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 first Americans who arrived in South Australia were whalers and seal hunters. 

Although originating with scientists and untrained laymen, archaeology has a distinguished record in South Australia. 

Independent auditing of Government is established in the position of the colonies first auditor general

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

From sporting events to flower festivals and patriotic displays presented by thousands of children, South Australia's Centenary Celebrations emphasised the positive.

One of the largest pageants in the world, come one, come all to Adelaide’s famous Christmas Pageant!

The powers of colonial legislatures to create courts, alter local constitutions and authenticate laws were confirmed by the British statute.

George Ian Ogilvie Duncan, a lecturer in law at the University of Adelaide, drowned on 10 May after being thrown into the River Torrens. Rumours spread that officers from the vice squad engaged in ‘poofter bashing’ had killed Duncan.

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

The tragedy of war was compounded by disturbance on the homefront in wartime and post-war reconstruction activities.

Paradoxically, the only parts of South Australia to experience occasional serious disruption of by flooding are the far distant sparsely populated deserts around Lake Eyre

Every year between 1938 and 1975 Adelaidians showed pride in their city by beautifying it with mass displays of flowers on National Flower Day.

With few areas of high rainfall, South Australia lacks abundant native forests. 

In 1910 thousands of people lined the Torrens to see the carnival of lavishly decorated boats in the first Henley-on-Torrens Regatta

In 1881 Adelaide became the first Australian capital city to be connected to a water-borne sewerage system. 

The first known Indian immigrants arrived in South Australia in the late 1830s

Over 400 South Australians served in the Korean War (1950–53) alongside other Commonwealth and United States forces

The evolving profession in South Australia retained some centuries-old practices.

Lithuanian migrants came to South Australia as early as the 1840s, numbers expanded significantly following the Second World War. 

Although South Australia was proclaimed a free settlement, colonial officials soon found they needed a gaol to house lawbreakers. 

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.

In general refugees have enriched and diversified South Australia’s religions, universities and schools, food, the arts, newspapers, clubs and sports.

Serbians migrated to South Australia from the 1940s - 1990s to escape various forms of prosecution and have since established a wide community. 

The first known Slovak to arrive in Australia was Brother Jakub Longa, a Jesuit, who was sent to Australia in 1888 to help found an Aboriginal mission at Daly Waters in the Northern Territory

This major international conflict officially began when Nazi Germany invaded Poland on 3 September 1939. It lasted for six years, gradually increasing in scope and intensity as it blazed through Europe into Africa and Asia and on into Pacific Asia and the Americas.

The Torrens title system for land ownership was inaugurated in South Australia  has led the world in the computerisation of real property title information.

The South Australian Tourism Commission, established in 1993, focuses on marketing South Australia as a tourist destination to interstate and overseas markets.