Adelaide was a planned free-settler capital in 1836
South Australia’s capital, Kaurna Tarndanya, was named for Queen Adelaide and laid out by Colonel William Light in 1836 as a carefully planned British free colony—not a convict dump. It is Australia’s fifth-most populous city and a festival-heavy destination.
Kaurna people have lived on these plains for tens of thousands of years, and finds at Hallett Cove in the southern suburbs go back 40,000 years. Tarntanya, one spelling of the name, means male red kangaroo rock, after a formation on the site that no longer exists. The River Torrens was Karrawirra Pari, the red gum forest river, and roughly 300 Kaurna lived around the future city in more than 20 seminomadic clans. Within decades of colonisation their culture had nearly vanished, the last fluent speaker dying in 1929, but missionary notes have since fuelled a language revival and the restoration of Kaurna place-names.
The colony grew from Edward Gibbon Wakefield's theory, worked out while he sat in a London prison for trying to abduct an heiress, that land should be sold at prices high enough to keep workers labouring rather than farming. Robert Gouger's lobbying produced the South Australia Act of 1834, the first colonists landed in February 1836, and government was proclaimed on 28 December beside the Old Gum Tree at Glenelg, still marked as Proclamation Day. Light's grid of broad streets and squares framed by parkland now carries national heritage status.
Planners assumed free settlers would need no gaol, but crimes in March 1838 prompted Governor Hindmarsh to found a police force under 21-year-old Henry Inman. Governor Gawler defied London by building a gaol, hospital and wharf, and his successor Grey slashed spending just as silver turned up at Glen Osmond in 1841. Francis Cadell's navigation of the Murray in 1853 opened trade, and self-government followed in 1856 with secret ballots. The university dates from 1874 and the art gallery from 1881, and the city weathered the 1890s depression better than Sydney or Melbourne.
Electric trams ran by 1909, and wartime manufacturing under the Playford Government diversified the economy. Adelaide hosted the Formula One Australian Grand Prix from 1985 to 1995 and now counts as a Gamma-plus global city.
Source: Adelaide
