South Australiastate of south-central Australia, occupying . It occupies one of the dryestdriest, most barren parts of the continent, but its southern fringe consists of well-watered and fertile lands and is where most of the population is located. It is bounded by Western Australia on to the west, Northern Territory on to the north, Queensland on to the north and east, and New South Wales and Victoria on to the east. On To the south it fronts the Great Australian Bight, a marginal sea of the Antarctica Oceansouthern Indian Ocean (called the Southern Ocean in Australia). The capital is Adelaide, on the southern coast.

Occupying about one-eighth of Australia’s total land area, it South Australia is fourth in size among the nation’s country’s eight states and territories. Its people make up less than 10 8 percent of the Australian population, ranking fifth among the populations of the states and territories.

Although isolation and its distinctive British origins as an experiment in planned settlement have produced a sense of local pride and identity, South Australia’s commercial links are strongest with Melbourne and Sydney. The settled parts of the state South Australia form the western end of a crescent of closely settled and productive land in southeastern Australia that is the economic heartland of the nation. country. The state’s commercial links are strongest with Melbourne and Sydney. Area 379,900 725 square miles (984983,000 482 square km). Pop. (1996) 1,427,936; (2001) 1,467,261; (2005 est.2006) 1,540514,413.

Physical and human geographyThe land



South Australia is a land of vast plains, low uplands, and extensive salt- or clay-encrusted lake beds that rarely contain water. More than 80 percent four-fifths of the state is less than 1,000 feet (300 metres) above sea level. The highest point in the state, Mount Woodroffe, in the Musgrave Range Ranges of the northwest interior, is rises to only 4,708 feet (1,435 metres).

The generally smooth southeasterly trend of the coastline is interrupted by the major indentations , of Spencer Gulf and Gulf St. Vincent, which extend inland some 200 and 100 miles (320 and 160 km), respectively. These shallow gulfs extend maritime climatic influences inland and were important corridors for local transport during the first century of European settlement. Kangaroo Island, which has an area of some about 1,679 680 square miles (4,350 square km), lies south of Gulf St. Vincent.

Most of the interior is arid. The highest rainfall, which occurs mainly in the winter half of the year, falls on the southern coastal lands and on the north-south-trending hills and ranges adjacent to the gulfs.





Southern Ocean


Precambrian Shield






Range to the Flinders Ranges. These rocks have been


folded and faulted repeatedly,



The sixth region is the Murray


Plain and the Southeast Plain, developed on



The final region



is some 52 feet


and has flooded only three times in the past century.Drainage and water supplies

, the lowest point on the continent.







about 60 percent


Approximately 90 percent


Groundwater accounts for some

35 percent


in recent times



South Australia is the driest of the Australian states. Only

18 percent

about one-fifth of the area receives


annual precipitation of more than 10 inches (250


mm), and

only 8 percent






climatic type

climate, with mild






wet winters and hot


dry summers. By contrast, rainfall in the arid interior is




86° F (30° C


59° F (15° C


63° F (17° C

63 °F (17 °C) in February to

a low of 45° F (7° C


86° F










red duplex soils of the lands near the gulfs.

Plant and animal life

Vegetation in the vast arid areas ranges from low woodlands of




acacia, to low

shrub lands



provide the basis

of the

for inland sheep


and cattle





Triodia (porcupine grass

porcupine (also called spinifex) grass (Triodia).


plant formations






have been

were established by the state government and by private companies on former


scrubland and

heath land

heathland in the





numbers of most wild fauna, especially mammals.

More than a quarter of the 50 or so species of marsupials



western gray






kangaroos, and





South Australia


The state has about 400 of the 700

Hundreds of species of




(including more than

100 species of reptiles.
Settlement patterns

South Australia has a closely settled core, surrounded by an area of diminishing population density and economic productivity. The heart of the state is metropolitan Adelaide. It has more than two-thirds of the state’s total population, the largest proportion for any Australian state capital. Near Adelaide the land is intensively farmed for dairying, fruit, and vegetables and includes the well-known wine-producing regions of the Barossa Valley and the Southern Vales. Beyond this zone are the intensive sheep- and cattle-rearing districts of the South-East and the wheat-barley and sheep-farming districts of the Murray Mallee, the Mid North, and the Yorke and Eyre peninsulas. Beyond the edge of the cultivated land, sheep grazing occurs on native pastures and shrubs. Most remote of all are the extensive cattle-raising properties of the northern arid zone.

Apart from the Adelaide there are some 50 cities and towns of more than 1,000 people, accounting for about 16 percent of the total population. The largest cities are Whyalla, Mount Gambier, Port Augusta, and Port Pirie. About 15 percent of the population is classified as rural.

The people


Population composition

In common with the other Australian states and territories, the ethnic composition of South Australia’s population has changed markedly since World War II. Before the war the state’s population was predominantly Anglo-Celtic in origin, most of the people in the state traced their ancestry to Britain; the state now has since become a more diverse, multicultural society.

In 1986, 22 percent the early 21st century, some one-fifth of South Australians were born overseas, and an additional 20 percent had at least one parent born overseas. The state’s population growth rate has exceeded that of Australia as a whole during only two periods. The first, from 1861 to 1881, was an era of rapid wheat-farming expansion and copper-mine development. The second, from 1947 to 1966, saw a rapid growth of manufacturing industry, was a time when manufacturing grew rapidly and was associated with a program of European immigration fostered by federal and state governments. This brought large numbers of non-English-speaking immigrants from Italy, Greece, areas of the Soviet bloc in eastern Europe, and the Baltic states, Germany, and The Netherlands, in addition to a substantial British inflow. Since the 1970s the last quarter of the 20th century the net gains from immigration have been smaller and have been composed largely of immigrants from the United Kingdom, New Zealand, Vietnam, and other European and Southeast Asian countries.Compared with the other Australian states

Settlement patterns and demographic trends




Compared with the rest of Australia, the census profile shows that the South Australian population generally has fewer children under 5 15 years of age but more adults over 65 years, a higher slightly lower percentage of persons born overseas, fewer Roman Catholics and Anglicans, more than three times the Australian average of Lutherans, a smaller share of households in the top income brackets, and generally a slightly higher level of unemployment. For more than a century, South Australian women have had fewer children than women in any other statestates, but and the average life expectancy is greater than the national average. In the late 1980s and early 1990s South Australia had the second lowest population growth rate of the states after Tasmania.The Aboriginal population makes up a little more than 1 has continued to rise. These factors, combined with persistent out-migration and low levels of immigration, have held South Australia’s population growth in check; since the late 1980s the state’s growth rate has remained among the lowest in the country.

The Aboriginal population is small, constituting less than 2 percent of the state’s total population. Some 40 percent ; roughly half of the state’s Aboriginal people live in Adelaide and about 20 percent community resides in the Adelaide vicinity, and much of the remainder lives in the remote northwest, where title rights to traditional lands were first granted in 1981. Compared with the state population in general, the Aboriginal population has a high proportion of children, a high birth rate, a high death rate, low income and occupational and educational status, and nine times the average percentage of persons in prisons and corrective institutions.

The economy




late 1980s

early 21st century showed that

28 percent

more than half of the state’s total

were the products of farms, 14 percent the products of


57 percent were manufactured products, and 1.4 percent

and a small fraction came from fisheries.

Less than 10 percent

A small portion of the

work force is

workforce was employed in the primary


activities of farming, forestry, fishing, and mining;

less than 20 percent are


remainder are


Agriculture and forestry




Resources and power

The Australian mining industry began with small-scale extraction of lead


and silver





. Commercial

, and commercial mining began in 1988

and when fully developed will support a town of 3,000 people




Some 80 percent




South Australia’s energy resources are remote from population centres. Coal






petroleum fields have been developed since



650-kilometre pipeline brings liquid petroleum gas (LPG; mostly propane and butane)


a recovery plant provides condensate for Australian and New Zealand markets and petroleum gas to Japan.
Agriculture and forestry

The mainstay of South Australian farming has long been wheat growing for export, and some 14 percent of Australian production of wheat comes from the state. Barley is a crop of more recent importance, and the state produces about 40 percent of the national crop. Livestock production ranges from extensive “open range” cattle rearing in the northern deserts to intensive pig and poultry rearing near Adelaide. South Australia’s sheep make up about 12 percent of the Australian total, and its dairy cattle more than 5 percent.

Intensive production of grapes, vegetables, and orchard fruit (especially oranges), normally grown under irrigation, amounts to about 15 percent of the value of the state’s farm produce and involves some 20 percent of all farm holdings. The wine grape crop amounts to about 60 percent of the Australian total. It is grown in districts of varying soil and climate, ranging from the hot summer irrigation districts along the Murray River through the rain-fed Barossa and Clare valleys to the cool-climate districts of the Mount Lofty Ranges and the southeast.

Australia’s largest grouping of managed softwood plantations, largely Pinus radiata, are in the southeast of the state and support Australia’s most important concentration of wood-processing industries.







production of larger household

“white goods”


At Port Pirie, Broken Hill Associated Smelters Pty Ltd operates one

One of the world’s largest

silver-lead smelters, which accounts for some 5 to 10 percent of the world


. The Whyalla steel-making plant of Broken Hill Proprietary Company Limited






together with nearby Port Stanvac, an oil-discharging terminal. The greater part of the


by the federal government’s Australian National Railways Commission. Services on most of the once extensive branch-line network have been discontinued, and the emphasis is



a suburban passenger rail system within metropolitan Adelaide

, which

that is integrated with


an extensive bus system and a



Roads carry the greater part of the passenger and general freight traffic and are mostly paved (bitumen-sealed).

Administration and social conditionsGovernment

The main functions of state governments in Australia are primary and secondary education, hospitals, public housing, prisons and police, roads, water supply, and the administration of land resources, including land-use planning. Commonwealth government powers are predominant in defense, foreign affairs, trade and economic policy, immigration, welfare payments, shipping, and aviation. Through its capacity to make specific-purpose financial grants to the states, the Commonwealth has substantial de facto influence on many state functions, including high education, health, housing, and assistance to industry.

South Australia’s parliament


Government and society
Constitutional framework



electoral districts, and a Legislative Council of 22

members for which the state is a single electorate




chamber. Alteration of the Constitution Act

, passed in 1855,



the Labor Party having formed the government for all but five years since 1965.In 1990 there were 121




The judicial system includes a Supreme Court, District Court, and Children’s Court, as well as local courts and courts of summary jurisdiction
Health and welfare




Compulsory education dates from 1875 and now applies to children from




years 1 through


7, and secondary classes are designated as




In the early 21st century, nongovernment schools accounted for

20 percent of the primary level enrollment in 1989 and for 27 percent of the

more than one-third of combined primary and secondary enrollment.

Postsecondary education is at two levels. The Department of


Higher education



Flinders University

of South Australia

opened in 1966 on the southern outskirts of Adelaide. The

state’s newest institution is the

University of South Australia


was formed in 1991

. It comprises


College in 1876—and


Health and welfare

The state government is responsible for providing the major health services for Aborigines, the aged, and the disabled; these include hospitals, mental health services, and drug and alcohol services. Policy is influenced by funding arrangements between the Commonwealth and state governments. In addition to public and private hospitals, there are community health services, services concerned with education and health promotion, and domiciliary care services. The School Dental Service provides for all children up to age 16.

; it is the state’s largest institution of higher learning.

Cultural life
The arts

The Art Gallery of South Australia

has representative


ceramic collections


for busking and


The Adelaide Festival, held in March every

second year

two years since 1960, is a major cultural event

, attracting nearly 800,000 attendances in 1988. It



been the site of world premieres of works commissioned specifically for the


event. The South Australian Film Corporation


(SAFC) produced many feature films for television and cinema

that have received critical acclaim in Australia and overseas. Various ethnic groups


vintage festivals.Recreation


Sports and recreation


in order

netball, golf, cricket, squash, and Australian


rules football. The main spectator sport is Australian


rules football, played during the autumn and winter, from


March to September. Year-round horse racing is popular.

A round of

Adelaide hosted the World Formula One Grand Prix

has been held in Adelaide each year since 1985; it is seen by some 120,000


Media and publishing


The period before British colonization

Human habitation in the The area that is now South Australia has ancient originsbeen inhabited by humans for tens of thousands of years. Archaeological discoveries on the Nullarbor Plain in the west indicate forms of human life for a period dating from at least 23,000 years before the present, and Kangaroo Island witnessed settlement from at least have revealed that human life was already present in the region about 34,000 years ago and that Kangaroo Island has been home to human settlement for perhaps 16,000 years ago. Other locations in Australia possess much earlier evidence of habitation, which suggests that South Australia either was settled later or has received less intensive archaeological investigation. It is clear, however, that for thousands of years there were numerous centres of Aboriginal indigenous population, especially along the banks of the Murray River, and that substantial trade existed between these Aboriginal groups separated by vast distances, some extending across Central despite the vast distances that separated them. Some trade routes extended across central Australia as far north as Cape York in present-day Queensland. But the Aboriginal indigenous population was probably already in decline at the end of the 18th century. They The Aboriginal peoples had little resistance to introduced diseases such as smallpox that were transmitted down the Murray River system in advance of the arrival of European settlers on the southern coast.

European exploration of southern Australia was slow and intermittent. In 1627 the Dutch East India Company vessel Guilden Zeepaard, captained by Francois Thyssen, conveyed Pieter Nuyts as far east as Fowler’s Bay in the Great Australian Bight. His reports were unfavourable, and almost two centuries passed before further information reached Europe. The entire coast was finally charted by Matthew Flinders in the Investigator early in early 1802, a little before a similar expedition led by the French navigator Nicolas Baudin in the Le Géographe. The two expeditions met at Encounter Bay.

Sealing parties, operating out of eastern Australian centres, frequented the southeastern coast from 1803 onward and made intermittent settlements on Kangaroo Island. George Sutherland reported on the island in 1819 and greatly exaggerated its potential for settlement. European knowledge of the interior of South Australia was negligible until 1829–30, when Charles Sturt navigated the full length of the Murray River system to its disappointing outlet into the Southern southern Indian Ocean. Sturt located substantial habitable land in the southern reaches of the territory, and his reports were the practical prerequisite for developing British plans for a new colony. The great inland regions of South Australia were not traversed for many years, and the challenge of a south-north crossing was not met until the expedition of John McDouall Stuart in 1862. The territory was not fully explored until the 1890s. The colonists learned what the Aborigines had known for thousands of years—that the interior was extremely inhospitable to most forms of permanent settlement.

European settlement

South Australia became the chosen location for an experimental form of colonization conceived out of the ideas and the entrepreneurial enthusiasm of Edward Gibbon Wakefield. He Wakefield had developed a theory of “systematic colonization” in 1829 that advocated a careful synchronization between the sale of land at a fixed price and the introduction of capital and labour. It was intended also to make emigration a more certain and respectable enterprise for ordinary British folk and to free Australian colonization from the stain of convictism. The proposals for the new colony emerged through a series of controversial negotiations with the British government. The government generally curbed, though it did not eradicate, the original plan’s aspirations toward civil and religious liberties. The projectors were wrongly suspected of republicanism. South Australia was to be no ordinary colony but rather a “province” of the mother country.

The Wakefieldian experiment began with the official settlement on Dec. 28, 1836, soon after the arrival of the first colonists at Glenelg and Kangaroo Island. Colonel Col. William Light was responsible for the much-admired plan for the city of Adelaide, which was sited a few miles short distance inland from the first landing on the shores of the Gulf of St. Vincent.

There were complicated arrangements governing the new colony, including regulations about the finance and control of immigration funds and the uses of revenues. The propaganda efforts of the first promoters—a mixture of commercial, theoretical, and utopian ideas that gave prominence to religious and political freedoms—attracted large numbers of immigrants and led to rapid expansion during the first five years of the colony’s foundation. But the administrative arrangements were ambiguous about the precise powers of the governors and the emigration commissioners and encouraged severe factional bickering. Instability and overexpansion produced a disastrous financial crisis in 1841–42 that threatened the very future of the experiment. The British government intervened, and the fledgling colony was placed under direct control of the Colonial Office. Governor Gov. George Grey imposed severe economic austerity. There was a collapse of confidence, and immigration and investment ceased. Nevertheless, within three years the colony returned to a pattern of growth, which eventually led to solid expansion. Settlers moved outward from Adelaide, and their production of wheat and wool soon exceeded local requirements and provided the basis for export earnings.

Colonial development in the mid-19th century

The discovery of rich copper deposits at Burra in 1845 induced a remarkable mining boom and stimulated rapid expansion. The development of South Australia outpaced that of the rest of the continent until 1850. South Australian wheat fed the markets of the eastern colonies, and the development of steamboats on the Murray River after 1853 opened new possibilities for intercolonial trade. South Australia began the first railway construction on the continent in 1854. Good agricultural land existed relatively close to Adelaide and its outlying ports, and pastoralists were pushed farther out into the drier lands.

In the 1860s most of the land revenues were no longer being spent on immigration but instead on public works. This signaled a serious departure from the original Wakefield blueprint. Copper, wheat, and wool dominated the exports of South Australia, and this resource-based growth continued until the early 1880s. It was punctuated by short setbacks in the early 1840s, and in the 1850s ’50s the dislocations caused by the discovery of gold in Victoria diverted labour from South Australia, especially from the copper industry. Nevertheless, the colony was an extraordinarily successful experiment in economic development. Until the 1870s South Australia often led Australia in economic growth and depended more completely on primary industries production than the other colonies. Further important discoveries of copper at Moonta and Wallaroo extended the mineral base of the economy. Settlement for agricultural occupation took the agricultural frontier into very dry country to the north and west. Wool producers prospered on buoyant world prices.

In the late 1870s a building boom converted Adelaide into a substantial city. It increasingly dominated the entire polity and economy of the colony, more so than other Australian cities. South Australia became a city-state in which the urban and rural sectors were relatively well integrated by the close settlement within reach of Adelaide. The continuous improvement of transport and communications greatly aided the process.

Aspirations and disappointments

From its inception the colony had entertained grandiose expectations of its future economic and demographic development. There were visions of the Murray River becoming a great trade artery for the eastern quarter of the continent, an antipodean Mississippi with South Australian equivalents of Chicago and New Orleans on its banks. Geographic realities eventually extinguished these those expectations. Similarly, when South Australia acquired the Northern Territory in 1863, the colony mounted ambitious plans for its development and settlement. Its The territory’s chief town, Darwin, was sited on the continent’s northern coast, and the Overland Telegraph Line from Darwin to Adelaide was completed in 1872. But South Australia had overreached its financial capabilities. In 1911 the Northern Territory was passed over to the government of the Commonwealth governmentof Australia; it was an unambiguous acknowledgement of failure.

Government investment in railways and roads and easier credit availability under land selection regulations favoured smaller landholders and encouraged hectic expansion in the 1870s. Settlement spread outward into parts of the colony with dangerously low rainfall. Wheat yields began to fall, and droughts in 1884–85 signaled the onset of the prolonged economic depression that affected South Australia almost a decade before the rest of the country.

Shifting the economic base

The development of mining at Broken Hill in New South Wales in the 1880s generated new activity in South Australia, but the economy remained dependent on a narrow rural base. The local market was too small to sustain rapid development of the manufacturing industry, and economic diversification was slow to materialize. Hence, for many decades South Australia’s economic growth rate fell behind those of other parts of the continent. Its rate of population growth, once the highest in Australia, also lagged. The population retreated from outlying districts, concentrating increasingly around Adelaide. After 1921 a rising majority of South Australians lived in metropolitan Adelaide; by 1961 only 12 percent of the work force workforce was employed in rural industries.

Poor economic growth from the turn of the 20th century until the late 1920s was associated with worsening budget deficits, migration to other states, and then severe drought at the end of the 1920s. During the Great Depression of the 1930s there was serious distress in both city and country, and South Australia suffered worse unemployment than most of Australia. The depression threatened to extinguish the infant industrial growth that had emerged in the 1920s, and there was a particular danger that South Australia’s automobile industry would be lost entirely to Victoria. The state government intervened and offered exceptional advantages to industries that would become established and stay in the state. Recovery in the late 1930s sustained the foundations for more rapid accelerated industrialization in the Adelaide region during World War II (1939–45). Heavy industry at Broken Hill and Whyalla emerged strongly, and munitions factories were developed near Adelaide.

The growth of war-related industries was translated into broader industrialization after the war, when the economy expanded rapidly and the state adopted a vigorous immigration program. Industrialization was undertaken through a combination of private and public enterprise, the state taking over responsibility for much of the basic infrastructure of the new economy and for the attraction of external capital. Premier Thomas Playford was a vigorous salesman for the business prospects of South Australia, emphasizing its lower wage costs, cheaper housing and land prices, lower taxes, and better industrial relations. He promoted the state operation of basic utilities, including electricity (in 1946 his government took over the private Adelaide Electric Supply Company), coal supply, housing, water, schools, and hospitals. Government enterprise also promoted the rural sector by means of soil improvement with trace elements and through new settlement schemes. A satellite town at Elizabeth was created for the further development of the industrial-urban base of the state’s economy.

Between 1947 and 1954 population growth in South Australia was again faster than elsewhere in Australia. It was surprising that South Australia, a relatively small community on the southern fringe of the continent, far from the larger markets and population centres of eastern Australia, was able to sustain such a vigorous program of industrial development. But the long upswing in economic activity began to weaken in the 1970s. South Australia followed the path of many other industrial economies in the last decades of the century, as and the proportion of the population employed in manufacturing fell to 19 below 10 percent in 1981the early 21st century. There was a concurrent shift of the work force workforce into service activities. The government placed great emphasis on the promotion of promoting high-technology growth in the economy and the attraction of attracting imported capital connected with high value-added industries. Its efforts to recruit industry often emphasized the stability of the work force workforce and the high quality and relative cheapness of living standards.

Population history

The Aboriginal population may have been about 25,000 at the time of British colonization. Well-intentioned government policies to protect their interests were rarely given practical effect, and the combined impact of introduced diseases, the loss of land, and falling fertility rates accelerated the decline in numbers. By 1860, colonial opinion fatalistically expected the Aborigines to die out within a few decades. In fact, there was a resurgence of their numbers, if not of their status and economic condition, probably assisted by miscegenationintermarriage with colonists. Government policies shifted toward assimilation by the 1960s. Only then were South Australian Aborigines accorded full citizenship. Aboriginal landrights land rights became an active political issue in the 1970s.

The white population began with large infusions of immigrants, many from the southern parts of England. South Australia’s population increased fivefold between 1844 and 1855, but the colony attracted relatively fewer Irish and Scottish than the rest of Australia. There was a secondary inflow of Germans, whose descendants faced considerable persecution and loss of rights and persecution during World War I . There were new (1914–18). New immigration programs were instituted in the 1850s and ’70s and before and after World War I. Larger inflows from 1945 to 1965 brought many immigrants from continental Europe, notably from Italy, Greece, Poland, and Yugoslavia and later from IndochinaSoutheast Asia. These later waves of immigration substantially altered the formerly homogeneous character of the population.

At other times population growth was disappointing. There were outflows of South Australians in the early 1850s and in the 1880s, 1930s, and 1970s and ’80s. Moreover, the rates of natural increase generally declined, and birth rates fell below national levels and eventually below the level of net reproduction. Mortality rates also have fallen, however, and South Australia’s infant mortality rate is among the lowest in the world.

Political characteristics

From the start, South Australians had an unusually progressive attitude toward social experimentation. The early colonists expected a swift transition to self-government and to popular representation. The colony’s initial commitment to religious toleration attracted a disproportionate number (though never a majority) of nonconformistsNonconformists, especially Methodists. Their collective influence was most evident in the lively public debates about the role of state support for education. In the 1850s South Australia became the first colony in the British Empire to disestablish religion (thereby separating church and state).

The decisive intervention of the British government into colonial affairs during the financial crisis of 1841–42 curbed the experimental pretensions of the colonists and checked their progress toward self-government. Nevertheless, during the 1850s there was a renewal of the original zeal. In 1851 partial self-government was introduced, and the Legislative Council was reformed to include two-thirds elected membership, based on a property franchise. Pressure for greater autonomy mounted, and in 1856 South Australia instituted some of the most advanced arrangements in the empire. These included triennial parliaments, manhood suffrage, the absence of property qualifications for the lower house, and secret ballots.

Thus, South Australia had obtained established a relatively advanced democratic bicameral government, and its first election on this basis was held in 1857, when the white European population was roughly 110,000. But its subsequent legislative record was less exciting than its conception. Some historians say that South Australia had lost its experimental and intellectual zest , which and that it was not recovered until the last part of the 20th century.

In 1884 South Australia was the first colony in Australia to introduce direct tax taxes on income and land. This reflected not so much advanced redistributive philosophies, however, but rather recurrent overspending by the government on public works programs and an excessive reliance on the London capital market.

Progress toward popular representation was curiously fitful. There were remarkable accelerations, as in 1894, when, in advance of virtually all other democracies, South Australia extended the vote to women. Yet it was very slow to vote women into Parliamentparliament. In 1973 full adult suffrage was accomplished when property qualifications for the upper house were finally abolished. Payment to members of parliament was introduced in 1887. In 1876 South Australia became the first of the Australian colonies to give legal recognition to trade unions. Unionization nevertheless was slow to develop, and there were generally fewer and less damaging strikes in South Australia than elsewhere in Australia.

Political parties became more clearly defined when leaders emerged to represent the urban and working population. The formation of the United Labor Party in 1891 was a prelude to the first fielding of Labor candidates in elections. This precursor of the contemporary Australian Labor Party (founded 1910) became the dominant vehicle for the interests of the left. Partly in response to Labor, conservative elements notably converged into the Liberal and Country League in 1932.

The conservative party was generally dominant, and it ruled from 1933 to 1965. For the last 28 years of this that period Thomas Playford was premier. During the Playford era the state was transformed from a mainly agricultural economy with a population of 600,000 to a predominantly industrial society with more than a million 1,000,000 people. The Liberals retained power through an electoral system that grossly underrepresented metropolitan Adelaide. By the 1960s it was generally, but not unanimously, agreed that the electoral system was the most backward unbalanced in Australia and had become a political scandal. Opposition to the system became vociferous but was resisted until 1969, when the Liberal government initiated electoral reform despite great internal controversy. When Labor attained power, more thoroughgoing legislation was introduced to redistribute voting power toward the metropolitan population. In 1975 electoral readjustments became the responsibility of a permanent Electoral Commission.

The Playford administration was marked by two extraordinary paradoxes. Under the direction of the auditor-general, J.W. Wainwright, Playford committed the Liberals to state-induced industrialization, in contravention of conventional conservative doctrine. This helped to reinforce the influence of state policy in shaping local society, in opposition to the powerful influences emanating from the federal centre in Canberra. The resulting expansion of the urban and industrial population effectively undermined the electoral foundations of the Liberal Party itself.

After 1965 Except for two years of a Liberal-Country coalition government (1968–70), the Labor Party held sway from 1965 to 1993. Under Premier Donald Dunstan’s administration, South Australia became highly image-conscious, especially in its commitment to culture. Dunstan pledged to make the state the technological, design, social reform, and artistic centre of Australia. Dunstan’s program depended on the affluence connected with industrialization. This affluence had, however, in its turn depended on high levels of effective protection for the local motor vehicle, household appliance, shipping, and electrical goods industries, a very high large proportion of the products of which was traded outside the state.

Sustained economic growth until 1977 favoured the political program, and unemployment rates in South Australia were lower than in the rest of Australia. But the employment base was relatively narrow and vulnerable to market shifts. During the 1980s and ’90s South Australia suffered greater than average reductions in the level of economic activity, and a growing nervousness affected the business climate of the state. In the last years of Dunstan’s tenure and during the administration of his successor, John Bannon, industrialization seemed to falter as tariff protection became less comprehensive. Earlier advantages diminished, and employment in the manufacturing sector fell. Plans to build a new city at Monarto, near Murray Bridge, were shelved. The state government became more receptive to plans for the exploitation not only of natural gas fields but also of the extraordinary ore bodies at Roxby Downsaround Olympic Dam. Since these ore bodies contained rich uranium reserves, the mining policy of the government became a matter of great political controversy, especially in the Australian Labor Party.

Under Dunstan there had been a rush of adventurous legislation easing censorship and restrictions on liquor, gambling, and shopping hours; extending the vote to 18-year-olds; permitting beach nudity; and reforming the law relating to adult homosexuality. But social experimentation decelerated as the government attempted to consolidate the industrial base of the economy. Under Bannon in the early 1990s, plans were advanced to facilitate large-scale international investment in an elaborate scheme incorporating high technology into the metropolitan area, known as “the multifunction polis.”

The Labor Party, much strengthened by the long-term impact of electoral reform, redefined its relationship with the trade unions while appealing to the middle strata of South Australian society for electoral support. This was emulated by a reunited Liberal Party and by a small coalition called the Australian Democrats that briefly held the balance of parliamentary power at several moments times in the 1980s. Despite the vicissitudes of the state economy, there was no weakening of the central commitment to the parliamentary system of representative democracy.

Having been ascendant for nearly two decades under Dunstan and Bannon, the Labor Party’s popularity declined abruptly in the early 1990s in tandem with the collapse of the State Bank, which had accrued a significant debt as a result of ambitious lending strategies. In the 1993 election the party experienced its heaviest defeat in 60 years. The new Liberal government committed itself to a reduced role in the mixed economy, or to the gradual program of reform that both main parties generally embraced.


economy. It privatized many public utilities and sold the State Bank.

The state economy was in the doldrums throughout the 1990s, with higher unemployment and lower economic growth than the national average. However, during that time South Australia sought new growth opportunities in the information technology industry and in exports, and grain and wine exports expanded vigorously. Nevertheless, the state’s recovery from recession was slower than that of the rest of the country, despite the implementation of debt-reduction policies. Expansion in the mining industry at Olympic Dam and large expenditures by the federal government on the construction of new naval submarines at Port Adelaide helped buoy the economy, and a new consortium emerged in 1999 that also brought trade benefits, employment, and new demand for steel production at Whyalla. By the end of the decade, wine, motor vehicles, grains, seafood, and electronics were all exporting well, and strong economic recovery was under way.

Although severe drought reduced agricultural yields in the early 21st century, the state continued to grow in other areas; in 2004 the long-anticipated rail link between Darwin in the Northern Territory and Adelaide, a grand national project first mooted in the 19th century, was finally completed.The Liberals were defeated in the election of 2002, which presaged the return of a Labor government. In 2004 Labor, under Mike Rann, issued a strategic plan focusing on economic development and improvements in health and education over the coming decade. Rann also persuaded the Labor Party to adopt a more positive attitude toward uranium mining.

The best general source of state information is the South Australian Year Book. Physical and human geography are presented in David Corbett, The Geology and Scenery of South Australia (1987); Michael Williams, The Making of the South Australian Landscape (1974); Trevor Griffin and Murray McCaskill (eds.), Atlas of South Australia (1986); Graeme Hugo, Atlas of the Australian People: South Australia (1989); and C. Nance and D.L. Speight (eds.), A Land Transformed: Environmental Change in South Australia (1986). The classic work on early colonial history is Douglas Pike, Paradise of Dissent: South Australia, 1829–1857, 2nd ed. (1967). Modern More-recent findings on a wide range of themes are found presented in Eric Richards (ed.), The Flinders History of South Australia: Social History (1986); and Dean Jaensch (ed.), The Flinders History of South Australia: Political History (1986). D.W. Meinig, On the Margins of the Good Earth: The South Australian Wheat Frontier, 1869–1884 (1962), provides a vivid account of the colony’s rural history. J.B. Hirst, Adelaide and the Country, 1870–1917: Their Social and Political Relationship (1973), deals with the special relationships that had great bearing on the colony’s political and social cohesion. P.A. Howell, South Australia and Federation (2002), is a survey from the colonial period to 1914. Andrew Parkin and Allan Patience (eds.), The Dunstan Decade: Social Democracy at the State Level (1981); Kyoko Sheridan (ed.), The State as Developer: Public Enterprise in South Australia (1986); and Neal Blewett and Dean Jaensch, Playford to Dunstan: The Politics of Transition (1971); and Andrew Parkin and Allan Patience (eds.), The Bannon Decade: The Politics of Restraint in South Australia (1992), offer important views of political and economic development during the post-Playford decades. The Australian Journal of Politics and History (annual) offers useful political commentary.

The influence of Wakefield is analyzed in Friends of the Turnbull Library, Edward Gibbon Wakefield and New Zealand 1830–1865: A Reconsideration (1997). Geoffrey H. Manning, Manning’s Place Names of South Australia (1990), is an invaluable compendium of detailed local knowledge. Andrew Beer and Cecile Cutler, Atlas of the Australian People—1991 Census: South Australia (1995), offers statistical portraits of the population of South Australia; as does Jim Walmsley et al., Atlas of the Australian People: 1996 Census (1999). Mark Peel, Good Times, Hard Times: The Past and Future in Elizabeth (1995), captures much of the post-World War II immigrant experience. Brian Dickey et al., William Shakespeare’s Adelaide 1860–1930 (1992); and Bernard O’Neil et al., Playford’s South Australia (1996), provide studies in the making of South Australian society. Two biographies, Stewart Cockburn, Playford: Benevolent Despot (1991); and Walter Crocker, Sir Thomas Playford: A Portrait (1983), give detailed accounts of the most important figure in South Australia in the mid-20th century. Neal Blewett, A Cabinet Diary: A Personal Record of the First Keating Government (1999), is an insider’s account of federal politics by a South Australian parliamentarian. More insights are found in the feminist Anne Summers, Ducks on the Pond (1999), an autobiography.