South Australia real estate

People have lived in the region for a very long time. Traces of human activity in what is now South Australia reach back as far as 20,000 years, and include flint mining and rock art at Koonalda Cave, on the Nullarbor Plain. Spears and tools of wood were made in an area of the South East that is now peat bog.

Kangaroo Island was inhabited long before rising sea levels cut it off from the mainland. Research into mitochondrial DNA suggests Aboriginal people reached Eyre Peninsula 49,000 to 45,000 years ago, arriving from the east, by way of the coast from the north, and from the west. Numerous groups and languages have occupied the region over that long history.

The earliest European sighting of this coast on record came in 1627, when the Dutch ship Gulden Zeepaert, under Captain François Thijssen, surveyed and charted part of the shore east to the Nuyts Archipelago. Thijssen gave the name "Nuyts Land" to everything east of the Leeuwin, after Pieter Nuyts, a notable passenger aboard.

Matthew Flinders and Nicolas Baudin mapped the coastline in 1802, except for the inlet later named the Port Adelaide River. That inlet was found in 1831 by Captain Collet Barker, and later charted accurately by Colonel William Light, who led the 'First Expedition' of the South Australian Colonisation Commissioners and became the first Surveyor-General of South Australia.

In 1788 Britain claimed the land that now forms South Australia, as part of its colony of New South Wales. The early settlements of that colony were on the eastern coast, and more than forty years passed before anyone put forward a serious proposal to settle its south-western portion. An act of the British Parliament, passed on 15 August 1834, allowed a province or provinces to be set up in southern Australia. The act marked out land between 132° and 141° east longitude, running from 26° south latitude to the southern ocean, and provided that the colony would have no convicts.

The province's colonial origins were unique in Australia: it was freely settled and planned as a British province rather than founded as a convict settlement. South Australia is the only Australian state never to have received British convicts. The plan drew on a theory of systematic colonisation put forward by Edward Gibbon Wakefield, later used by the New Zealand Company, and aimed to make the province a centre of civilisation for free immigrants, with civil liberties and religious tolerance. Some emancipated or escaped convicts and expirees made their own way to the province, making up 1 to 2% of the early population.

Unlike the rest of Australia, the new province was not treated as terra nullius. The Letters Patent that set its boundaries stated that nothing in them should affect the rights of Aboriginal people in the province to the actual occupation and enjoyment of lands they then actually occupied or enjoyed. The Letters Patent gave those rights the force of law, yet the South Australian Company's authorities and squatters disregarded them, and while the Governor's first proclamation spoke strongly of the rights of the native population, the Australian Frontier Wars in South Australia brought many conflicts and deaths.

Survey came before the settlement of the province. William Light was appointed to lead the Colonisation Commissioners' 'First Expedition', tasked with examining 1,500 miles of South Australian coastline and choosing the best site for the capital, then planning the city into one-acre Town Sections with 134-acre Country Sections around it. The South Australian Company obtained permission to send its ships ahead of the surveys and of the Commissioners' colonists, and seven vessels and 636 people made a temporary settlement at Kingscote on Kangaroo Island. In November 1836 the first immigrants reached Holdfast Bay, near present-day Glenelg.

Colonial government began on 28 December 1836, when the council members took their oaths near the Old Gum Tree; the date is now Proclamation Day. In April 1838 the South Australia Police was formed to guard the community and uphold government regulations, and its main task was running the first temporary gaol, a hut of two rooms.

In 1863, letters patent annexed the part of New South Wales that lay north of South Australia, giving it the name "Northern Territory of South Australia". On 6 July 1863 the name was shortened to the Northern Territory. In 1911 the territory passed to the federal government and became separate.

The state flag dates from 13 January 1904, when the current design was adopted. It is a British blue ensign carrying the state badge: a piping shrike with its wings outstretched on a yellow disc. Robert Craig, of Adelaide's School of Design, is believed to have designed the badge.