The Adelaide City Council has a history spanning over 170 years of service to its citizens.

A long-running dispute over a senior nursing appointment culminated with a medical officers’ strike and the temporary loss of medical teaching at the Adelaide Hospital

The Adelaide Steamship Company was Australia’s largest shipping company and one of South Australia’s most successful business ventures.

Providing housing for ‘industrious and deserving’ workers since 1899

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. 

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

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

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

Labour settlements were created during the 1890s to trial collective ownership, new farming technology and the high unemployment created by the Depression.

The Presbyterian Church has a long history in South Australia, owing much to the early Scotish community.

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 History Trust of South Australia is coordinating a series of programs and events to mark the 125th anniversary of womens suffrage in South Autralia. In December 1894, after decades of activism, women in South Australia were awarded the right to vote and stand for parliament. In 2019 we will celebrate the victory of the early suffragists such as Mary Lee, Augusta Zadow, Catherine Helen Spence and those who joined the fight. The Suffrage 125 initiative will explore issues of gender equality over the past 125 years.

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.

Founded in 1888, the Women’s Suffrage League was an organisation dedicated to extending the political franchise to South Australian women, which was achieved in 1894.