson, founder of Clare as his 'Black Point Run'.

From 1862, and 1863 and well before 1870 settlers and graziers campaigned for better transport routes from Black Point to Kadina for easier freight transport of wheat and wool. By 1867 a Parliamentary Enquiry produced a Report recommending the Clare to Wallaroo railway be built for a cost of £144.15s. Only with the arrival in 1870 of Robert Barr Smith at the Hummocks Run, did the surveyors immediately arrive in February 1870, and then, first a paved road (1874), and later a railway (1878) get built from Kadina to Barunga (now Barunga Gap), a location on the Western side of the Hummocks. On September 25, 1877, the Commissioner for Crown Lands agreed with a local delegation that a township should be established at Black Point, and the railway was extended from Barunga Gap to Black Point.The Government only started showing interest in the settlement as late as 1869 when it planned to establish various new towns throughout the district and to divide the land into much smaller holdings. Snowtown's charter as a government town was proclaimed on 19 December 1878 by Governor William Jervois. Jervois named the town after one of the members of the Snow family who were his cousins and lived on Yorke Peninsula (which lies immediately west and southwest of Snowtown). It is officially considered that the town was named after Thomas Snow, who became Jervois's aide de camp when he received his posting in South Australia. The town boundaries were defined as an approximate rectangle immediately adjacent to section 114 in the Hundred of Barunga north east of Barunga Creek, north west of Salt Lagoon and south of Boundary Creek. During this period one of the first major structures, the old Snowtown Pub was built in 1879 by Mr. Richard Hazelgrove, who paid £171 for block 160 on which he built the hotel. In 1879 the Snowtown school was also established on Glen Davidson Drive and the Kadina railway line was opened to Snowtown in October of that year. The extension to Brinkworth would be completed in 1894.In 1888 the District Council of Snowtown was established by proclamation of the District Councils Act 1887, along with 20 other new local government bodies in South Australia. The new council incorporated the entirety of the hundreds of Barunga and Boucaut.

In 1923 the Long Plains railway line extension reached Snowtown and, in 1925, was completed to Redhill, bringing an increase of rail traffic to the town.

St Canice's Catholic Church was built in 1936 to designs by Adelaide architects Herbert Jory and Stanley Pointer in Romanesque Revival style.Salt Lake school once existed at the southern extremity of the locality about 2.4 kilometres (1.5 mi) east of Augusta Highway.During the 1970s and 1980s, the secessionist micronation of Bumbunga Province existed on farmland owned by the Brackstone family at Bumbunga, 15 kilometres (9.3 mi) south of Snowtown.

In 1999, Snowtown became known as the location where the remains of eight bodies were found in barrels of acid stored in a disused bank vault. The "Snowtown murders" or "bodies in barrels murders", as they came to be known, occurred in several locations in South Australia between August 1992 and May 1999. The bodies were held at a series of locations around Adelaide for some time, and were moved to Snowtown in early 1999, a few months before their discovery.Only one victim was actually killed in Snowtown, and none of the victims or the perpetrators were local to the town. Most of the murders had actually been committed in the outer northern suburbs of Adelaide, located on the outskirts of the South Australian capital.Four people, including ringleader John Justin Bunting, were convicted of murder or assisting the murders. Snowtown, a film about the murders and the life of Bunting, was released in 2011.