Until last month Ken and I had some unresolved issues about the Kincraig and Naracoorte Institutes. We knew that the Kincraig Institute began in 1864 and in 1909 its ‘merging’ with the Naracoorte Institute was reported in several newspapers and an SA Institutes document.
Kincraig and Naracoorte were adjacent towns until the towns amalgamated in 1869 to become Naracoorte. Kincraig Institute, however, kept its name for another forty years until ‘the merging’ of the two Institutes in 1909.
We accepted that there were two separate institutes up to 1909 having followed newspaper reports of the ‘Kincraig Institute’ and also of the ‘Naracoorte Institute’. So we created two narratives for these Institutes. We had a photograph of the impressive Kincraig Institute building (above) that opened in 1876 and even of its first wooden building erected in 1866. We didn’t have a photo of a Naracoorte Institute building despite many events reported as held in an Institute of that name.
We should have become suspicious about the existence of a Naracoorte Institute when the record of the required returns from affiliated institutes from 1859 to 1907 revealed a continuing record of the Kincraig Institute but no record of a Naracoorte Institute. But many institutes began without affiliating with the central government Institute so we continued to keep separate records for the two. There had to be because they had merged!
Our suspicions that there was always only one Institute was stirred when Murdoch and Parker’s History of Naracoorte (1974) stated that while Kincraig had a population of around 400 in 1865 there were only three families in Naracoorte. No way would three families maintain an Institute when there was already one thriving in the vicinity! Unfortunately we could not find a reference for this disparity in population numbers. Also the same book recorded an influx of railway workers that increased the Naracoorte population to 591 by 1876. Officially there was no Kincraig at that stage so 591 could have been the amalgamated population. It was just the central SA Institute (and the Kincraig Hotel and other businesses) that kept the Kincraig name.
To see if we could resolve the issue of the two Institutes Ken and I stayed overnight in Naracoorte last month and made an appointment to check out the history room in the Naracoorte Library – now adjacent to the original Kincraig Institute building.
At the Information Centre we ascertained which side of the Naracoorte Creek the two separate towns had been. A drive around the town and a walk along the creek showed us that the Kincraig side of the creek (the southern side) was more conducive to a long-term settlement. The Naracoorte side had been the government’s original choice for locating the town while Kincraig had begun as a private development.
Both the Kincraig Institute (now the Naracoorte Town Hall) and the Kincraig Hotel (still with that name) are on what was the Kincraig side of the creek. Our visit to the history room in the library provided another opportunity to check out the Murdoch and Parker history of the town but did not reveal the source of the 3 family/400 residents split nor the exact boundary between the two early towns or why the town is called Naracoorte instead of Kincraig.
We have concluded that ‘merged’ was just the wrong word used when Kincraig Institute was renamed Naracoorte Institute in 1909. We would need to check out a Lands Department record to determine where exactly the border between the two towns was and some government minutes to find out about the choice of the town’s name. But those are rabbit holes we don’t need to travel down.