Standing before the austere modernist clock tower of Elizabeth, South Australia, Marilyn Baker, several times mayor of the city and one of its greatest champions, admonished me for the third time:

“You will write good things about us, won’t you?”

We’d spent the afternoon round and about the place, once a separate new town in its own right, now a part of northern Adelaide. We’d driven Elizabeth’s elegantly curved, eucalypt-attended roads, passed the now-shuttered Holden plant in all its vastness, inspected the bold, sculptured fountain — which had once stood at the very centre of town and was moved to the edge of the shopping mall car park — and poked around a few remaining “Elizabeth homes”; neat, vaguely stylish modernist homes built when the place was started in the 1950s.

“Journalists come up here to write the worst things.”

Still I had not been able to convince her, that I wasn’t here to do a hatchet job. Elizabeth was built as part of South Australia’s rapid industrialisation in the 1950s. Since the 1990s it has been a resource for journalists looking for stories of dole rorting, weird sex crimes or urban disaster in general.

“Not me,” I said. “I’m a believer.” It’s true too. I’d come to Elizabeth to see the Australia we never got — a place where planning, economy and administration work together to create a new society, as a population swells.

But the planned roads of Elizabeth were those not taken. After the city was planned, laid out and booming, Australia never attempted one like it again. Even by the 1970s, it was being pointed to as a way not to do urban development; by the ’80s it was a byword for bad planning — so much so that no one really questioned the judgement.

The question was, why? For 70 years we have been ramrodding the population, growing by close to 500% over the span of one long lifetime. Does it not make sense that we would build whole new cities to accommodate them? What did we do instead?

***

Elizabeth city centre today

“They said they were going to pull down the clock tower. I said I’ll be on top of it when you do. So they didn’t.”

On an early brochure, the Elizabeth clock tower stands, a tall flat carton with a plain pyramid point. It is all boldness and futurity, looming over a vast plaza of happy 1950s people, in their Sunday best. Not a shop can be seen.

The place looks clean, sleek, on the model of English “New Towns”, hopeful humanoid sculptures and all. Sleek — and a little dull. “Wasn’t it, uh, boring?” I asked Dave, a retired local butcher, town councillor, and a resident since childhood. “Ooooooooh nooooooo,” he says in his extant Northern accent — Elizabeth was designed in part to draw British immigrants — “it was every exciting. The pubs were groaning, there was a lot of music.” That’s true enough. The SA pub rock scene there produced Cold Chisel and the Angels, so …

“Surely,” I say to Marilyn, “it was tough on women, housewives? People were settling a red-dirt plain. Your mum must have had some hard times.”

“Oh no, she loved it in the end!” said Marilyn.

In the end, hmmm. By the 1970s and 1980s, the modest life it offered was starting to pall. Jimmy Barnes, its most famous son, said it was “a great place when you were young … football fields everywhere, but … around 13 or 14, it gets pretty rugged … lots of gangs, lots of street fights”.

The government began to use it purely as a welfare agency, and Elizabeth and nearby Salisbury became areas of high unemployment — and then of “problem families” moved out of other estates. The city’s reputation plummeted.

That sealed its fate. In the mid-1990s, the city centre was sold off by a cash-strapped state government, and in 1997, the municipality was folded into a mega-area, Playford. The town hall was rehoused in a postmodern shed to one side, and the centre was sold off for shopping mall development. That’s when Marilyn made her threat to occupy the clock tower.

In the council chambers, she shows me eight square metal bas-reliefs in a pattern on the walls.

“These were the door handles in the old centre. They wanted to just throw them out.” A sort of nihilism had taken over, a positive desire to trash the naïvete of earlier times. The new city centre of Elizabeth is the food court of the mall.

Naïve as it may have been, having a Henry Moore-esque fountain and figures reaching for the stars at the centre of your city, seems more aspirational than car parking for the Woolies.

We killed Elizabeth as a possibility, and then we pointed to it as an example that planning, state investment and conscious social development do not work.

Not the place’s fault. We sacrificed aspiration and audacity to endless subdivision, surrendered to sprawl. “Remember you promised to write good things!” my guide said, as she dropped me at the Woolies. I did my best, Marilyn. By the waters of Elizabeth fountain, I shed a tear for ambition sold short, what we might have been.