Adelaide history and heritage: the free settler city

Adelaide's history is distinguished by what it did not have — convicts. The city was established in 1836 as a planned free settler colony on Kaurna country, and this founding distinction created the civic culture of independence, religious tolerance, and progressive social policy that gave South Australia the first responsible government in Australia (1856), the first secret ballot in the world (1856), and the first women's suffrage in Australia (1894).

South Australian Museum — the founding collections — the SA Museum's founding collection philosophy — the most comprehensive possible collection of the natural and human world — created the Pacific Cultures collection (one of the most significant outside the British Museum), the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultural materials (including material from the Stolen Generations era that is the subject of ongoing repatriation), and the natural history collection that documents the unique South Australian fauna and flora.

Tandanya National Aboriginal Cultural Institute — the Kaurna name for the Adelaide CBD area (Tarntanya), the cultural institute at Grenfell Street provides the Kaurna and broader First Nations cultural programme, the gallery exhibitions, and the performance space that create the most accessible single point of First Nations cultural engagement in the Adelaide city centre.

Ayers House and North Adelaide heritage — the 1846 Ayers House on North Terrace (the home of Sir Henry Ayers, seven-time premier and namesake of Uluru in its former official designation) and the North Adelaide heritage streetscape of Palmer Place, Kingston Terrace, and Stanley Street preserve the colonial elite residential architecture that the free settler city's first generation of wealthy merchants and politicians created.

The Central Market and Victoria Square heritage — the Adelaide Central Market (1869) and the Victoria Square (1836 survey, the mathematical centre of Colonel William Light's planned city) together document the extraordinary achievement of Light's city plan, which created the parklands ring and the grid that Adelaide has preserved more faithfully than any other planned colonial city in the world.

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