The parks on the hills face behind Adelaide

What the zone is

The parks service's page for Cleland National Park says the park protects a large area of bushland that sits inside the Adelaide Hills face zone. That page, and the other official pages this guide draws on, do not set out the zone's definition or the shape of its edge. What they do record is the land on the face itself: which parts of it were reserved, when, and what lives on them now. The rest of this guide sets that out, park by park, in the order the years fall.

The face is the stretch the city looks at. The three parks closest to the Adelaide Plains sit on it: Black Hill, Morialta and Cleland. Cleland's own page gives its position as 22 km south east of Adelaide, with Mount Lofty Summit Road and Waterfall Gully Road as the main ways in.

The parks that hold the face

The three parks came into public hands in different ways and at different times, and the pages that tell each story are the parks service's own.

1. 1802Matthew Flinders, sailing off the south coast, sighted Mount Lofty on 27 March.
2. 1831Captain Collett Barker and two companions, Kent and Davis, were the first Europeans recorded to climb it, and their note of a tree nearly 15 metres around brought loggers to the slopes.
3. 1839Road building opened the face: Waterfall Gully Road began that year and Greenhill Road followed in 1858.
4. 1840Settlement around Morialta began, and the felling of trees, mining, quarrying and grazing changed the native vegetation markedly.
5. 1860The first part of Black Hill became a reserve, and four hectares were dedicated at the time.
6. 1901James Smith Reid bought 405 hectares at the head of Fourth Creek. In August 1912 he gave 120 hectares to the State Government and sold another 90.
7. 1912The City of Burnside managed the Cleland area, which became a National Pleasure Resort that year, and the kiosk that is the Utopia restaurant today was built then. Sir Samuel Davenport had owned much of that ground in the second half of the 1800s.
8. 1913Reid's land passed to the National Pleasure Resort on 20 March, and Morialta Falls was proclaimed a National Pleasure Resort in the Government Gazette on 15 July 1915.
9. 1963Not until the 1960s, and the long campaign of J B Cleland to keep its conservation value, did the reserve become the Cleland Wildlife Reserve.
10. 1972July brought 372.2 hectares together under the National Parks and Wildlife Act 1972 as one park, with the name Morialta Conservation Park.
11. 1975Through 1970 to 1975 the State Government bought the parcels piece by piece, and in 1975 they were proclaimed Black Hill Conservation Park, the Athelstone Wildflower Garden among them.

Read together, those dates answer the question the hillside raises. The face between the city and the crest was reserved and re-reserved as public land for more than a century: four hectares at Black Hill in 1860, a pleasure resort at Cleland in 1912 and at Morialta in 1913, proclaimed in 1915, a wildlife reserve at Cleland in 1963, a conservation park at Morialta in 1972 and at Black Hill in 1975.

Black Hill covers 684 hectares now, and the low sheoaks growing on it are what give the hill its name. Morialta has been a place people go to for recreation for more than a hundred years, and it lies 10 km north east of Adelaide; dogs on a lead may go into its recreation zone, between the Stradbroke Road car park and the First Falls car park, and the rest of the park is closed to them.

A garden above the face

The Botanic Gardens of South Australia's history of the garden gives these dates:

1. 1911Maurice Holtze, Director of the Botanic Gardens at the time, put forward the idea of an arboretum for cool climates in the Mount Lofty Ranges.
2. 1948Noel Lothian, newly appointed as Director at 36, won approval for a garden for cool temperate climates in the ranges.
3. 1954The land was set aside by gazettal for the garden.
4. 1965A plan by the landscape architect Allan Correy, drawn up with the Director Noel Lothian, was finished; the garden's history calls it a pioneering piece of master planning, which set each valley to stand for a part of the world and left the ridges as they were.
5. 1977The garden opened to the public at 97 hectares.
6. 1978The Main Lake was built to hold water for the garden and to keep a supply through droughts.

Whose country the face is

The Adelaide Hills Council's history page records that the Aboriginal peoples now known as Peramangk and Kaurna made the Hills their home, and that the stories that have survived tell of how the Hills were made and of geological features people know today. The same page records that in 2018 the Kaurna people won recognition, after 18 years of legal proceedings, as native title holders of the country around Adelaide, a large part of the Adelaide Hills included.

That page also records that many of these peoples were displaced by the mid 1850s as farming expanded in the district, with water and free passage across the hills in competition, and land fenced for stock, especially sheep. Peramangk children learned to swim at Bokati-illa, a permanent waterhole on the Onkaparinga near Hahndorf, and place names of Aboriginal origin survive in the Hills, the Council's page notes: Brukunga and Uraidla, Gumeracha and Onkaparinga, Echunga and Cudlee Creek, though these are often not the names the earliest European settlers wrote down.

The view from the plain

Black Hill takes its name from the low sheoaks that grow on it. Their foliage darkens to a rusty near-black as summer goes on, and from the Adelaide Plains the hills can look black.

From the top of the face, the parks service's page for Mount Lofty Summit describes wide views from the peak across the city skyline to the coast, counts more than 350,000 visitors a year, and puts the peak at more than 710 metres above sea level. The Bureau of Meteorology's weather station on the crest stands at 685 metres, and the section drawn on every page of this site marks that station at its own height, which is the height the Bureau gives it.

Mount Lofty Summit is 15 km east of Adelaide, and the lookout there is accessible, with accessible parking spaces and toilets.

What lives on the face

On the higher slopes of Cleland the forest is mostly stringybark, with a rich understorey of small trees and shrubs below it. Lower down, on the northern side of the park, significant stands of blue gums and manna gum give way to open grasslands.

Among the birds the park's page names are the superb blue wren, the grey fantail and the white throated tree creeper. Mammals on the list include echidnas and the endangered southern brown bandicoot; the page also suggests watching for kangaroos in the distance and koalas asleep high in the trees.

A root-rot fungus, Phytophthora, is killing native plants and threatens the survival of the animals that depend on those plants for food and shelter.

The walk up Mount Lofty from Waterfall Gully climbs this slope, and the weather guide gives the rain the face catches.