Wilson, a former village in the Flinders Ranges, came and went under similar circumstances to many 19th century settlements in South Australia. These small towns were formed as community centres after South Australia's pastoral runs were resumed by the Government in the 1870s and subdivided into small farms. Drought, the inability of the land to sustain such intense agriculture and the arrival of the motor car all contributed to the demise of most of these settlements, the ruins of which are scattered across the South Australian countryside.

Where is it?: Wilson is 52 km northeast of Quorn.

The town of Wilson sprang up as a siding after the construction of the railway through the Flinders Ranges to Hawker. The Port Augusta-Quorn section became the first stage of a planned north-south transcontinental railway between Adelaide and Darwin that was first mooted by Melbourne businessman, J. Roberston in 1858. Twenty years later, South Australia finally began building its 3 feet 6 inch gauge Great Northern Railway. Starting in Port Augusta it was expected to reach Darwin within a short time. Crossing the western plains via Hawker, Beltana and Farina, it reached Marree in 1883. It was extended to reach Oodnadatta in 1891. When the Commonwealth Government took control in 1926 it extended the line from Oodnadatta to Alice Springs and from Pine Creek to Birdum. The Ghan name originated in Quorn in 1923 when the Great Northern Express was dubbed The Afghan Express by railwaymen in memory of the Afghan camel drivers who were the main carriers through the area before the railway was built. During the Second World War, Larrimah, nine kilometres north of Birdum, became the effective railhead. The thousand or so kilometres between Birdum and Alice Springs were never completed. Washaways in the north and the incapacity of the railway to handle expanding traffic saw a new standard-gauge railway constructed from Stirling North to Brachina. The railway through Wilson was closed to regular traffic in 1957 though by then the village had all but disappeared.

In 1880, when the village of Wilson came into existence, the railway had reached as far as Hawker. A station was built there and a town was surveyed around it. Blocks were sold and very soon a town consisting mainly of wood and iron buildings came into being. The Hawker Hotel/Motel, built as the Royal Hotel in 1882, the Post Office, which was built in the same year, and the railway station and goods shed built in 1880 are the most notable of the surviving buildings from Hawker's initial years. Wilson sprang up around a railway platform built on the Quorn to Hawker section of the line and catered for a number of families living in the area who farmed wheat. A hotel, a school, a store and a stationmaster's residence were built around 1880 to provide the essential services required by the people of Wilson.

Kayaka Homestead ruins

The land on which the township was built was once part of the mighty Kanyaka Station, first settled by a young Scotsman named Hugh Proby who moved cattle into the area after taking out three pastoral leases in July 1851. A year after establishing the station, Proby was drowned while trying to cross a swollen creek during a violent thunder storm. Irish born Alexander Grant and his youngest brother Frederick added Kanyaka to their own pastoral leases, but stocked it with sheep rather than cattle. Within five months Kanyaka claimed two more lives when the Grant's third brother James went missing with a companion. Their bodies were not discovered until two years later. The Grant brothers then focused their attention on another pastoral property, Coonatto Station, leaving Kanyaka to John Randall Phillips, Grant's first partner in the enterprise.

Like many pastoral stations in South Australia, the severe drought of 1863-1866 nearly crippled Kanyaka but it managed to survive until the early 1870s when the South Australian Government resumed many pastoral leases, including Kanyaka, and subdivided them for more intensive farming. Kanyaka Homestead was abandoned and is today a crumbling ruin (right). Deceived by its blue waterholes, carpets of wildflowers in the Spring and green eucalyptus foliage contrasting against the backdrop of the purple Elder Range, the Government deemed the former pastoral run suitable for wheat farming, having forgotten or ignored the ravages of drought a decade earlier.

By 1880, all the former Kanyaka Station land in the area between Quorn and Hawker was occupied by wheat farmers whose yields were initially seen as some of the finest wheat grown in Australia. Wilson's first year was also the first in a decade of drought and it was not until 1890 that good rains fell. By then, many of the farmers around Wilson had walked off their properties, broken by loneliness, drought and their failure to sustain a living from their 400 to 600 acre farms. Even after the drought had broken, the dwindling community struggled to support the businesses and services which formed the nucleus of the village.


With the arrival of the motor vehicle in the early 1900s, settlements like Wilson that were already battling to survive lost the reason for their existence. The major towns in the region, which in the case of Wilson, was Hawker, were now only 10 or 15 minutes' drive away, rather than a few hours' walk each way, and offered a far greater range of products and services than a local store could offer. The townsfolk and the remaining farmers sold up and the land in the area reverted back to being just a few large landholdings as it had been back in the Kanyaka days. Two thirds of the area originally farmed here has reverted back to being semi-arid grazing country. The last to leave was the stationmaster who had already been gone for a few decades when the railway line closed in 1957.

All that remains today of the village are the stone walls of the stationmaster's cottage beside the Quorn to Hawker Road, numerous ruins in the bush on the other side of the road which indicate how substantial a settlement Wilson once was, and a culvert over a small waterway, the only clue that a major railway line once passed by here. Not far away are the ruins of the home of Dave Evans who had migrated from Cornwall, England, and was among the rush of hopefuls who moved to Wilson during its early years, unaware of the heartache that would befall them.

His substantial four room sandstone cottage was built by Evans and occupied by him and his family until his wife died in 1915. From the ruins of the Evans cottage, one can see the remains of a handful of other old homesteads, many of which are little more than a heap of rubble, their location identified from the road by a few trees where there would normally be none. A number of burial sites are situated in a cemetery in sandhills situated along the old Wilson to Cradock road about three kilometres from the townsite ruins.