Based on the philosophy and understanding of child development of the German educator and philosopher Friedrich Froebel, kindergartens in South Australia began for both educational and humanitarian reasons.
Aboriginal people were conservative and conservationist land managers; European settlers and their descendants expected land to be the backbone of society and the economy.
In the nineteenth century South Australia was visited by numerous Latvian sailors who worked on Baltic trading ships, carrying mainly softwood timber, known as Baltic pine.
Lebanese immigrants began arriving in Australia in the late nineteenth century. They emigrated from what was then the province of Syria in the Ottoman Empire for a variety of reasons.
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.
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.
In South Australia probation encapsulated several kinds of opportunity, not only for those prosecuted but also for the criminal justice system and society
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.
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.
Regions/Regionalism, meaning extensive and distinctive areas and human attachments to them, these are words to conjure with in the South Australian experience.
In the early years of European settlement the distinction between retail trade, wholesale trade and importing in South Australia was unclear, with many businesses combining all three functions.
The River Murray has been central to South Australia’s existence. Named in 1830 by Charles Sturt after Sir George Murray, British secretary of state for the colonies, the river runs 2576 kilometres from its watershed in the Australian Alps to the sea near Goolwa on the Fleurieu Peninsula, 650 kilometres of the river’s flow being within South Australia.
Before and after the arrival of Europeans, Aboriginal peoples had a well-developed cultural understanding and practical knowledge of plants, animal behaviour, local geology and meteorological conditions. Information they provided was frequently vital to the success – and even survival – of early European navigators and explorers.
Singaporean migration to South Australia has occured from the early nineteenth century, however, when the Restriction Act 1901 was relaxed in 1967 there has been a significant increase of people coming to South Australia.