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.
Camel driver Bejah Dervish, highly-regarded for his part in the Calvert Scientific Exploring Expedition in 1896, became a familiar figure in South Australia’s far north.
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