St Kilda

St Kilda is a coastal suburb in Adelaide, South Australia.

St Kilda is a coastal suburb in Adelaide, South Australia. Its seafront faces the Barker Inlet, which is part of the Port River estuarine area, the largest tidal estuary of Gulf St Vincent, and includes a large area of mangroves. St Kilda is an internationally recognised bird watching area with over 100 species of birds feeding in and around the mudflats, salt lagoons, mangroves and seagrass beds, which are part of the estuarine ecosystem.

St Kilda has a small number of houses and a 2016 population of 70. There is a single connecting road from the suburb to the rest of Adelaide. The inhabited section of the suburb occupies less than 100 hectares (250 acres) along the seafront. The remainder of the land was formerly used for extensive salt evaporation ponds, although these are much fewer in number now. The settlement ponds of the Bolivar Waste Water Treatment Plant occupy some of the southern end of the suburb. St Kilda is bordered by Buckland Park to the north, Waterloo Corner to the east-north-east, Bolivar to the south and south-east, and Gulf St Vincent to the west.

The suburb is home to a number of tourist attractions, including an adventure playground, tram museum, mangrove forest walk and an abundance of birdlife.

Prior to the 1836 British colonisation of South Australia, the area was inhabited by the Kaurna people, who occupied the land from Cape Jervis in the south up the western side of the Fleurieu Peninsula, to Crystal Brook in the north, east to the Mount Lofty Ranges, across to Gulf Saint Vincent, including the Adelaide Plains and city of Adelaide. They called the Port River region and estuary Yerta Bulti (also spelt Yertabulti), meaning "land of sleep or death".The Kaurna people made much use of the estuarine area for hunting and gathering food as well as materials which they made into artefacts and tools. They made use of the natural resources; for example, they used to trap and spear fish (kuya), lobsters (ngaultaltya) and birds (parriparu), and also gathered bird's eggs, black river mussels (kakirra, species Alathyria jacksoni), periwinkle (kulutunumi), river crawfish (kunggurla – probably common yabby), clams, native mud oysters and blue swimmer crabs. However, they did not kill the black swans, as this was forbidden. The reeds, blue flax lily and rushes (probably Juncus kraussii, the salt marsh rush) were used for weaving baskets and nets – the latter used for not only fish, but game such as kangaroo and emu. Dolphins were known as yambo.

Before the town (later suburb) was established, there were three low-lying islands that were covered in shell grit and saltbush and surrounded by mangrove and samphire swamps. Settler fishermen had established huts on the islands by 1865, and by 1873 there were 13 huts and a boathouse recorded when the area was surveyed by Thomas Evans. By the 1890s people were visiting the islands, attracted to the supposed curative properties of the mangrove mud, using the beach for bathing and fishing for crabs. An early settler in the area was John Harvey, the founder of nearby Salisbury, who gave the area its name, as it reminded him of the island of St Kilda in the Outer Hebrides of Scotland, which also has abundant birdlife. (In fact, there is no saint of that name.)

In 1886 the St Kilda area became part of the Munno Para West District Council (which had been founded in 1854), along with Virginia West. It was proclaimed a town on 31 July 1893, with sales of the first allotments made on the same day.The St Kilda Hotel, built out of limestone from east of what is now Elizabeth, opened in 1898 with Matthias Lucas as the first publican and remains the suburb's only hotel. A school opened in October 1902, where the tram museum is now sited, admitting students in November of the same year. The school was closed from 1917 to 1924 and finally closed permanently in 1949, with students moving to Salisbury North Primary School and the building eventually being used at Virginia Primary School.St Kilda was moved to the new District Council of Salisbury (later City of Salisbury) on 22 June or 1 July 1933 along with most of the Munno Para West area.The islands were extensively modified after floods in 1948 and 1957, which cut off St Kilda from the rest of Adelaide. Salisbury Council began building up the area, expanding seawalls and reclaiming additional land by dumping of earth spoil.In 1924 a telegraph office opened in Shell Street and, due to the suburb of St Kilda in Melbourne having the same name, the post office service requested that the name be changed. Over some local objections the name was changed to Moilong (a Kaurna word for where the tide comes in), but this was reversed after local protests. Moilong Telegraph Office opened in 1924, was upgraded to a post office in 1945, renamed Saint Kilda in 1965 and closed in 1974.Imperial Chemical Industries (ICI) began construction of the Solar Evaporation Lagoons in 1935, using up to 600 workers to dig out the lagoons by hand and then expanded them mechanically after World War II.St Kilda's population has never been large, with 50 non-permanent residents counted in the 1901 census, 68 (including 20 permanent) in 1911, 30 total residents in 1933, 80 in 2002, increasing to 246 by 2006, but dropping to 70 (11 families) in 2016.

Adelaide has a Mediterranean climate with St Kilda being slightly hotter and drier than the Adelaide average. Summer daytime temperatures can be expected to exceed 40 °C on 4 days of the year. Conversely, nighttime temperatures in winter are expected to drop below 0 °C on 1 day, although generally the season is mild with moderate rainfall.