Montefiore Hill

Montefiore Hill stands between the city of Adelaide and North Adelaide. A statue of Colonel William Light, South Australia's first surveyor general, stands on the Hill looking towards the city. The area is known as Light's Vision. Light has been generally acknowledged to have selected the site for Adelaide and drawn the city plan, although some believe his deputy Charles Strickland Kingston should receive the credit for this. Light and his surveying team were under severe time constraints to select a site for South Australia's capital and to survey it. The area that is now Adelaide was chosen because its fertile plains were near the Port River and Light thought that the Mount Lofty Ranges would attract rain. In his account of his surveys, Light wrote:

'The reasons that led me to fix Adelaide where it is I do not expect to be generally understood or calmly judged of at present. My enemies, however, by disputing their validity in every particular, have done me the good service of fixing the whole of the responsibility upon me. I am perfectly willing to bear it; and I leave it to posterity, and not to them, to decide whether I am entitled to praise or to blame.'

The statue of Light was originally unveiled in Victoria Square in 1906 but was moved to Montefiore Hill in 1938. Montefiore Hill was named after the merchant, Jacob Montefiore, one of the ten commissioners of the colony of South Australia.