Whyalla is South Australia's second largest city and once a major industrial force with an iron ore smelter, steel rolling mill and shipyard. It is a large, sad sort of place that has spent many years struggling for survival, reddened, like a bruised eye, by the iron ore which is blown over the city from the steelworks. Driven by the local steel and petroleum industries, it is the largest provincial city in South Australia.

Where is it?: Eyre Peninsula. 395 km north west of Adelaide; 76 km south of Port Augusta, on the east coast of Eyre Peninsula

HMAS Whyalla

Whyalla Maritime Museum
Whyalla Maritime Museum is an ideal starting point for any visit to Whyalla. The museum has an excellent and comprehensive display, combines a history of local shipping (through models, photographs and audio visual displays) with a guided tour of the 650 tonne corvette HMAS Whyalla (the first ship built at Whyalla) and a huge model railway display.

Of all the ships built in Whyalla, the 650 tonne corvette HMAS Whyalla, the first ship completed at the shipyard, has become the most famous. It now stands like some kind of strange vessel which has lost its way glaring down over the Lincoln Highway at the northern entrance to the city.

Hummock Hill: the ideal place to get an overall perspective of the city. It looks over BHP's Pellet Plant to the north, across the marina to the east, down the coast to the south and across the city centre to the west. It was used as an observation post during World War II and the gun emplacements are still standing. On the southern slope of Hummock Hill, near the beach, are the Ada Ryan Gardens. This pleasant green park, complete with a duck pond and some native fauna, is a cool retreat from the hot dryness (the town boast 301 sunny days and only 268mm annual rainfall) of the town.

Whyalla shipbuilding yard, 1970

Between 1941-78 sixty-three ships were built at the Whyalla shipyard. At its peak Whyalla was the biggest shipbuilding port in Australia with a capacity to build ships up to 83 000 tonnes. The largest ship ever built in Australia, a bulk carrier called the Clutha Capricorn, was launched from the Whyalla shipyards in 1972. The most memorable was the ore carrier, MV Lake Illawarra, which collided with the Tasman Bridge in Hobart, Tasmania, on 5th January 1975, causing the deaths of 12 people. The ship and the debris pile were deemed unsafe to move, and remain at the bottom of the Derwent estuary.

Port Lowly Lighthouse: Two kilometres beyond the Santos Plant is the Port Lowly Lighthouse which dates from 1883. It was originally built in masonry and extended in concrete. The original lantern is still in place. The lighthouse was manned until 1973 (the two lighthouse keeper's cottages are nearby) but is now fully automatic.

About Whyalla
The first European to visit the site of modern day Whyalla was Matthew Flinders. On 9 March 1802 Flinders sailed along the coast and named Hummock Hill, which now is the site of the city's lookout - a marvellous location which affords 360�� views across the city and steelworks as well as across Spencer Gulf and down the coast. Thirty eight years later Edward John Eyre, on one of his many expeditions to the peninsula which now bears his name, passed near the present site of Whyalla. However it wasn't until 1862 that the first pastoral lease - appropriately called Mount Hummock - was taken up in the area.

In 1880 iron ore leases were taken out at Iron Knob and by 1886 BHP had control of the leases with the plan to transport the ore across the Spencer Gulf to be used as a flux at Port Pirie where the silver, lead and zinc from Broken Hill was being smelted. In 1901 a privately owned railway was built between Iron Knob and Hummock Hill. It replaced the bullock drays which had been used to bring the iron ore to the coast.

Whyyalla was founded as Hummock's Hill in 1901 by the Broken Hill Proprietary Company (BHP) as the end of a tramway bringing iron ore from the Middleback Ranges to be used in the lead smelters at Port Pirie as flux. A jetty was built to transfer the ore. The settlement, consisting of small cottages and tents clustered around the base of the hill, developed into South Australia's third most populous city after Adelaide and Mt Gambier, and became Australia's biggest company town.

On 16 April 1920 the town was proclaimed as Whyalla. The ore conveyor on the jetty was improved and ore began to be shipped to the newly built Newcastle, New South Wales steelworks. The town grew slowly until 1938.

A blast furnace and harbour were built, and then in 1939 a shipyard to provide ships for the Royal Australian Navy. The population began rising dramatically and many new facilities, including a hospital and abbatoirs, were built.

By 1943 the population was more than 5,000. After the war, the shipyard began producing commercial ships. In 1958 the Company decided to build an integrated steelworks at Whyalla. They were completed in 1965. In the following year salt began to be harvested and coke ovens were built. The population grew extremely rapidly.

Abandoned hotel in the city centre, 2008

In 1970 the city adopted full local government status. Fierce competition from Japanese ship builders resulted in the closing of the shipyards in 1978, which were at the time the largest in Australia. From a peak population of 33,000 in 1976 the population dropped rapidly. A decline in the BHP iron and steel industry since 1981 also impacted employment.

From 2004 northern South Australia enjoyed a mining boom and Whyalla found itself well placed to benefit from new ventures, being situated on the edge of the Gawler Craton. The city experienced an economic upturn with the population slowly increasing and the unemployment rate falling to a more typical level.