South Australia

South Australia is a state of Australia occupying the south central portion of the continent.

Geography and climate

South Australia has a total area of 984,377 square kilometres. Most of South Australia has a temperate climate with Summer from December to February and winter from June to August. Snow is rare, with falls occurring some years in the Mount Lofty or Flinders ranges, but usually having melted by lunchtime the same day.

The northern part of the state is arid in central Australia with little rainfall, and consequently also little population. The areas that are not complete desert are used in large pastoral properties running sheep or cattle on low stocking rates, limited by availability of feed and water.

Eyre Peninsula, the mid north region and Yorke Peninsula are predominantly used for grain (especially wheat and barley) and more intensive sheep and cattle production. The southern and eastern areas receive sufficient rainfall for more intensive cropping and farming, including dairy farms and vineyards.

Insurance ad, 1878

History

Before white settlement, South Australia was occupied by Aborigines, whose ancestors are believed to have arrived around 40 000 years ago. The specific groups included the Kaurna on the Adelaide Plains, Peramank in the Mount Lofty Ranges, Ngarrinjeri around the Murray River and Coorong and Pitjantjantjara in the far north of the state.

19th century

South Australia was settled as a planned British colony in 1836. It is the only state of Australia to never have received convicts transported from Great Britain. Settlement started in the capital city, Adelaide and gradually moved out to the rest of the state.

Exploration began before settlement with Charles Sturt's expedition down the Murray River in 1830 and Matthew Flinders' and Nicolas Baudin's expeditions exploring the coastline, both in 1802. Flinders and Baudin met in what is now known as Encounter Bay, and many coastal features have French names given by Baudin.

South Australia paid travel for immigrants and gave out free land; 1878 announcement

From the time of South Australia's settlement in late 1836 seamen started to desert in an effort to better their conditions. Despite frequent representations from masters, colonial administrators were reluctant to act, despite the fact that the colony's council had passed an act in 1838 to regulate seamen in Port Adelaide that was more stringent than 1835 imperial legislation. Instead, the colony's administrators maintained that the only way to prevent desertion was for captains to show more concern for the needs and comfort of their crews. The administration was therefore unwilling to expend police and court time in apprehending and prosecuting deserters. They were not, however, adverse to hiring their police services to private shipping interests. After 1852 policemen, paid by the captains, were sent on board to prevent desertion.

Religion and morality

Both entrepreneurs and laborers were recruited in Britain, but the respectability required of all was distinctly that of the middle class. The society that recruiters described was the one the middle class would have liked to create rather than the actual state of affairs. The record shows that church attendance in the town was fairly low and that more public houses than churches operated. Drunken and disorderly behavior persisted but never became a major problem. Colonial officials licensed both producers and purveyors of alcohol, both to prevent illegal and unregulated trade and for the tax revenue it generated.

Many Irish Catholics came to South Australia and established a flourishing church. However, tThe conflict between the Dominican sisters and the bishop of Adelaide in the 1860s-70s is symptomatic of a church in entropy, and it centered on a changing concept of what it meant to be a nun. The bishop, along with his vicar-general Smyth and an associate, Reverend Woods, brought in the Sisters of St. Joseph to staff the Catholic schools. This divided decisionmaking, along with Woods's impulsive and intrusive style, proved problematic, and there were deep and frequent tensions among the diocesan leadership and between the administration and the sisters.

The forces of individual privatization and the drive to increased comfort were at work in the colony of South Australia as elsewhere in the Western world. The spread in mass consumption of goods engendered major value shifts, with new and distinct differentations being made among "luxuries," "decencies," and "necessities." Luxury may have been beyond the reach of most Adelaide families, but decency - represented by such items as dining-room tables and adequate laundering equipment - was not.

Adelaide was able to avoid the deterioration of the physical fabric with the spread of slums and the overstraining of the sanitary infrastructure that often characterized 19th-century cities. Adelaide managed to avoid these ills because of the ability and willingness of the bulk of the population to pursue an expensive form of city-building. Moreover, high incomes, an unusual absence of urban poverty, and a functional public transportation system account for Adelaide's success.

20th century

The town of Elizabeth, founded in South Australia in 1956 as a planned outer suburb of Adelaide, was designed to be a series of neighborhood communities, each with its own infrastructure of shops, schools, churches, and recreational facilities. Residents, however, preferred to shop in the town center, demanding local bus services and a movie theater. Moreover, the residents were not as "socially balanced" as planners envisaged - an economic and social cross section of Australians with middle-class residents providing leadership and cultural standards. Instead, Elizabeth was overwhelmingly working-class and immigrant (primarily from Britain). In a variety of ways it was women, not men, who shaped family and neighborhood life and who gave Elizabeth its distinctive qualities. Simply stated: males worked and women managed. Elizabeth worked reasonably well during the long postwar boom until hard times (beginning in the 1970s) heightened tensions and social problems.

Population

The population of South Australia is slightly over 1.5 million people, almost three quarters of whom live in the Adelaide area. The median age is 38.8 years, the highest of any Australian state.

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Adelaide typified New Urban Frontier cities of the American West and Australasia in which high average worker incomes and effective public transport enabled most of the population to live in a suburban setting. Comparison of infant mortality rates in the city of Adelaide, Unley, and Port Adelaide, however, reveals that suburban living did not guarantee healthy infants. "Black spots" with high infant mortality rates existed near similar pockets of streets with older, higher-density housing that experienced lower infant death rates. Socioeconomic status, mother's education, and family size had more impact on levels of infant mortality than did the external physical environment. Levels of crowding and cleanliness within individual homes also affected infant death rates.

Government

South Australia is a constitutional monarchy with a bicameral parliament. The leader of the party with a majority in the lower house, the House of Assembly is known as the Premier. The upper house is called the Legislative Council. The monarch, Queen Elizabeth II is represented directly by the Governor of South Australia. Since 1901, South Australia has been a state of the Commonwealth of Australia.

See also

• Adelaide