Matthew Moorhouse, a medical practitioner, arrived in South Australia from Staffordshire, England, in June 1839 to take up appointment as the colony’s first permanent protector of Aboriginals.
This Barossa Valley winery made vital contributions to the industry throughout the twentieth century becoming a leader in wine marketing by creating renowned wine brand, Jacobs Creek.
The one viable alternative to importing live stock by sea was the droving of stock overland from New South Wales, the work of overlanders. Their motive was simple: high profit.
‘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’.
A Baptist minister and Waterloo veteran with a dragoon’s pension, South Australia’s first Thomas Playford arrived in 1844 to claim an inherited original town acre. Thomas’s eldest son, Thomas Playford (1837–1915), was a successful orchardist at Drysdale, Norton Summit, in the Adelaide Hills. Thomas’s grandson, Tom Playford (1896–1981), also went into parliament, becoming Australia’s longest-serving premier.
From the 1880s Tommy Walker, or Poltpalingada Booboorowie, was a leading figure among the community of Aboriginal people who lived on the fringes of white Adelaide society.
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.
South Australia was unique among the Australian colonies in that the South Australian Literary and Scientific Association assembled a subscription library before the settlers left Britain.
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.
Regions/Regionalism, meaning extensive and distinctive areas and human attachments to them, these are words to conjure with in the South Australian experience.