There were 13 Polling Places for the 1903 Australian federal election located within the Division — Port Adelaide, Lefevre's Peninsula, Alberton, Rosewater, Woodville, York, Hindmarsh, Thebarton, Hilton, Henley Beach, Plympton, Goodwood and Grand Junction.

The south-east state border rural seat of Barker was then considered a "hybrid urban-rural" seat, stretching all the way from the southern tip of South Australia at least as far as Glenelg and the Holdfast Bay area, and at times even stretched as far as the western metropolitan suburbs of Keswick and Henley Beach.

Redistributions from the late 1940s onward have moved Hindmarsh clear of its initial boundaries over time to include increasingly wealthy seaside suburbs in and around Glenelg and the Holdfast Bay area to the south.

The present Hindmarsh has changed little geographically since neighbouring Division of Hawker was abolished in 1993, though the north-western coastal strip was added from 2004.

From then on, successive redistributions gradually gave it a voting pattern similar to mortgage belt seats, which tend to be fairly marginal.

Even then, sitting member Clyde Cameron still won enough primary votes to retain the seat outright.

Labor's hold on the seat became even more tenuous in the redistribution prior to the 1993 election when it absorbed most of the area around Holdfast Bay that had previously been in abolished Hawker.

Combined with state-level anger at the time stemming from the State Bank Collapse, this was enough for Liberal Chris Gallus, previously the member for Hawker, to win the seat in 1993 with a one percent two-party margin from a two percent two-party swing, becoming only the second non-Labor MP ever to win it.

Though Georganas was thought to have built up a base with the substantial Greek community in Hindmarsh (he is himself of Greek descent), he was defeated at the 2013 election when Liberal Matt Williams won the seat with a 1.89 percent margin from a 7.97 percent two-party-preferred swing.

[7] A Galaxy seat-level opinion poll of over 500 voters in Hindmarsh conducted a week out from the Saturday 2 July election indicated a knife-edge 50–50 two-party vote.