Inneston - The name was applied to a post office on Yorke Peninsula, 10 km North-West of Stenhouse Bay, while an article titled ‘Founding a New Town’, in 1927, said that ‘it was named, with due ceremony, after its founder, Mr W.R.D. Innes’, a director of the Peninsula Plaster Company that took up leases for the harvesting of gypsum, north of Cape Spencer.

Its former name was ‘Cape Spencer’ and its school, opened under that name in 1919, was changed to Inneston in 1928; it closed in 1950.
In October 1927 it was said that ‘Inneston did not exist as a town until last Sunday’:

It did not grow overnight, but the hundred inhabitants had been so busy bringing it into existence during the last ten years that nobody had time to think of describing it as other than ‘the camp at Cape Spencer’.

Actually the camp consists of a number of stone houses and a manufacturing plant working 24 hours daily converting crude gypsum into plaster of Paris. Members of the party decided that the town should have a name, and it was named with due care after its founder (Mr W.R.D. Innes) ... The men employed at Inneston are contented. They are provided with home rent free

Photographs are in the Chronicle, 11 October 1924, page 40.
A contemporary newspaper report said that ‘visitors to Cape Spencer were comparatively few’:

But it is surprising that so little is known about this model settlement - an industrial organisation that knows no labour disputes, where the masters and men mingle as equals, where foremen are unknown, where a fair task is allotted to every man and where the principal of a fair deal is put into practice... Cooperation has brought satisfaction.

Although the whole settlement is controlled by the promoters, no restrictions are placed in the way of other business people and traders who may desire to enter. They have not come. The men belong to the union. Masters and men live together in complete harmony, ministering to each other’s welfare - an inspiring example to other industrial organisations, a monument to the enterprise and humanitarianism of the founder, and a credit to Australia.

In the early days of the settlement the workers were housed under canvas but, as the company flourished, it built substantial stone houses and gave them to the married men, rent free, while bachelors were supplied with quarters for board and lodging at nominal rates. A community hall was erected, fitted with a piano and gramophone, and a post office and school built at company expense. By 1927, there were 80 men on the payroll and, at that time, few communities in South Australia could match the number of motor cars per head of population.

The residents lived well; ‘only the best quality goods [were] demanded and the store [sold] up to six hundred- weight [sic] of chocolates per month.’ Although the settlement was within 80 kilometres of larger peninsula towns it was isolated except by sea communication. To ease this situation the company established its own mail, telegraph and postal services.

Mr Innes constructed nine miles of telephone line and, later, handed it over to the Post and Telegraph Department only to be advised that his company was to be charged for using it and was asked to ‘investigate the most trifling irregularity in the service’ conducted by company clerks. The supply of bread and meat was unsatisfactory, so one of the workers was appointed to the position of both baker and butcher. Bread was made at set intervals and cattle obtained from the company’s herd of some 200 beasts and killed three times a week; he sold his produce over the shop counter, ran his own motor car and had his ‘rooms fitted with an elaborate wireless set and other devices.’

The settlement had its own general store, fully stocked, where items were sold at reasonable prices, and a chemist, while sporting enthusiasts were provided with a cricket and football oval, croquet ground and golf links. Electricity was provided to all houses and commercial buildings, an agency for two banks was conducted by company clerks while, in the mid-1920s, arable land within the leasehold was planted with barley; thus, ‘all of the 14,000 acres [sic - other reports state 200 acres as the total holding] held in the lease [was] being tested for its full productivity.’