Monarto SA, megopolis to zoo...

Monarto Zoo, an open‑range zoo about an hour south‑east of Adelaide, is often described as “bigger than all the zoos in Australia combined”. That’s an exaggeration, though the truth is still impressive. Covering about 1,500 ha, it’s vastly larger than any other single zoo in the country, roughly half the combined area of Australia’s other major open‑range and wildlife parks. The Lightroom photomap shows how comprehensive my photographic coverage was of the Zoo area — and how limited its scope for expansion now is.

Monarto Safari Park feels more like a working landscape than a zoo. It’s a sweep of mallee* country divided into vast paddocks, service corridors and visitor trails. The public sees open plains with giraffes on the horizon, but the park is organised into distinct precincts: the great Wild Africa savannah at its centre, a carnivore zone for lions and hyenas, Asian grasslands for bison and horses, and quieter breeding paddocks tucked behind treed ridgelines. Boundaries are marked by kilometres of electric fencing and double‑gated corridors, letting keepers move safely between herds. Husbandry here resembles pastoral management more than traditional zoo keeping — herds are split into breeding and non‑breeding groups, rotated between public paddocks and private yards, and guided by remote gates rather than physical handling.

Visitors experience the park in several ways. Walking trails (12 km) thread through mallee scrub to viewing platforms overlooking the big paddocks, giving the sense of a bushwalk rather than a zoo path. The Zulu bus loop carries visitors through the heart of the park, stopping at vantage points where giraffe, rhino and antelope often wander close. We joined private safaris and behind‑the‑scenes tours bundled with our accommodation, staying three nights and four days — more on that below.

Monarto runs on a large team, part of Zoos SA’s workforce of around 250. Their dedication is obvious. Keepers, veterinary staff and wildlife specialists form a major fraction of that total, supported by more than 500 volunteers who help with daily operations and visitor programs.

Although Monarto began as a government project, Zoos SA — which also runs Adelaide Zoo — is now an independent not‑for‑profit conservation charity. It receives some government support for capital works and conservation programs, but relies mainly on memberships, ticket sales, donations and ventures such as the new lodge. The result is a park that feels both expansive and carefully engineered: open‑range spectacle built on a quiet system of genetics, logistics and land management. The zoo participates in global breeding exchanges to maintain diversity, though transport costs remain a major constraint.

We learned most of this from excellent guides and filled in gaps later with what we like to think were astute questions to AI. We tried every visitor option — walking trails, Zulu and city buses (both anticlockwise with six hop‑on/hop‑off stops), and private safaris in open trucks with flexible routes. It’s worth getting off at bus stops, as some enclosures require short walks. Guides were knowledgeable and entertaining, though not always attuned to photographers’ needs, sometimes stopping in poor light. Even the city buses, driven by regular drivers, were surprisingly well‑informed when no guide was aboard. There’s a pecking order at Monarto, and not just among the animals: day‑trippers are limited to buses and trails, while overnighters enjoy safaris included with the Lodge. Monarto is vast — allow at least a night or two to cover it properly.

For all its size and careful design, Monarto is still a zoo, not the boundless landscapes these animals evolved for. The architects and keepers do what they can to mimic natural rhythms, but a creature pacing along a fence always makes you wonder — is it longing for freedom, or simply eyeing something tempting on the other side?

Herbivores...

The savannah is the great shared landscape of Monarto, where giraffes, eland, zebras, ostriches and nyala wander together with an ease that feels almost pastoral. A few species, like addax, Barbary sheep and oryx, are kept separate, but most of the plains animals coexist peacefully in these wide open paddocks. Przewalski’s horses are tucked away elsewhere, part of the broader open‑range collection. Nikolai Przewalski was a 19th‑century Russian explorer and naturalist. He led several expeditions into Central Asia — Mongolia, Tibet, Xinjiang — and documented a huge amount of wildlife and geography for the Russian Empire.

Carnivores

The carnivores live in more secure, self‑contained territories: lions, cheetahs, hyenas and painted dogs, each with their own domain. They’re occasionally rotated through one another’s spaces to keep life interesting and to give them new scents and challenges.

The Big Guys

The heavyweights of the park — elephants, rhinos, hippos and bison — each occupy their own substantial enclosures, with the new Asian elephant habitat being a standout. The bison feel like the odd ones out in this company, a North American presence among African and Asian giants, but they fit the open‑range landscape surprisingly well.

Chimpanzees

The chimpanzees are in a category of their own, with a sprawling outdoor area so dense with ropes, poles and climbing gear that photography becomes a bit of a puzzle. Their indoor space is rearranged daily to keep them mentally engaged and to stop them settling into predictable routines — a philosophy shaped in part by Jane Goodall’s long‑standing advocacy for enrichment, autonomy and social complexity in captive chimps. Her work underpins much of the modern approach you see here: environments that challenge, stimulate and respect the animals’ intelligence rather than simply containing it.

Jane Goodall’s influence extends globally, shaping how modern zoos and conservation centres think about chimpanzee welfare. Her advocacy for enrichment, choice, and social complexity helped push institutions toward environments that challenge the mind as much as they protect the body — the very philosophy behind Monarto’s constantly shifting indoor spaces and its sprawling, climb‑friendly outdoor habitat. And it’s easy to see why such care matters: chimpanzees share about 98.6 percent of our DNA, a reminder that their emotions, curiosity and social bonds are not distant echoes of our own but close reflections.

Monarto Miscellany...

Monarto is also home to odds and ends of the wildlife fraternity — meerkats in their diggings, wandering ostriches, visiting birds, emus and ducks that drift through, and even flowers and weeds that give the landscape more character. It’s a loose collection of creatures and plants that don’t sit neatly in our main categories, small moments that add texture to the bigger story.

Staying at Monarto...

Probably most visitors are day-trippers to Monarto Safari Park, but there is accommodation as well. The Monarto Safari Lodge, which we think only opened a few months prior to our visit, is a luxury glamping development overlooking the savannah, offering private safaris, exceptional service and the “wake up with wildlife” experience that open‑range parks worldwide now aspire to. Older more modest lodge facilities have been retired or repurposed. WE don't know where they were. There is a Monarto Safari Hotel which centres on a large resort style, medium-rise building, with views over the savannah. There is no camping inside the park itself; the land is too tightly managed for wildlife movement and fire control.

We stayed in tent #1 at the Safari Lodge. There are 20 altogether arranged either side of the mian building in a semi-circle all overlooking a waterhole in a corner of the Savannah precinct. From our balcony, we could see giraffes and zebra most commonly, and sometimes they wandered quite close. The tent was luxurious with a small sitting area facing outside, and a king-sized bed looking over that sitting area to outside. The tent was air-conditioned, and we had it set to "heating" all the time we were inside, so cool was the weather. At the back was a large walk in wardrobe and a tiny kitchenette. The bathroom was freezing, but then again we kept its door closed and the shutter glass window open so we could see the view from there. There is nothing to criticise about our tent other than underfloor heating in the bathroom may have helped, as would a light over the desk, which was in a gloomy corner of the spacious tent. Tent #1 was furthest from the main lodge building and faced south, so we could see the savannah in good light.

Staff told us that ours was the best tent (they probably tell everyone that!) and we believed it. In our three nights, we saw the Lodge go from busy (more than half full) to quiet (only 2 or 3 other couples). On the busy night, our dinner was described as a "feast" where all guests sat at one long table. The food was magnificent. On the other nights, we sat in couples as per a normal restaurant, and the standard fare was an eight course degustation menu (all fabulous, but too much!). We opted for a simple mean the last night, and the capable chefs were pleased to oblige.

The Failed Megapolis ...

Monarto is a fabulous zoo, but it has a fascinating history too. It sits on land that was originally acquired for one of Australia's most ambitious urban experiments: a brand-new city for 200,000 people. The project was widely described at the time as a futuristic megapolis, though the official term was a satellite city. It was planned, surveyed, named, and partially prepared — and then abandoned.

In the early 1970s, South Australia's Premier Don Dunstan launched plans for a completely new city — first called Murray, then Monarto. It was to house 200,000 residents, making it the first major new Australian city since Canberra. It was to be utopia - a "refreshed and natural place in the sun… shady, walkable, easy-to-live-in". Like Canberra, it would be built around a man-made lake, but with Mediterranean-influenced low-rise buildings, plazas, and abundant parkland. Quoting Real Commercial: "citizens would glide on monorails"! The centre would be a "honky-tonk" precinct with tent-like roofs made from cutting-edge lightweight materials. There was a fully developed urban plan with renderings, models, and promotional material, even a Government approved official emblem for the new city. To make the dream real, the SA Government acquired 16,000 hectares of farmland in a single sweep. Overnight, a quiet rural district became the site of Australia's most ambitious urban experiment. Wow!

The name "Monarto" itself comes from Queen Monarto, an elderly full-blood Aboriginal woman who lived in the district in the mid-1800s. She was renowned for her skill on the Murray River, navigating, catching crayfish, and even saving three people from drowning. The district has been called Hundred of Monarto since 1847, so its not a new name.

The Monarto plan collapsed within a few years after Adelaide’s growth slowed dramatically. The mid‑1970s recession undermined large‑scale public works, and the Government lost enthusiasm, especially when projected costs sky‑rocketed. Eventually, some land was transferred to Zoos SA, which saw an opportunity: the enormous, undeveloped mallee landscape was perfect for an open‑range zoo that became Monarto Zoo, rebranded as Monarto Safari Park in 2019. When the project collapsed, most of the land was sold back to farmers or returned to private ownership. Zoos SA received a small portion — about 1,500 hectares — for the open‑range zoo, later expanding into nearby Crown land but still occupying less than ten per cent of the original city footprint. Today, the wider Monarto region remains sparsely settled: a rail siding with grain silos, scattered rural properties, a few industrial and logistics sites along Old Princes Highway, and almost no residential township at all — a landscape that hints at the scale of the city that never came to be.

Photographer's Note...

This is the first time I have attempted a Photo Journal post of a zoo. The Photo Map image above reveals just how many photographs I took around the zoo. This volume exists because almost all animal shots are taken on what used to be called "motor drive", now called "burst" and other things. My Canon R7 will take up to 20 images per second! Now that digital photography has freed us from the limitations of precious film, I also work on the premise that if I take 100 shots, I might get one good one! It doesn't always work. In 4 days at Monarto, my camera recorded almost 1000 exposures. That's a modest rate, and it gets much higher when birds are involved. The land based critters at Monarto are a lot more placid. Zoos offer fabulous opportunities for photographers, even the chance of decent closeups, but I strive to keep the "hand of man" out of my images to make them look as if they could be in the wild, and in zoos that means "watch the background". I try to keep fences, roads and other manmade artifacts out of the frame, unless they are necessary for the story I'm telling. At Monarto, I was largely successful with this, but some animals I just could not capture without something ugly behind them. The viewer can judge me on this.