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.
The striking facade from Adelaide’s private produce market in the north east corner of the city remains a city landmark, though the market itself no longer operates.
One of South Australia's earliest buildings and home to over 300 000 people from 1841 to 1988, Adelaide Gaol is one of Australia's longest operating prisons.
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.
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 January 1931, during the Great Depression, more than 1000 unemployed men clashed with police in protest at the replacement of beef with mutton on their ration tickets
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.
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.