Lockleys, South Australia

Lockleys is an inner western suburb of Adelaide, in the City of West Torrens.

Australian Bureau of Statistics data from May 2021 revealed that Adelaide's western suburbs had the lowest unemployment rate in South Australia.

The area was inhabited by the Kaurna people before the British colonisation of South Australia.

The area was subject to flooding by the River Torrens, which originally ran into an area named "The Reedbeds" in the upper reaches of the Port River. In the 1930s the Torrens Channel, also named Breakout Creek, was cut through the coastal dunes to Gulf St Vincent, to drain the wetlands and eliminate the flooding. A large part of Lockleys is within a bend of the River Torrens.

Hence, prior to subdivision, the area was renowned for its rich soil, market gardens and greenhouses. The name comes from a property (section 145) owned by Charles Brown Fisher, then Edward Meade Bagot and Gabriel Bennett, who built a course there for amateur horse racing. The property was rented by trainers J. Eden Savill and C. Leslie Macdonald for their Lockleys Stables where many good racehorses were prepared.

The area was divided for housing. However, the Hank family lived on Torrens Avenue, Lockleys and had established 11 acres of market garden there after world war I. The Hank brothers (Ray, Bill and Bob) all attended the Lockleys Primary (now called the Brooklyn Park Primary) School in Brooklyn Park and would all become footballers for the West Torrens Football Club in the SANFL. Bob Hank would go on to become an AFL Hall of Fame inductee, winning the Magarey Medal in both 1946 and 1947 and winning a record 9 league best and fairest awards for his club. A pavilion in the eastern grandstand at Adelaide Oval is named the Bob Hank Pavilion and the grandstand at Thebarton Oval is named the Hank Brothers Stand after these Australian Football legends. Bob Hank also famously clean bowled Sir Donald Bradman in a District Cricket final in March 1947 whilst playing for the West Torrens Cricket Club against Bradman's Kensington Cricket Club.

The former John Martin's department store had a bulk warehouse on Pierson Street, which was also a storage location for the floats used in the company's annual Christmas Pageant.^[when?] The warehouse was converted by EDS for a data and call centre, which opened in 1996, and later owned by the Maras Group and operated by Westpac as a mortgage processing centre. In September 2021 a development application was announced for rezoning the call centre and adjacent child care centre, to allow a medium density residential development to be built on the site.

The Windsor Theatre, located at 362 Henley Beach Road, was originally built as a RSL hall in March 1925, with the construction cost of £3,800 covered by community fund-raising, with much of it donated by John Mellor. It was called the Lockleys Memorial Hall. On 10 October in the same year, the hall was used by Lyric Theatres Ltd to screen a film, and soon became a successful movie theatre. At some point it was named the Odeon Star (indicating ownership by D. Clifford Theatres).