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.
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.
Could the problem of infant mortality be dealt with by giving expert advice to mothers? The Mothers’ and Babies’ Health Association certainly thought so.
The National Council of Women of South Australia argued for pensions for widows with children, raising the marriage age for girls from 12 and other reforms.
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.
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.