Long before there was a town, this was the country of the Nauo people, with the Wirangu and Kokatha among the peoples of the wider west coast. They lived along this shoreline, its reefs and seagrass beds and sheltered bay, for countless generations. When Matthew Flinders sailed past from 10 to 13 February 1802, he named the offshore islands but did not even note the existence of Waterloo Bay in his log. The land that would become Elliston already had keepers, and a history, that the charts of passing Europeans simply did not record.

In the late 1840s, conflict between settlers and Aboriginal people along this coast escalated into bloodshed. In May 1849, after stores were taken and station hands threatened, a pastoralist and his men pursued a fleeing group of Aboriginal people to the cliffs of Waterloo Bay, where some tried to climb down to escape. What happened there became known as the Waterloo Bay Massacre. The archival records are thin and contested: they document a small number killed, while accounts of far greater loss, of people forced over the cliffs, have circulated since the 1880s, and recent scholarship judges the true toll likely to run into the tens. For more than a century, many locals insisted the massacre never happened at all.

Silence is its own kind of harm, and breaking it took decades of effort, much of it led by Wirangu people who refused to let the dead be forgotten. The reckoning finally came through art and acknowledgement. When the council developed a coastal walking trail along the very cliffs where the killings occurred, the goddess sculpture Mara, a figure of mother earth, was set among the works to help carry the grief of the past. In 2017 the Elliston District Council erected a memorial naming what had happened. It was a small town choosing, at last, to remember rather than deny, the descendants of those who suffered finally seeing their loss recognised in the open.

Elliston's own name carries a quieter story. The settlement began as Waterloo Bay before Governor Sir William Jervois formally gazetted it in 1878. He named it not for a battlefield hero but for Ellen Liston, a London-born writer and educator who came to South Australia as a girl and worked as a governess at the nearby Nilkerloo station. Liston was widely respected across the district, and Jervois, who liked to name places after people he knew, honoured her, though some later commentators, dismissive of a woman's standing, preferred to credit a Battle of Waterloo soldier instead. The town had already been fondly calling itself Ellie's Town. The name stuck because the affection was real.

For all its history, Elliston is a living town of around 330 people, perched behind a bay shaped like a wine glass. Its narrow, reef-guarded entrance once wrecked sailing ships carrying wool and wheat to market; today the calm inner waters draw swimmers and anglers, while abalone divers and lobster boats work the coast beyond. Barley and sheep cover the flat farmland inland. The town hall holds a mural of more than 500 square metres, said to be the largest of its kind in Australia, depicting the life of the district. Beyond the breakwater, surf beaches like Lock's Well promise salmon and the occasional shark, and 32 kilometres offshore, Flinders Island rides the horizon.