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.
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
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.
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.
Reputed to be Australia’s third-largest industry, horseracing contributes to the national economy and state government revenues through direct employment and also through primary production, transport, tourism, media, entertainment and gambling.
Small in number over time, Adelaide’s Jews have contributed significantly to the professions, especially medicine, and are well represented in academia, industry and commerce.
‘South Australia’, wrote the early twentieth-century author of The Cyclopedia of South Australia, ‘owes its existence to a movement which had its origins in philanthropy’.
South Australia’s demography is in many ways the most distinctive of all Australia’s states, but the wealth of historical population data available for both the colony and state remains under-analysed.
JM Freeland characterises Australian pubs as among ‘the most socially significant, historically valuable, architecturally interesting and colourful features of Australian society’ (Freeland 1977, p. 1). South Australia’s pubs are no exception.
In the early years of European settlement the distinction between retail trade, wholesale trade and importing in South Australia was unclear, with many businesses combining all three functions.
Before and after the arrival of Europeans, Aboriginal peoples had a well-developed cultural understanding and practical knowledge of plants, animal behaviour, local geology and meteorological conditions. Information they provided was frequently vital to the success – and even survival – of early European navigators and explorers.
In South Australia, the prime key to wealth has been land. From its inception as a European colony, ownership (or control) of land meant access to agricultural and mineral resources. For the Aboriginal peoples, dispossession meant devastation.