The Morrow Road Bridge

Before O'Sullivan Beach was subdivided in 1926, the people who had taken up land there reached their blocks by crossing a timber bridge over Christie Creek. The crossing carried Morrow Road, and the settlers who remembered using it spoke of it long afterwards as the way in — the only practical means of getting across the creek to the land that lay between it and the sea. The bridge was built in the 1860s, at the point where the suburbs of Lonsdale, O'Sullivan Beach and Christies Beach now meet.

It is a plain piece of work, and that ordinariness is precisely why so few like it survive. Sandstone abutments on either bank and a single stone pier mid-stream, its ends rounded to part the water, once carried a deck of heavy timber logs topped with compacted rubble — no arch, no parapet, no inscription. Bridges of this kind were common across the colony from the middle of the nineteenth century, thrown up wherever a road met a watercourse and a council could afford nothing more ambitious, and one by one they were replaced as South Australian timbers rotted and the demand for better roads grew. The main timber logs have since been taken out for safety, leaving the stone abutments and pier; in the 2000s a new steel structure was built above the original to carry the crossing.

The land around it came to the Morrow family. Robert Morrow was an Irish-born police constable who married Annie O'Brien at Port Adelaide in 1896 and brought his family out to the Morphett Vale district about 1905, taking up farmland on the eastern side of O'Sullivan Beach Road near the corner of Dyson Road. In 1920 he added a further hundred and sixty acres running down to the sea, the ground that would later become the Port Stanvac refinery site, and worked it mostly for barley; the holding came to be known as Morrows Farm. When he died in 1940 the land passed to his children, Robert and Winnie, and over the years the family came to hold most of the coastal country that was eventually sold through the South Australian Housing Trust and taken over in 1958 by the Standard Vacuum Oil Company — the Stanvac whose name the place still carries. Morrow Road itself was once the continuation of what is now Dyson Road, running on past the creek to finish at Sherriffs Road — the road at Lonsdale that still carries the name of William Sherriff, the Scottish emigrant who farmed nearby from 1839. The bridge had carried traffic for some forty years before Morrow ever held the land, so it can only have taken his name long after it was built, in the ordinary way that country roads did, from whoever owned the ground they ran across.

The land on the seaward side of the creek was the country that would become O'Sullivan Beach. The O'Sullivans had settled near Christie Creek from 1840, and when the suburb to the south was carved up into building blocks in 1926 it was named in honour of Ignatius O'Sullivan, the family's founder. The subdivision belonged to a wave of coastal land selling that ran the length of the gulf shore through the 1920s, as Adelaide families bought weekenders and holiday blocks within reach of the train. At neighbouring Christies Beach the boom was extraordinary: by 1929 some eight hundred of a thousand building allotments had been sold, and for every house going up at Port Noarlunga ten were rising at Christies Beach.

What the new settlements lacked was roads. The beaches were cut off from the railway station at Morphett Vale, and getting goods and people down to the coast over the existing tracks was a constant grievance. In July 1929 a deputation of the Morphett Vale District Council, the Christie's Beach Progress Association, and other interested parties pressed the Commissioner of Crown Lands to bring the new bitumen road down through Christies Beach rather than leave it on its old line.

The road should continue along the road straight to Christie's Beach, and then turn due south into Port Noarlunga along Torrens-street.

Register News-Pictorial, 25 July 1929

It was an argument about the future shape of the district — which beach the made road would serve, which subdivision would prosper — and it was the kind of pressure that, over the following decades, steadily made the old timber crossings redundant. The Morrow Road bridge held on longer than most. In its day it had done more than serve a few farms; it carried the main road south across Christie Creek and gave Adelaide easier and safer access to the western side of the Fleurieu Peninsula, and it remained the principal crossing for the country south of the creek until the 1960s.

That it was never demolished in its turn, only superseded, is the reason it survives. Several bridges of similar construction still stand in the Willunga district to the south, but in the Noarlunga area the Morrow Road bridge is thought to be the only example of this type of engineering left. It is recognised as a local heritage place for that reason — not for any beauty or distinction, but as the last working memory of how an ordinary country district got itself across its creeks before the age of made roads, and of the route the first O'Sullivan Beach settlers walked to reach their blocks.

Sources

• Onkaparinga Heritage Survey Stage 2 (Grieve Gillett Andersen for the City of Onkaparinga, 2022) — assessment of the Morrow Road bridge: 1860s construction, sandstone abutments and central pier, timber-log span, the later steel structure built above, and its role in opening access from Adelaide to the western Fleurieu Peninsula.
• City of Onkaparinga — Local Heritage Place register, Bridge across Christie Creek, Morrow Road, Lonsdale (Heritage ID 5294): description of construction and history of use as the main Christie Creek crossing before the 1960s.
• City of Onkaparinga Libraries — local history collection: the Morrow family record and 1992 photographs of the bridge; Robert Morrow, an Irish-born police constable who married Annie O'Brien at Port Adelaide in 1896, his family on the land from about 1905, the coastal farmland acquired in 1920, and its sale through the Housing Trust to the Standard Vacuum Oil Company in 1958.
• Register News-Pictorial (Adelaide), 25 July 1929 — "Road to Port Noarlunga: Christie's Beach Proposal": deputation to the Commissioner of Crown Lands; Christie's Beach allotment sales and building figures; the contest over the route of the bitumen road. Trove
• Observer (Adelaide), 30 January 1926 — "Port Noarlunga Railway: Coast Route or Branch Line?": evidence before the Railway Standing Committee on the want of road and transport facilities serving the coastal subdivisions. Trove
• Pioneers of Reynella, Margarette Powell, Audrey Green and Bob Stupple (Reynella, 2015) — the Bennier and Booth family entries, which place Robert Morrow, a police officer from Port Adelaide, on the coastal farmland that became Morrows Farm and later the Stanvac oil refinery site.