The South Australian Aborigines Act Amendment Act (1939) established a board ‘charged with the duty of controlling and promoting the welfare’ of Aboriginal people.
The Australian Democrats have been arguably the most successful minor party in Australia’s political history and one that (unlike the National party or the DLP) consistently performed best in South Australia.
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.
In July 1882 Rev. Joseph Coles Kirby of Port Adelaide Congregational Church delivered a series of lectures on what he termed the Social Evil – broadly interpreted as drinking, prostitution and other forms of sexual licentiousness. Those present, following a similar movement in England, agreed to form the Social Purity Society (SPS), to combat what they perceived to be an epidemic of vice.
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.
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.