One Tree Hill
Postcode: 5114
One Tree Hill is a town 22 km north of Adelaide, South Australia. It is located in the City of Playford local government area.
The Kaurna people (pronounced “Garner” or “Gowna”) people were the Indigenous inhabitants of the Adelaide region, numbering approximately 650 in 1842. The Peramangk people lived further inland, and also visited the area now known as One Tree Hill.
They visited the area chiefly in the warmer parts of the year as the area was cooler and better watered than the plains. The hills at this time were well wooded with tree species that had been in the area for around 6000 years. Along the rivers and creeks and wide valleys could be found tall, heavy eucalypts, many of which had wide, hollowed bases large enough for the Aboriginals to use as shelters. There were many such shelter trees in use by the Kaurna and Peramangk as late as the 1840s, and evidence exists that they hunted and gathered in the woodlands and grasslands for many generations prior to European settlement. Unfortunately, the community declined soon after European settlement, and most of what we know about them today comes from the few artifacts and sparse archaeological evidence that they left behind.
The name comes from a single large tree (burnt down in 1890) that was three kilometres west of the town near the original One Tree Hill inn.