Lyell Alexander McEwin (1897–1988) received a frugal Mid North upbringing which taught him the motto, ‘waste not, want not’, that characterised his 40 years in the Legislative Council, 1934–75.
The National Council of Women of South Australia argued for pensions for widows with children, raising the marriage age for girls from 12 and other reforms.
Best known as a governor of South Australia, Sir Mark Oliphant was also a pioneering nuclear physicist, who became an outspoken anti-nuclear campaigner.
Modelled on the gentlemen’s clubs that proliferated in London from the eighteenth century, the Adelaide Club resembles bodies established at about the same time in the capital cities of the other Australian colonies.
Theodor George Henry Strehlow (1908–1978) was brought up by his parents, Carl and Frieda Strehlow at the Hermannsburg Mission near Alice Springs. His work as linguist and ethnologist contributed extensively to white understanding of Aboriginal culture and music, but provoked ongoing dispute between settler and Indigenous cultures.
Carpenters, tailors, bakers, carriers, cordwainers and coachmakers had formed unions within ten years of European settlement of South Australia, and by the 1870s there were thousands of union members in the colony.