Water Tanks
Salisbury North

About Salisbury North, SA

Salisbury North is a suburb in the City of Salisbury, part of the greater Adelaide conurbation in South Australia. It was built by the South Australian Housing Trust on a greenfield site in the early 1950s, mainly to house employees of the nearby Long Range Weapons Establishment. It is bounded on the north by the Adelaide–Port Augusta railway line; on the east by the Gawler railway line; on the south by the Little Para River and Waterloo Corner Road; and on the west by Bolivar Road. == Establishment of the housing estate == In 1947 the Commonwealth Government established the Long Range Weapons Establishment (LRWE) in partnership with the United Kingdom Government as a facility for research and development of rocket-propelled weapons. The support base for the rocket range at Woomera was at Penfield (34°44′31″S 138°38′10″E), on the northern side of the Adelaide-Port Augusta railway line, where a large munitions manufacturing complex had been built in 1941, 3 kilometres (1.9 mi) from the small rural centre of Salisbury. As with the munitions complex at the beginning of the war, in 1949 the location that was to become known as Salisbury North, immediately to its south, was no more than wheat paddocks on a flat alluvial plain. Through the paddocks ran Waterloo Corner Road, the main road leading north-west from Salisbury to Port Wakefield. The whole area was lightly populated, having a population of only 4,159 within the boundaries of the 200 square kilometres (77 sq mi) Salisbury District Council, including Salisbury itself.During the war years, many hundreds of workers had been conveyed each day by train to and from Penfield since most of the workforce lived in Adelaide. There had been a post-war lull when munitions manufacture ceased, but as the new Anglo–Australian weapons project established in 1947 gathered pace, the need to recruit large numbers of employees increased. However, the post-war labour market in Adelaide was buoyant and the price of housing high.