Some history about Elliston ..........

Elliston is a delightful seaside town located 169 km northwest of Port Lincoln and 641 km west of Adelaide via the Princes and Eyre Highways.

Set between rolling and pleasant sheep and wheat country and some of the most interesting and dramatic coastline on the Eyre Peninsula. The town and area is rich in historical interest with many monuments and remains of infrastructure placed by the pioneer graziers. Elliston is renown for being a pleasant town to enjoy various activities including fishing, swimming, surfing and wind surfing, snorkelling, diving, walking along the rugged sandstone cliffs and town historical mural to jetty trail.

Elliston is one of the very few towns in Australia to boast that it has been named after a writer. Originally known as Ellie's Town, it was named after the writer and teacher Ellen Liston who was born in England in 1838 and emigrated to South Australia in 1850.

She became a governess and was working on the property owned by John Hamp near the present town when Governor Sir William Francis Drummond Jervois decided to name the town after her. John Hamps monument marking his death can be found at Lake Newland Conservation Park.

The honour was a combination of the wide spread respect and admiration she enjoyed in the area and Jervois' penchant for naming towns after friends and family. Ellie's Town was officially gazetted in 1878.

Ellen Liston subsequently moved from the area and over the next seven years she gained a slight reputation as a writer of verse, novels and short stories. Stories by Ellen Liston was published in 1936. She died at Marrabel in 1885.

The area had been settled as early as the 1840s and by 1848, so local legend has it, the port had become known as Waterloo Bay after some settlers, in a brutal act of reprisal, rounded up a large number of local Aborigines and drove them to a cliff where they were confronted with either jumping to their death or being shot. Some macabre European wit decided that the Aborigines had met their Waterloo.

The town's economy was given a boost in the mid-1960s when a Sydney company brought Chinese, Tahitian and Malay divers to the region to exploit the abalone beds which lay offshore.