When South Australia was first settled by Europeans in 1836, it was home to as many as fifty distinct Aboriginal groups , with a population estimated at 15,000. Three distinct cultural regions existed: the Western Desert, the Central Lakes, and the Murray and southeast region. It was the people of the comparatively well-watered southeast who felt the full impact of white settlement, those who survived being shunted onto missions controlled by the government. Some Aboriginal people have clung tenaciously to their way of life in the Western Desert, where they have gained title to some of their land, but most now live south of Port Augusta, many in Adelaide.

 

The coast of South Australia was first explored by the Dutch in 1627. In 1792 the French explorer Bruni d'Entrecasteaux sailed along the Great Australian Bight before heading to southern Tasmania, and in 1802 the Englishman Matthew Flinders thoroughly charted the coast. The most important expedition, though - the one which led to the foundation of a colony here - was Captain Charles Sturt 's 1830 navigation of the Murray River from its source in New South Wales to its mouth in South Australia.

South Australia was planned from the start: in the idealistic scheme of the English entrepreneur Edward Wakefield, there were to be no convicts - instead free settlers would be sold small units of land (rather than given large free land grants) in a state guaranteeing them civil and religious liberty. The success of the scheme was guaranteed when George Fife Angas formed the South Australia Company to finance it. In 1836 Governor John Hindmarsh landed at Holdfast Bay, now the Adelaide beachside suburb of Glenelg, with the first settlers; the next year Colonel William Light planned a spacious, attractive city, with broad streets and plenty of parks and squares, some distance inland. By 1839, Angas was assisting persecuted Lutheran communities from the eastern provinces of Prussia to settle in South Australia.

Early problems caused by the harsh, dry climate and financial incompetence (the colony was bankrupt in 1841) were eased by the discovery of substantial reserves of copper over the next decade. By 1870 Adelaide's population had almost doubled. The tradition of libertarianism in South Australia continued; in 1894 its women were the first in the world to be permitted to stand for parliament and the second in the world to gain the vote (after women in New Zealand). Social improvement through slum clearances began after World War I. Of all the mainland states, the depressions and recessions of the interwar period hit South Australia the hardest. After World War II new migrants came, boosting the output of industry and injecting new life into the state.

The 1970s were the decade of Don Dunstan . The flamboyant Labor Premier, who died in January 1999, was an enlightened reformer who had a strong sense of social justice: he abolished capital punishment, outlawed racial discrimination and decriminalized homosexuality. The state has been a duller place since his retirement in 1979, and a poorer one since the recession started to have an effect at the end of the 1980s. Unemployment levels are still high.