Bert Kelly, “Monarto … and why it went wrong,” The Bulletin, November 3, 1981, p. 44. This is the first and so far only article in The Bulletin by Bert Kelly that I have found that is not his Modest Farmer column.

I know that people from the eastern States used to regard us South Australians as a dull lot. Adelaide was known as the city of churches and we had old-fashioned ways of looking at sin and six o’clock closing. We also had an old-fashioned Premier called Tom Playford and no one could call him exciting, though he was good at governing that part of the country. Jack McEwen once said of me that he could think of no man who had more to be modest about. Well, we have plenty to be dull about, our people worked hard in a dull kind of a way, we did not have great natural resources or a lot of fertile land with a decent rainfall and so on. But all the same we kept on growing. It is true we grew like Topsy instead of in an exciting, well-planned way and people used to sneer at us because we didn’t see visions in the night. We were dull indeed, but at least we paid our way.

Then Don Dunstan took us over and we stopped being dull. Life became exciting and people from Melbourne and Sydney used to pat us patronisingly on the head and tell us we had reached the big league at last. Then when Mr Whitlam took over in Canberra it seemed that there were two suns in the South Australian sky at once and we felt that we were about to go into orbit.

All kinds of exciting developments awaited us. We had a Lands Commission which was to demonstrate the superiority of socialist planning over capitalist greed. This is now being disposed of. We had a frozen food factory which perfected the technique of losing money faster than anything known before. But the pride of our South Australian hearts was the Monarto development, this Dunstan-inspired vision of a new city designed to absorb the bourgeoning population of Adelaide.

With the eager and generous assistance of the Whitlam Government, 18,600 hectares of farming land were purchased and planning by experts began in a big way. Each new planning step was unveiled with proper pomp and pageantry before a bemused populace. We were so used to being dull that this new exciting world was hard for us to absorb. Over half a million native trees were planted and on the contour too. Areas for recreation were thoughtfully set aside; indeed it was planning at its splendid best. Nothing was overlooked and everything met with universal approbation. The only argument was about the new city’s name; many wanted it called Camelot.

The only thing that went wrong was that the Adelaide population stopped burgeoning. So after spending about $27 million of State and Federal taxpayers’ money, there are now fewer people living there than there were before we stopped being dull. The present government is now engaged in disposing of the land by feeding it on to the market gradually and a careful examination of its budget papers seems to indicate that it hopes to recover about $9 million, which will leave us with a cost of about $18 million for which we will have gained some experience, some trees but no houses at all.

I know it is easy to be wise with hindsight, but surely a careful examination of the population figures of the late 1960s would have sounded the alarm bells for those who wanted to listen. And how could the politicians be expected to foresee that their way of splashing money around was scaring the daylights out of the business community? All their camp followers were fawning on the politicians and praising their splendid vision, but business was slowing to a walk, making the need for a new city recede even further and the whole vision started to look silly.

This had been a sad experience for us. Under Playford we were dull, but at least we were reasonably well off. Then for a while we were dragged into an exciting new world led by our new Messiah, Don Dunstan, and we wasted our substance in riotous living. Now we have gone back to being dull again, but this time we are poor as well. I suppose that we can take some comfort that we must be wiser, if poorer, for the experience; but I am not even sure about this. I have an uneasy feeling that wisps of the Dunstan clouds of glory may still trail through the South Australian corridors of power. I can sometimes almost feel another vision coming on.