In the realm of State-pride iconography, there can be few humbler figures than South Australia's Stobie pole. To those of us living outside The Festival State, that's a power pole or perhaps telegraph pole. Native crow-eaters are often unaware that those tall things by the roadside aren't called Stobie poles anywhere else; in their defence, the distinctive name belongs to a distinctive artefact, one that is ubiquitous within the state's borders but near-absent beyond.
The existence of both name and artefact is an accident of history and geography. The history part is the roll-out of electricity infrastructure across the state in the early 20th century, and the geography part is the fact that South Australia is almost entirely desert and scrub. The two met in a chronic shortage of tall, sturdy trees with which to make things to keep power lines off the ground. Enter James Cyril Stobie (1895-1953), engineer. In 1924, he patented his eponymous pole: two steel rails bolted together and filled with concrete. The first poles of his design were erected in South Terrace, Adelaide, in the same year. The real payoff for Stobie was in regional construction: timber had to be transported on demand, but cement was easily available and old railway materials lay all over the state. Economies of scale, plus the durability of Stobie's fireproof, rotproof, termiteproof invention, immediately made wooden poles obsolete state-wide. Stobie poles (although no longer made with railway steel) are still the standard today. If you are super-fascinated by all this, you can even visit ETSA Utilities' Stobie Pole Manufacturing Plant in Angle Park. (One of the original South Terrace poles has been preserved there for your viewing pleasure... should any of the 700,000 others in the state not suffice.)
Stobie poles aren't, of course, found solely in South Australia - the design has cropped up here-and-there across Australia, and no doubt elsewhere as well - but their monopoly of the South Australian roadside has made them very much a part of the state's visual identity. BankSA recognized this fact in 2002 by honouring them in their annual Heritage Icons List.
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