Marble Hill

Marble Hill was the Vice-Regal summer residence for the Governor of South Australia for seventy-five years, from 1880 to 1955.

Marble Hill was the Vice-Regal summer residence for the Governor of South Australia for seventy-five years, from 1880 to 1955. It is also the name of a ward of the Adelaide Hills Council, and a suburb, both named after the residence and in which the residence is located. It is about 20 kilometres (12 mi) east of Adelaide between the towns of Ashton and Cherryville, and has expansive views of the Adelaide Hills to the North and East, and the Adelaide Plains to the West.The residence was destroyed during the Black Sunday bushfire of 1955. Subsequently, the site was managed by the National Trust of South Australia from 1967 to 1992, and the Department for Environment and Heritage from 1992 to 2009. A volunteer Friends of Parks group, Friends of Marble Hill, ran open days and maintained the site from 1994 to 2008. To date, the main building has never been fully restored, but the National Trust undertook restoration of the tower and the nearby stables in the 1970s. Successive State Governments have not been prepared to restore the building (despite it having been a residence of the vice-regal representative), as the expense involved would not be considered responsible use of public funds. In 2009, Marble Hill was sold to a local family, who plan to reconstruct and re-use the building.

The locality of Marble Hill was not greatly developed until after the establishment of the Vice-Regal Summer Residence. It consisted largely of uncleared pastoral land until 1880. This was partly due to the rugged terrain dissuading settlers, but also due to the fact that the Government did not offer a large amount of the land for sale. A large area was declared a Government Reserve in 1878, the year that construction on the residence commenced. It was around that time that Governor William Jervois was said to have given the hill its name. When informed that marble had been found during the excavation of the site, he remarked "Then we shall call it Marble Hill". In fact, there is no true marble at Marble Hill. The Governor's informant had merely misidentified the locally abundant quartzite. An alternative account contends that it was instead named for the hill's rounded top, which supposedly resembled a marble when viewed from a distance. In 1896, part of the Government Reserve was subdivided into 34 blocks of approximately 20 acres (8.1 ha) each which were offered for lease. The "blockers", as those who took up residence on the blocks became known, found it difficult to make a living on the uncleared land in the early years, but by the 1920s, all of the blocks were tenanted and productive, planted mainly with fruit trees.

Prior to the establishment of the Government Reserve, part of the locality was used as a pound for stray animals.