Adelaide Australia Temple

White Granite on Lower Portrush Road

The Adelaide Australia Temple stood at 53–59 Lower Portrush Road in Marden, a quiet suburb a few kilometres north-east of the Adelaide city centre. It was the only temple of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in South Australia, and for members across the state and the Northern Territory it was the nearest place where the Church's most sacred ordinances could be performed.

The building was small by the standards of the Church's great nineteenth-century temples. It was a single-storey structure of a little under a thousand square metres, faced in snow-white granite quarried at Campolonghi in Italy, with a single slender spire rising twenty-two metres above the ground. A gold-leafed statue of the angel Moroni, trumpet raised, stood at the top of the spire, facing east. At night the building was floodlit, and the white stone glowed against the dark of the surrounding streets.

The temple sat in the middle of a landscaped site of nearly three hectares, ringed by lawns, garden beds, trees and paved plazas on all four sides. A low fence and gates separated the grounds from Lower Portrush Road. The gardens were open to the public during the day, and families often photographed brides and grooms on the front steps and the plaza after weddings.

Planning and Dedication

The temple was announced in March 1999, one of a wave of small temples the Church built around the world at the turn of the century to bring ordinances within reach of members living far from existing temples. Before then, South Australian members had to travel to Sydney, a journey most made by car or coach and many managed only a handful of times in their lives.

Ground was broken on 29 May 1999 in front of more than five hundred people. Heavy rain fell in the hours before the ceremony and cleared just as it ended, a detail that local members retold for years. Construction moved quickly. The temple shared its floor plan with the Melbourne Australia Temple, built at the same time, and the two were dedicated a day apart.

A public open house in early June 2000 drew around forty-nine thousand visitors, many of them Adelaide residents curious to see inside a building that would afterwards be closed to them. The temple was dedicated on 15 June 2000 by the Church's president in four sessions, attended by over two thousand members from across South Australia.

Inside the Temple

Visitors entered through the main doors into the Annexe, a hushed area where members waited, greeted one another and gathered before sessions. Off the Annexe were separate men's and women's dressing rooms, where patrons changed out of their street clothes into the white clothing worn throughout the temple. Between the Annexe and the inner corridors stood the recommend desk, staffed by temple workers who checked each patron's temple recommend before admitting them further into the building.

The heart of the building held two ordinance rooms, used for the endowment ceremony. They were furnished with rows of cushioned theatre-style seats facing the front, with men customarily seated on one side of the aisle and women on the other. Beyond them lay a celestial room, the most richly furnished space in the building, with a chandelier, soft carpet and upholstered chairs, where patrons sat in silence after an endowment session.

Two sealing rooms, each with a cushioned altar at the centre and mirrors on facing walls, were used for marriages and for sealing families together. A baptistry, set below the level of the main floor, held a font resting on the backs of twelve sculpted oxen, used for proxy baptisms performed on behalf of the dead, most often by groups of teenagers on youth temple trips. Throughout the building, the decoration was restrained: pale walls, timber detailing, carpet in soft tones and artwork of Christ and of the Australian landscape.

The Work of the Temple

The temple was staffed almost entirely by volunteer workers, most of them retired couples from Adelaide's wards, who served one or two shifts each week as ordinance workers, recorders and recommend desk attendants. A temple president and matron, usually a couple called for a three-year term, oversaw its running. Some workers served for decades, and long-time patrons knew them by name.

The temple's schedule followed the rhythm of the stakes it served. Wards booked evening sessions and Saturday mornings for group visits. Youth from across the city came for baptisms on weekday evenings during school holidays. Weddings filled Saturdays, with guests who were not temple recommend holders waiting in the grounds for the couple to emerge.

The Evening of 29 July 2018

On the evening of Sunday 29 July 2018, the temple hosted an unusual gathering for selected members from across the Modbury Australia Stake, called by a visiting apostle, Elder Nathaniel Carter. Those invited arrived at dusk, changed into white, gathered in the Annexe and presented their recommends at the desk before being shown into one of the ordinance rooms.

That night, against long custom, husbands and wives were invited to sit together. The temple president and the area president arrived first, followed by Elder Carter. In the meeting that followed, those present raised their arms in covenant, pledging to keep what they heard confidential. The gathering closed with a hymn and prayer, and the members left into a cold winter night.

Several families who attended left their homes and congregations over the following months. Whatever passed in the ordinance room that evening was not recorded in the temple's ordinary records, and the temple's own operations continued without interruption.

Closure and Continuity

The Adelaide Australia Temple closed in March 2020, along with every other temple of the Church, as the pandemic spread. It reopened in stages over the following year, first for sealings of living couples, then for limited endowment sessions with reduced numbers and booked appointments.

By the mid-2020s the temple had returned to its full schedule. Through 2026 it remained the centre of temple worship for South Australian members, its spire lit each night above Lower Portrush Road and its gardens still crowded with wedding parties on Saturday afternoons.