Think you know all there is to know about the Adelaide Park Lands? Think again! Here are five fun facts from The Adelaide Park Lands by Patricia Sumerling.

1. The Elder Rotunda comes from Scotland – Patricia says: While the Torrens Lake was fringed with promenades and walkways, there were few grassy places to have picnics, listen to bands or linger and chat. Sir Thomas Elder, sojourning in Scotland, read about the forthcoming opening of the lake in his most recent batch of Adelaide newspapers and noted that the corporation intended to beautify the banks of the river by laying out several acres of ground for a place of recreation and a promenade. He saw it as an opportunity to donate something worthy for the site and informed them of a ‘trifling gift’ of a rotunda bandstand, which he had shipped to Adelaide. The rotunda duly arrived from MacFarlane’s Saracen Foundry in Glasgow and was erected; its columns were painted in bronze, with the remainder picked out in grey and blue. The rotunda was officially opened on 28 November 1882, more than a year after the lake. A piece of music, the ‘Rotunda March’, composed for the event, was played by the Adelaide City Council Brass Band.
2. Botanic Park had its own Speakers’ Corner –  Patricia says: Speakers’ Corner in Botanic Park became one of Adelaide’s most popular attractions, particularly for the ‘sensation loving public’ on Sunday afternoons. The only rule was to abstain from making personal attacks. In February 1895 a variety of speakers were on offer. Three or four individuals who had ‘the call’ took it in turns to promote the scriptures, while regulars were ‘for the most part gathered around the soldiers of the Salvation Army, who worked with unflagging energy despite the heat’. The Army was conspicuous for ‘blaring trumpets and the thumping of the drum’. Nearby speakers Stewart and Osborn ‘fired off’ slanderous statements about employers and capitalists. By 1912, Barney, a celebrated veteran preacher, had braved winter rain and summer heat for nearly 30 years to convert in a ‘divine sense’, mostly ‘young men and maidens’. Sometimes he was dressed in a long sheet decorated with antediluvian drawings.
3. The Park Lands had their own morality police (well, in a sense) –Patricia says: During the First World War the police force appointed its first two policewomen, Kate Cocks and Annie Ross, who began work on 1 December 1915 in time for the forthcoming summer. Kate Cocks was famous for her vigilance on the Park Lands, using her cane to separate lovers, who were often unaware of her approach. Finding lovers locked together she used her catchphrase ‘Three feet apart!’ In March 1916 courting couples came under the spotlight of the Advertiser again: ‘During the last few years it has become the fashion among people to do their courting lying down. It is now the practice for them to lie down so closely together as to appear immodest but many of them are respectable.’ Kate Cocks was not amused, commenting that the ‘police were powerless to advise couples to sit up’.
4. The Park Lands had their own air raid shelters during World War II – Patricia says: It is not generally known that several miles of pipe were laid and trench air raid shelters built in the city’s squares, in children’s playgrounds and on the fringes of the Park Lands and along North Terrace during the Second World War. Generally not used for the purposes for which they were intended, they existed from January 1942 to around August 1944, when they were filled in by a bulldozer from the Highways Department. The Hume cement pipes, which had been used for shelters, had a second life in drainage works and in the children’s playgrounds.
5. Large sections of the Park Lands were for many years ‘Cows Only’! – Patricia says: One of the most enduring images of the Park Lands until the end of the 1960s was that of the signs dotted around bearing the words ‘Cows Only’. In 1963 there were well over a thousand livestock grazing on the Park Lands. However, in 1972 the last two dozen cows in Park 27B, next to the North Adelaide Railway Station, were banished, while 60 odd horses still grazing in several parks were brought together in Park 6 off Lefevre Terrace in North Adelaide. Today the long tradition of horse agistment, begun in the 1850s, continues, creating a delightful rural character in a capital city.

To learn more about the Park Lands, click here and take a look at Patricia’s well-loved history of this area.