Sorry, all done, better luck next time y’all.

Winners will be announced soon!

This is the extended version of an piece that appears on page 22 of Issue 79.5

Adelaide is filled with lines, most of them neat, not all of them pretty. When Colonel Light first designed Adelaide, he separated the Port from Adelaide proper. He drew a line on the map; he put a cleft in things. At the time, it was a controversial decision. It divided the merchant community, and Colonel Light drew fire from the Governor himself.

Colonel Light’s decision was a practical choice, but it had social implications: it drew a line between the City and the Port (since erased by Adelaide’s sprawl), but it also built two distanced commercial centres in the colony. And it’s a decision whose echoes and ripples are still being felt.

Today, Port Adelaide’s a dying thing; she’s dusty, and empty, and her breath is rasping faintly. If you walk down the streets, there are buildings boarded up. There are signs that claim Port Adelaide’s exciting, and a happy place to be — smiling retail development ads full of pretty blondes and kids.

But they’re lying through their teeth, and when you look in the eyes of the few people around, you can see they know it too. There’s a wretched feeling of neglect and dereliction; of a town halfway abandoned. Historic buildings sleep and gradually decay — and are occasionally vandalised. The National Trust of Australia has called Port Adelaide one of the country’s most at-risk heritage locations.

I wish I knew why Port Adelaide was dying, but I don’t. I think a lot of people wished they knew. Certainly, there are a lot of people — government, corporate, and the grey in between — who are trying to save it. They’re trying angrily and desperately. It’s CPR to her most broken places. A breath and thump of $1.2 billion. But sometimes things just … die. And when they do, they seem to come full-circle.

Port Adelaide was born and founded in abjection and rejection, dust and decay. On the 6th of January, 1837, Captain Lipton took his post as the Port’s first Harbourmaster. Within three years, the media had renamed the Port: Port Misery. It was muddy and isolated, and beset by mosquitoes. By the late 1850s, more terms had been coined to describe it: “Dustholia” in summer, “Mudholia” in winter. By all accounts, Port Adelaide started pretty badly.

But even so, progress progressed. It was a port, and ports mean trade. Buildings were built and industry flourished. By 1881, there were gas streetlights; by the 1920s and 30s, significant reconstruction of the wharves themselves occurred. The people were celebrating and recovering from the war. There were buildings, largely un-vandalised, and almost all in use. And with a population on the rise, the port soon became a commercial centre: jobs were plentiful, and the shopping precinct was the second largest in the state.

But then, the sixties came: the beginning of the fall. Shipping containers were invented and popularized, which reduced the costs of commerce. But it also meant lost jobs. To make matters worse, according to historian Brian Samuels, shopping centres opened in nearby suburbs, lessening the need for a concentrated commercial precinct. The Port began to crumble.

The events of the sixties are a blow from which Port Adelaide has never really recovered. As early as the 1970s, calls were made for redevelopment. But it never really happened. People moved and looked for work, and slowly shops were boarded up.

If you’ve ever been to Perth or Melbourne’s ports, you’ll know how unusual this is. A lot of ports today are beautiful, busy, effervescent places. So why not here? Well partly, I think, people started working earlier to save the others. Maybe it’s too late for ours. But maybe it’s just bad luck. Whatever the reason, the result is clear: Port Adelaide is dying, slowly. Walk the streets awhile. She’s once again Port Misery.