The 1834 British statute authorising the establishment of the colony of South Australia described the region as ‘waste and unoccupied’, making no mention of the Indigenous owners of the land.
South Australia’s Foundation Act, passed by the British parliament in 1834, made no reference to the Aboriginal peoples who owned and occupied the land that was being annexed from the other side of the world.
The distribution of government rations to Aboriginal people, begun in the earliest days of European settlement, continued well into the twentieth century.
The city of Adelaide refers here to the area within the outer boundary of the parklands; that is, the ‘square mile’ of the commercial centre, plus North Adelaide, the city’s first suburb.
This festival is widely recognised as one of the great international arts festivals, while its accompanying Writers’ Week is the largest literary event of its kind.
The classically styled freestone Adelaide General Post Office was constructed in the late nineteenth century and housed both the post and telegraph offices which connected Australia with the world
Andrew Tennant was the son of a Scottish shepherd who became a pastoralist and counted mining and the Adelaide Steamship Co. among his business investments.
George Fife Angas (1789–1879), described by his biographer Edwin Hodder, who was attracted to Angas’s nonconformist piety, as ‘one of the Fathers and Founders of South Australia’, helped shape South Australia’s institutions
Constructed from east to west in January 1880, Adelaide’s most distinctive commercial complex of14 shops and hotel, heading west along Rundle Street, was built for The South Australian Company.
Robert Barr Smith (1824–1915), the son of a Scottish clergyman and his wife Marjory, née Barr, migrated to Melbourne in 1854. Moving to Adelaide just as Thomas Elder’s brothers were leaving South Australia, he threw in his lot with Elder.
Benjamin Herschel Babbage (1815–1878), an English engineer who superintended construction of the first Port Adelaide railway line, was employed by the South Australian Government in 1851 to search for gold. He led two official expeditions (1856 and 1858) that found no gold but surveyed the Flinders Ranges and Far North and established the extent of Lakes Eyre and Torrens.
The history of childhood in South Australia has been characterised by the assimilation policies practised by the state and the Christian churches throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and also changes in infant mortality, and the introduction of compulsory schooling.
Settlers believed that using land intensively maximised its value and civilised its occupants, and that holdings should be small to allow people to hold land
South Australian mineral discoveries of the 1840s (especially at Kapunda and Burra in the Mid North) and extension of the farming frontier, were a magnet to the Cornish.