Elder Family of Scots merchants and ship owners saw the infant South Australia as an opportunity to expand their business interests. Alexander Lang Elder (1815–1885), the pioneer, arrived in 1839 and established a trading business.
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
Labour settlements were created during the 1890s to trial collective ownership, new farming technology and the high unemployment created by the Depression.
The League of Loyal Women was formed in South Australia on the 20 July 1915 and was primarily designed to utilise the domestic skills of women to provide men fighting overseas with homely comforts.
The League of Women Voters (so named from 1939), earlier entitled the Women’s Non-Party Political Association, was established in South Australia in 1909 by Lucy Morice. Its main object was the removal of legal, economic and civil inequalities between men and women.
Radicalism has been inherent in South Australian history from its founding as a free settlement. Based upon the English radical liberal thought of its founders, the State's reputation grew as a progressive colony and the first to entirely separate church from state.
The Children's Patriotic Fund and Schools' Patriotic Fund were repsonsible for aiding the war effort on the homefront during the First and Second World War, respectively. They achieved this by mobilising school children across South Australia to contribute in any way they could towards the war effort.
The Torrens title system for land ownership was inaugurated in South Australia has led the world in the computerisation of real property title information.
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.
The Wattle Day League was responsible for campaigning to establish 'Wattle Day', a national day of celebration, within Australia and helped raise funds on the home front to help support Australian soldiers fighting in the First World War.
