The Dry Creek Explosives Depot & the landing at Broad Creek

This is Broad Creek in Barker Inlet in the Port (Adelaide) River in South Australia: -

Here is a map of the river showing the location of Broad Creek (RHS of Barker Inlet, just below Swan Alley Creek): -

According to “A Cruising Guide to Historic Gulf Ports – Vol. 1” by Graham Scarce, there used to be four wharves and a 31m-long jetty in the upper reaches of Broad Creek.

These were for the unloading of munitions onto wagons. Those wagons ran on a 2½ foot tramway to a munitions dump at Dry Creek.

These facilities were abandoned after World War II. The wharves and jetty were demolished in 1978. There was a 10m-wide dredged channel in Broad Creek that was 3m deep, but this has long silted up. The creek is now shallow on anything other than a high tide.

I have been able to kayak up Broad Creek on high tides a few times. I was able to visit two shipwrecks in the upper reaches of the creek – Hulk No.1 and the Dorothy S: -

There is also an abandoned trimaran adjacent to the remains of the wharves there: -

According to Wikipedia, there was an explosives depot consisting of 10 magazines at Dry Creek, near Port Adelaide, from 1904 to 1995. It was a secure storage facility for explosives.

The magazines were built at Dry Creek by the South Australian Government's Department of Chemistry in 1906. These magazines replaced an earlier explosives depot at Magazine Creek at Gillman. That depot was called the North Arm Powder Magazine.

Of the horse-drawn tram, Wikipedia says, “A narrow gauge tramway with a track gauge of 610 mm (2 ft) was constructed in 1906. Running along the magazines, it connected the depot to the landing jetty, a distance of 2 kilometres (1.2 miles), and on the other side 800 metres (870 yards) to the Dry Creek railway station. Six small horse-drawn wagons of 1.25 long tons (1.27 metric tons) capacity transported explosives such as dynamite to the magazines. Previously, explosives had to be transported by road from the North Arm to the magazines, a dangerous and expensive practice.”

There are lots of old photos on the Wikipedia page. These photos show the magazines and jetty, and much more, including an aerial shot.

This is a Google map of the Dry Creek magazine depot: -

Chris Frizell says that "Ketches used to go up there and load explosives. One of my old skippers took the ketch John Robb up there many times, the boxed explosives were loaded in the hold, the detonators were put under his bunk in the cabin aft, which also housed the small auxiliary engine. OH&S did not exist back then, and guess what..they never blew it up."

According to https://www.geocaching.com/geocache/GC7CRWQ , “In 1850 the South Australian Government decided to store all the Colony's explosives under Government supervision in powder magazines and three associated floating hulks in Magazine Creek off the North Arm of the Port River. By the early 1900s however, the North Arm Explosive Magazine had become inadequate for the amount of explosives being imported into the State to be used in the construction, mining and quarrying industries.

“In 1906 the Dry Creek explosives magazines were built in a large reserve of 287 acres. Ten separate buildings each capable of storing 30 tonnes of explosives were laid out in a long line, each surrounded on three sides by a large earth mound.

“At first the explosives were unloaded at the North Arm and transported by horse and dray to the new stores, but in 1906 a closer landing site was established by the construction of a wharf at the end of Broad Creek, south east of Barker Inlet. Then the imported explosives were unloaded onto hulks at the old 'powder ground' in the North Arm, with the explosives lightered to the Broad Creek Wharf.

“In 1913 a new explosives berth was completed at Snapper Point (east of Outer Harbor) and explosives were then lightered to Broad Creek via Barker Inlet. Explosives were sometimes stored in floating hulks to supplement the magazine storage. Until 1939 all explosives were imported from the United Kingdom, but from the beginning of the Second World War they arrived from Victoria, firstly by sea and then from 1946 by rail to the Dry Creek Railway Yards.”

There is much more information there, including many interesting photographs.