Homonym headache: Is Adelaide’s famous Windy Point actually ... Windy Point?

It’s one of our city's best-known vantage points, but now there’s evidence we’ve been pronouncing Windy Point incorrectly for generations.

It’s long been the go-to spot for Adelaideans to gaze out over the twinkling lights of the city – or into the sparkling eyes of a loved one – but it turns out we might have been saying Windy Point wrong all this time.

Mitcham Council has been compiling a history of the popular lookout for a series of interpretative signs that have been erected as part of a revamp of the area, and several elderly residents interviewed for the project mentioned that as children they knew it as Windy Point.

As in Wine-dee Point. Which makes sense as the road leading to the bluff is particularly winding. But given that it is a bluff on the edge of the Adelaide Foothills it’s also quite windy at times. Confused yet?

“We can’t say categorically, but there is certainly speculation that it could have been pronounced that way,” Mitcham Councillor Lindy Taeuber said.

“When researching the information for the signs there were discussions with the National Trust and a range of historians and elderly people, and some of those people said that they had always known it as Windy (Wine-dee) Point, and that it had morphed over the years into Windy (Win-dee) Point.”

Either way, it’s like the current pronunciation is too embedded to change.

Belair Road below Windy Point, 1910. Picture:The Mitcham Local History Collection

The area was established as a reserve in 1930 but has been a popular tourist destination since the 1800s.

George Marshall built a shop in a tent to sell refreshments to visitors in 1928, and a camera obscura and even a dance floor were built in the 1930s.

By the 1940s it wasn’t unusual to have up to 500 visitors in an evening, with police patrols occasionally called in to manage the traffic.