Dry Creek or Dry Creek Drain is a seasonal stream in

South Australia South Australia (commonly abbreviated as SA) is a state in the southern central part of Australia. It covers some of the most arid parts of the country. With a total land area of , it is the fourth-largest of Australia's states and territories ...

Whitworth (1866) p. 69 which passes through the

Adelaide Adelaide ( ) is the capital city of South Australia, the state's largest city and the fifth-most populous city in Australia. "Adelaide" may refer to either Greater Adelaide (including the Adelaide Hills) or the Adelaide city centre. The dem ...

suburbs of

Modbury Modbury is a large village, ecclesiastical parish, civil parish and former manor situated in the South Hams district of the county of Devon in England. Today due to its large size it is generally referred to as a "town" although the parish co ...

, Walkley Heights and Pooraka. The nearby suburb of Dry Creek and

Dry Creek railway station Dry Creek railway station is located on the Gawler line. Situated in the inner northern Adelaide suburb of Dry Creek, it is from Adelaide station. History First opened in 1856, the station was rebuilt in 1982 and a bogie exchange facili ...

are named after the stream.

Description

In season Dry Creek flows from its source near Yatala Vale in the

Mount Lofty Ranges The Mount Lofty Ranges are a range of mountains in the Australian state of South Australia which for a small part of its length borders the east of Adelaide. The part of the range in the vicinity of Adelaide is called the Adelaide Hills and ...

to the

Barker Inlet The Barker Inlet is a tidal inlet of the Gulf St Vincent in Adelaide, South Australia, named after Captain Collet Barker who first sighted it in 1831. It contains one of the southernmost mangrove forests in the world, a dolphin sanctuary, seagra ...

of the

Gulf St Vincent Gulf St Vincent, sometimes referred to as St Vincent Gulf, St Vincent's Gulf or Gulf of St Vincent, is the eastern of two large inlets of water on the southern coast of Australia, in the state of South Australia, the other being the larger Sp ...

via a manufactured drain near

Globe Derby Park A globe is a spherical model of Earth, of some other celestial body, or of the celestial sphere. Globes serve purposes similar to maps, but unlike maps, they do not distort the surface that they portray except to scale it down. A model globe ...

. The flooded state of the plain either side of Dry Creek after heavy rain is presumed to be the source of the local place name 'Yatala' (as in

Hundred of Yatala The Hundred of Yatala is a cadastral unit of hundred in South Australia covering much of the Adelaide metropolitan area north of the River Torrens. It is one of the eleven hundreds of the County of Adelaide stretching from the Torrens in the sout ...

and Yatala Vale). The name is likely derived from the indigenous word 'yertalla', which means "water running by the side of a river". Dry Creek is mostly dry in summer and flows through a deep

gully A gully is a landform created by running water, mass movement, or commonly a combination of both eroding sharply into soil or other relatively erodible material, typically on a hillside or in river floodplains or terraces. Gullies resemble lar ...

at the rear of the prison with outcrops of exposed

pre-Cambrian The Precambrian (or Pre-Cambrian, sometimes abbreviated pꞒ, or Cryptozoic) is the earliest part of Earth's history, set before the current Phanerozoic Eon. The Precambrian is so named because it preceded the Cambrian, the first period of the ...

rocks that were extensively

quarried A quarry is a type of open-pit mining, open-pit mine in which dimension stone, rock (geology), rock, construction aggregate, riprap, sand, gravel, or slate is excavated from the ground. The operation of quarries is regulated in some juri ...

as part of prison activity.Lewis (1985) pp. 174–175

Yatala Labour Prison Yatala Labour Prison is a high-security men's prison located in the north-eastern part of the northern Adelaide suburb Northfield, South Australia. It was built in 1854 to enable prisoners to work at Dry Creek, quarrying rock for roads and con ...

was established in the 1854 next to Dry Creek and was alternately known at the time as the ''Dry Creek Prison'' or the ''Stockade''. The rock from the quarry was transported to Adelaide via the Stockade railway station (opened in 1857; closed 1961), with the area around the station and quarry being since redeveloped as the Stockade Botanical Park. A 14km long walkway, known as Dry Creek River Trail, runs along the creek in the Dry Creek Reserve. Dry Creek south bank, Walkley Heights

Notes

References

* * {{Rivers of South Australia Rivers of Adelaide