St Matthew's Anglican Church (Poonindie)

St Matthew's Church at Poonindie

North of Port Lincoln, the small stone St Matthew's Anglican Church stands as the most visible remnant of the Poonindie Mission, established in 1850 as a farming community for Aboriginal people removed from the Adelaide area and beyond. The building was raised in 1854–55 — originally intended as a school room — and held its first service in 1855, conducted by the mission's founder, Archdeacon Matthew Hale.

The mission was, for a time, held up as a model settlement, but its history is layered and sobering — a place of displacement, hard work, disease and eventual closure in the 1890s, with the land later thrown open to European farmers. When the mission wound up, St Matthew's and a small parcel of land remained with the Anglican Church, and the church of local stone has survived as a quiet, dignified marker of that story.

It is a place to pause and reflect rather than a busy attraction, and it rewards visitors who take time to read its history.