The powerful sculpture of Catherine Helen Spence in Light Square, Adelaide celebrates the life and work of a formidable South Australian.

A remarkable and feisty South Australian attorney-general and premier, a father of federation and the first Australian Minster for Trade and Customs is commemorated by this statue

Different, but a good likeness

Celebrated at its opening in 1882, and again a century later, the rotunda remains a focus point for events in Elder Park.

Creating and installing King Edward VII’s statute took eight months longer than the period of his reign

Adelaide-born Lord Florey won the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1945 for his part in making the infection-fighting penicillin available

‘My aim is to leave the world better for women’ – Mary Lee was an activist, suffragist and unionist

This scale model of the spiral staircase in the Newmarket Hotel is just 600 millimetres high, but represents months of careful craftwork. It was made by a young man named Walton Banks and exhibited at the Adelaide Jubilee International Exhibition in 1887.

Since 1894 Queen Victoria has looked imperiously over the bustle of Victoria Square

One of many around the world, this statue of Scottish poet Robert Burns was unveiled in 1894

The spirit of Antarctic explorer and professor of geology, Sir Douglas Mawson, is captured in the bust by John Dowie

The bronze bust of Sir Mellis Napier, sculpted by eminent South Australian artist John Dowie, commemorates his distinguished community service, including to the law and legal profession in South Australia

A statue of Sir Samuel Way reflects his towering presence in legal, political and cultural circles in the last decades of the nineteenth century.

The bronze figure of Sir Walter Watson Hughes by Francis Williamson stands on a massive block of red granite.

Between 1880 and 1891 the hulk Fitzjames, colloquially known as ‘Hell afloat’, served as a Reformatory for over 100 boys aged from 8 to 16 years of age. 

Adelaide tunnel tales are a perennial favourite in the popular press, and are cheerfully perpetuated by tour operators and publicans everywhere.

A startled Venus caused consternation as Adelaide’s first public statue in 1892