Qualla: Adelaide Gaol

Adelaide Gaol: Introduction

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Peripitus, CC BY-SA 4.0. Forty-four men and one woman went to the gallows inside these walls, and the colony that built the place nearly went bankrupt doing it. Adelaide Gaol opened in 1841 as the first permanent prison in South Australia, a bluestone fortress in the parklands beside the River Torrens. Its cost overran so badly that the blowout helped trigger a statewide depression and bankrupted the builders. For the next century and a half, until it closed in 1988, roughly 300,000 people passed through its gates. The gaol still stands today, one of the two oldest buildings in the state, its yards open to anyone willing to walk where the condemned once spent their final nights.

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Image: Peripitus | CC BY-SA 4.0

Adelaide Gaol: The Prison That Broke the Colony

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit badjonni from Adelaide, Australia, CC BY-SA 2.0. George Strickland Kingston designed the gaol in 1840 on the model of London's Pentonville, planning for 140 prisoners and four ornate turrets. Then Governor George Gawler began changing the plans. He halved the building, then added a gaoler's house, two more towers, and costlier ...

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Image: badjonni from Adelaide, Australia | CC BY-SA 2.0

Adelaide Gaol: Inside the Circle

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Marcus Wong Wongm, CC BY-SA 3.0. The gaol was built on a radial plan, every cellblock and exercise yard reached from a single hub the staff called The Circle, named because wagons delivering supplies or prisoners had to turn a full loop to leave. Days followed a rigid clock. Breakfast came to the cell at seven, ...

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Image: Marcus Wong Wongm | CC BY-SA 3.0

Adelaide Gaol: The Condemned Cells

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ashton 29, CC BY-SA 4.0. In Yard Four, the last three cells facing the wall were the condemned cells, where men under sentence of death spent their final night. Forty-five people were executed at Adelaide Gaol over its working life. Among them was Elizabeth Woolcock, hanged in December 1873 for poisoning...

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Image: Ashton 29 | CC BY-SA 4.0

Adelaide Gaol: What the Floorboards Hid

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit James ADL, CC BY-SA 4.0. In 2007 a volunteer fell through rotting floorboards in an old tea room, and beneath them lay a buried history no one expected. A two-year archaeological dig uncovered five distinct layers of occupation. The deepest, from before 1836, held stone tools left by the Kaurna people wh...

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Image: James ADL | CC BY-SA 4.0

Adelaide Gaol: Mercy in the Walls

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit User:Orderinchaos, CC BY-SA 3.0. The gaol was never only a place of punishment. From 1867, Sister Mary MacKillop, later canonised as Australia's first saint, regularly visited to tend both male and female prisoners alongside her order. More than a century later, the Dame Roma Mitchell Gardens still grow inside t...

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Image: User:Orderinchaos | CC BY-SA 3.0