With their carnivals and regattas, bathing-beauty competitions, amusements, sea and sand, beaches were one of the key gathering places for South Australians from the 1870s to the 1950s.
In October 1896, within one year of the Lumière brothers’ first public screening of film in Paris, the first public film screening in South Australia occurred at the Theatre Royal in Hindley Street
Paradoxically, the only parts of South Australia to experience occasional serious disruption of by flooding are the far distant sparsely populated deserts around Lake Eyre
The first large scale arrival of Laotians in Australia was in 1976. Only a few made their way to South Australia. The numbers increased steadily until the 1980s, and are only in the hundreds even in the twenty-first century.
Radicalism has been inherent in South Australian history from its founding as a free settlement. Based upon the English radical liberal thought of its founders, the State's reputation grew as a progressive colony and the first to entirely separate church from state.
The South Australian Tourism Commission, established in 1993, focuses on marketing South Australia as a tourist destination to interstate and overseas markets.