Monarto is a locality in South Australia west of the Murray River. It is north of the South Eastern Freeway between the Callington and Murray Bridge exits 63 km from Adelaide.
Most of the residents of Monarto run small hobby-like farms, raising cows, sheep and horses. Crops in the area include wheat, oats and barley.
In the 1970s Monarto was proposed to be the site of a new satellite city of Adelaide originally known as "New Murray Town". By the turn of the century the proposal had been completely abandoned.
History
Establishment
The locality of Monarto was originally a private subdivision of section 210 of the Hundred of Monarto, from which it took its name, the hundred having been gazetted in 1847. The Hundred was named after an aboriginal woman, "Queen Monarto", who lived in the area at the time of its proclamation. The township was laid out in 1908.
Boundaries for the locality of Monarto were created on 16 March 2000.
Proposed city of Monarto
A project to develop a new city
In 1970, the Labor-led South Australian government, headed by Don Dunstan, was concerned that Adelaide would become overpopulated following rapid population growth caused by high rates of both birth and immigration in the two decades prior. In total, population growth was in excess of 3% per annum and the government estimated Adelaide would reach 1.5 million by the end of the century. Further, the authorities believed that the growing population would, sooner or later, become a threat to the social and environmental quality of urban life, which at the time was relatively high. An expansion of the city would also threaten the attractive wine-producing areas to the south and north of the city.
To tackle the problems associated with Adelaide's rapidly increasing population, the state government proposed that another city should be built about east of Adelaide. The government held the view that it would work as a kind of supporting city, to which Adelaide residents could move. The government originally used the name "Murray New Town" for the proposed city, but subsequently adopted the name "Monarto" or, more formally, the "City of Monarto").
The government estimated that 1.3 million was the optimal population for Adelaide, which meant that Monarto would have to accommodate about 200,000 people by the end of the century. Monarto would work as a satellite city to Adelaide and, since it was far enough away, it was important that Monarto should have its own identity and economy. That made it difficult to define what kind of city Monarto was supposed to be.
Some people were suspicious about the project and the reasons behind it. For instance, some thought that the project was motivated by political interest and that the state government only wanted to improve its electoral prospects in nearby Murray Bridge. Others believed that the state government wanted to have a development project that was close to Adelaide and its economy, but still far enough from it to be included in the "new cities programme". Additionally, geographer Professor Peter Scott was sceptical about the idea of a new city, pointing out that population growth was less than had been projected.
Structure of the project
The main purpose of the "new cities programme" was to facilitate decentralised policy in regional and urban planning and, by that, alleviate some of the problems of rapidly growing cities. In the beginning there was some opposition about including the Monarto project in the programme. Nevertheless, there was also a strong consensus that in order to succeed with establishing a city, it would be crucial to have a strong public sector employment base in the early phases of development. According to the Monarto development commission, Monarto was going to develop into a small city after years of working as a large country town. This attitude would come to affect planning over the area, as the commission wanted to find a balance between the natural features of the site, its built-form and infrastructure.
Small-scale scenarios, such as the city centre would have public spaces as a key feature, with adjacent buildings as complement. On a broad citywide scale, key landscape features would form the basis of park lands articulating built-up areas.