Small in number over time, Adelaide’s Jews have contributed significantly to the professions, especially medicine, and are well represented in academia, industry and commerce.
Aboriginal people were conservative and conservationist land managers; European settlers and their descendants expected land to be the backbone of society and the economy.
Originally intended as a recreational garden oasis from the surrounding city, Light Square, however, developed a reputation for prostitution, drinking and violence.
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 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.