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

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. 

The powerful sculpture of Catherine Helen Spence in Light Square, Adelaide celebrates the life and work of a formidable South Australian.

A remarkable and feisty South Australian attorney-general and premier, a father of federation and the first Australian Minster for Trade and Customs is commemorated by this statue

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

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. 

Celebrated at its opening in 1882, and again a century later, the rotunda remains a focus point for events in Elder Park.

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

Germans have been arriving in South Australia since the beginnings of the new colony in 1836

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

The statue of inland explorer John McDouall Stuart at the corner of Victoria Square and Flinders Street, Adelaide, commemorates his place in Australian history

Creating and installing King Edward VII’s statute took eight months longer than the period of his reign

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

‘My aim is to leave the world better for women’ – Mary Lee was an activist, suffragist and unionist

This scale model of the spiral staircase in the Newmarket Hotel is just 600 millimetres high, but represents months of careful craftwork. It was made by a young man named Walton Banks and exhibited at the Adelaide Jubilee International Exhibition in 1887.

Since 1894 Queen Victoria has looked imperiously over the bustle of Victoria Square

One of many around the world, this statue of Scottish poet Robert Burns was unveiled in 1894

The spirit of Antarctic explorer and professor of geology, Sir Douglas Mawson, is captured in the bust by John Dowie

The bronze bust of Sir Mellis Napier, sculpted by eminent South Australian artist John Dowie, commemorates his distinguished community service, including to the law and legal profession in South Australia

A statue of Sir Samuel Way reflects his towering presence in legal, political and cultural circles in the last decades of the nineteenth century.

The bronze figure of Sir Walter Watson Hughes by Francis Williamson stands on a massive block of red granite.

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

Between 1880 and 1891 the hulk Fitzjames, colloquially known as ‘Hell afloat’, served as a Reformatory for over 100 boys aged from 8 to 16 years of age. 

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.

Adelaide tunnel tales are a perennial favourite in the popular press, and are cheerfully perpetuated by tour operators and publicans everywhere.

A startled Venus caused consternation as Adelaide’s first public statue in 1892

The lives and cultures of ‘Afghan’ cameleers are recognised in Whitmore Square