The vanished grassy plains

Stand anywhere on the built-up apron that runs between the hills and the gulf — a supermarket car park, a suburban oval, a six-lane arterial road — and try to picture what stood there before 1836. You will fail, and that failure is the whole point of this entry: no ground in the Adelaide story has been so thoroughly rewritten.

What the first colonists found, stepping off their ships, was neither forest nor bare grassland but something lovelier than either: open grassy woodland. Scattered stands of South Australian blue gum and grey box, with river red gums tracing the creek lines, rose out of a continuous tussock floor of spear-grass and wallaby-grass, spaced widely enough that the whole plain read as parkland rather than bush (Planning SA 2000). One colonial official, walking the future city site in December 1836, described grass “three or four feet high” over a tract “of the most luxuriant description” — which sounds like flattery until you remember it explains, better than any later argument could, why the settlers took the ground so fast and so completely. It looked ready-made.

That was its undoing. Flat, fertile, easy to plough and close to the water and the port, the plains were the richest country in the whole gulf-to-range transect. Rich, easy country is always cleared first, and cleared hardest. There was no single catastrophe, no fire or flood to mark it; just two centuries of fence, furrow and subdivision, working steadily at a landscape that put up no resistance. The tally now stands at something like four per cent of the plains’ original native vegetation surviving at all (Bradshaw 2012), and the tussock grassland that once carpeted the ground under those scattered trees is rarer again — scarce enough that conservationists today still name it among the region’s most endangered plant communities (Green Adelaide 2025). That we can even describe the lost woodland with any confidence is mostly the work of one patient man. Darrell Kraehenbuehl spent decades reading colonial surveyors’ field notebooks and tracking down the handful of surviving scraps, and in 1996 rebuilt, paddock by paddock, a landscape almost nobody alive had ever walked through (Kraehenbuehl 1996).

None of which means the plains have nothing left to read. That huge, low-branched gum standing alone in a stock paddock or a school oval is not a garden escapee; grown wide and open like that, it is very likely a genuine survivor of the vanished woodland, spared because it was too big, or too useful for shade, to bother felling. That unfamiliar, wispy grass fringing an old railway cutting or fenced inside a country cemetery may be the plains’ true original ground layer, saved by nothing grander than an accident of fencing that kept the plough and the stock out. Read it properly, and a paddock stops being scenery and becomes a crime scene with the evidence still standing.