employees living at Salisbury North was very high for years after it was established. In 1951 three-quarters of the houses were allocated as soon as they were finished to families nominated by LRWE and contractor companies. The other quarter went to staff of the state education and police departments and to needy families in the area. In September 1955 a report to the General Manager of the Housing Trust calculated that, out of the initial allocation of 1000 houses, 850 were now home to employees of LRWE and its associated industries. At first the estate’s social mix was wider than had been envisaged. With the absence of anything better to go to, every class rubbed shoulders there, from the men of the Commonwealth Investigation Service to graduate Experimental Officers to toolmakers. But eventually many employees tired of the conditions and went to live in better housing far from the estate. In 1959, Salisbury High School was built on a picturesque riverside site between the estate and the town of Salisbury. Before then most secondary students had gone to Enfield High School, away. In the 1980s, the South Australian Housing Trust started to offer houses for sale to their tenants. Since then many of the original houses have been extended, and in some cases rebuilt, made practicable by the low real estate market. Salisbury North's reputation was adversely affected when it was revealed in 1999 that the leader of a group of four serial killers, John Bunting, had lived for several years in a rented house in Waterloo Corner Road. He and his gang members had murdered and buried two of the victims in the backyard before eventually storing the bodies with others in a former bank at Snowtown. The house was demolished several years ago in 1999. Expansion of the Adelaide conurbation has resulted in Salisbury North now being part of the capital's continuous northern suburbs, no longer a single-purpose estate bounded by farmland. References