Pinkerton Plains is a locality in the

Mid North The Mid North is a region of South Australia, north of the Adelaide Plains and south of the Far North and the outback. It is generally accepted to extend from Spencer Gulf east to the Barrier Highway, including the coastal plain, the southern ...

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 ...

Australia Australia, officially the Commonwealth of Australia, is a Sovereign state, sovereign country comprising the mainland of the Australia (continent), Australian continent, the island of Tasmania, and numerous List of islands of Australia, sma ...

. The locality is named for

William Pinkerton William Pinkerton (1810–1893) was an early English settler in South Australia. He became a major rancher and landowner. He was known for violent retaliation in 1848 against a band of Nauo Aboriginals on his land who had killed one of his shepher ...

, an early pastoralist active in the region in the 1840s. The land was originally the land of the

Kaurna The Kaurna people (, ; also Coorna, Kaura, Gaurna and other variations) are a group of Aboriginal people whose traditional lands include the Adelaide Plains of South Australia. They were known as the Adelaide tribe by the early settlers. Kaurn ...

people. It is unclear when the area first became known as 'Pinkerton Plains', but references to Pinkerton Plains begin to appear in newspaper reports and South Australian Government documents from about 1866, which is about when the area was first settled. The area was settled by a number of

Irish Catholic Irish Catholics are an ethnoreligious group native to Ireland whose members are both Catholic and Irish. They have a large diaspora, which includes over 36 million American citizens and over 14 million British citizens (a quarter of the British ...

settlers, and in 1866, the St Benedict's Catholic Church was established there. The Church closed in 1900, but its cemetery remains in use by farmers in the area. In about 1868, a railway station was erected at Pinkerton Plains on the railway that ran through the locality.Austlii.edu.au
/ref> Pinkerton Plains School was established in 1886 and remained open until 1967. Pinkerton Plains' most famous resident was probably Nicholas McCabe, a notable farmer who invented 'McCabe's Wheat Pickler', a pickling device that was used by farmers across South Australia for a period of time.

References

Towns in South Australia {{SouthAustralia-geo-stub