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.
The historic toll house at the base of the South Eastern Freeway was constructed in 1841 as a means for funding road construction from Adelaide to Mount Barker. As the only toll road in the colony of South Australia, this system generated significant public hostility and did not even come close to covering construction and maintenance expenses. The building’s use as a toll house was therefore stopped in 1847 to great public relief.
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.
Originally an informal service provided by a ragtag assortment of 'watermen' and their rowboats, Port Adelaide's ferries evolved into the preferred link between Port Adelaide and Lefevre Peninsula until the opening of the Birkenhead Bridge in 1940.