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

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

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. 

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 first significant wave of Belarusians arrived in South Australia as Displaced Persons (DPs) when Belarus anti-communist fighters, members of Belarusian Youth Union, military Belarusian (anti-Russian) units, pro-German Belarusian government organizations and others were in conflict with the Soviet Red Army.

The origins of foster care for disadvantaged children

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. 

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.

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

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 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. 

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

The first Slovenians arrived in South Australia in 1946. They emigrated as Displaced Persons from camps in Italy, Austria and Germany after Marshal Tito established a communist government in Yugoslavia in 1945.

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.

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.

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.

The Women's Work Depot sprang out of a First World War business, theTrench Comforts Shop, reforming in 1920 to sell goods made by women.