Kimba Agricultural, Horticultural & Floricultural Society

Kimba is preparing to celebrate its 100th agricultural show, although only 97 have actually taken place. Since the Kimba Agricultural, Horticultural & Floricultural Society began holding its show in 1921, drought, war, and the realities of life in one of South Australia’s driest farming districts have occasionally interrupted the annual tradition.

The show grew from a town built around wheat. When Kimba’s first crops were harvested in 1908, farmers hauled their grain 76 kilometres south to the port at Cowell by bullock dray. The arrival of the narrow-gauge railway to Port Lincoln in 1913 encouraged further settlement, and Kimba was officially proclaimed a township two years later.

For more than a century, the show has brought the district together to exhibit the things that keep an agricultural community running: livestock, produce, flowers, cooking, crafts, machinery, and the considerable competitive energy of rural neighbours. Its survival has turned the event into more than a yearly fair. It is a running record of how Kimba has endured and adapted.

That history has also spilled beyond the showgrounds. As part of the community-led Igniting Kimba arts program, local agricultural scenes were revived in murals and celebrated through events such as Fashions of the Era, which revisited clothing from across the show’s first century.

The program’s largest canvas was considerably harder to hang. In 2017, Melbourne artist Cam Scale covered Kimba’s towering Viterra grain silos with a young girl standing in a wheat field, representing the region’s next generation. The mural took 26 days and roughly 200 litres of paint to complete, transforming the machinery of Kimba’s agricultural past into a monument to its future.