Belair is a suburb in the south eastern foothills of Adelaide, South Australia at the base of the Mount Lofty Ranges.
Name
Before European settlement, the Kaurna people called the area of modern-day Belair "piraldi". One early European name for the area was Sleep's Hill, named after Samuel Sleep, a shepherd who came to South Australia in the 1830s. The origin of the modern name "Belair" is uncertain. Gustav Ludewigs, who subdivided the area, may have named the suburb after Bel Air, Martinique, being his wife Maria's birthplace. Another theory is that it was named in 1849 after Eugene Bellairs, a Government surveyor who lived in the area.
History
The area was used by the Kaurna and Peramangk people for seasonal hunting and gathering. The trees provided gum resin for food and bark for shelter construction, and possums and bandicoots were hunted for food and for their skins to be used in cloaks.
Government Farm
The first known European settler in Belair was a squatter named Nicholas Foott. Although he did not own any land, the colonial government allowed him to stay in the area and improve the land until the land was required by the government. Foott built a house on the land some time between 1836 and 1840. In July 1840, Governor George Gawler decided to establish a farm in the area named Government Farm, and Foott was asked to leave. From 1858 to 1860, Old Government House was built on the farm as the summer residence for the Governor of South Australia, which it remained until a new house was built at Marble Hill in 1880.
Two petitions, with 620 signatures between them, were presented to the South Australian Parliament in 1878 calling for a railway line to be constructed into the Adelaide Hills. The first petition desired a railway line so that both the rich and the poor living in the Adelaide Plains would be able to access the hills, viewed as the healthiest part of the Adelaide region. The second petition wanted a railway link to Port Adelaide so that produce could be delivered to markets in the hills at the same price as to markets in North Adelaide, which already had a rail link. After a survey of the Adelaide Hills, the Parliament passed a bill enacting a route from Adelaide to Nairne, which would pass through Belair. Construction work on the line began in 1879 and the section of the line through to Aldgate was opened on 14 March 1883. This included service to the Belair railway station, located in Government Farm.
In 1881, the South Australian government proposed subdividing the land of the farm to meet the increasing demand for land in the Adelaide Hills, but this was met with protests. This led to an Act of Parliament being passed in October 1883 prohibiting the sale of Government Farm without the sanction of Parliament. Further campaigns to protect the land during the 1880s, as well as the greater accessibility to the farm due to the construction of the Adelaide to Nairne Railway line, led to Government Farm being transformed into Belair National Park, proclaimed on 19 December 1891 with the passage of the National Park Act.
Later development
Belair was the location of the first facility for the treatment of alcoholism in South Australia, at the Belair Home for Inebriates. The retreat was partially funded by the government and opened in 1877. The building was renamed Hope Lodge in 1893 and operated as a training center for missionaries until 1907. Belair was also home to multiple sanatoriums for people suffering from tuberculosis. Kalyra Consumptive Home was incorporated in December 1894 by the James Brown Memorial Trust, with its first patients admitted in February or March 1895. Another sanatorium called Nunyara Tuberculosis Sanatorium was opened in 1902 by Dr Arthur Gault, which operated until his death in 1917.