Adelaide Facts

A statue of Adelaide's founding father, Colonel William Light, stands atop Montefiore Hill and gazes proudly across the city he helped to create. Below him rolls an expanse of attractive green parkland, resplendent with rose beds, peppered with trees and dominated by the ivy-clad Adelaide Oval. To the rear of the cricket ground lies lazy Torrens Lake, its southern foreshore replete with grand bluestone buildings that contrast starkly with white concrete extrusions of the Festival Centre. Further south, modest towers mark the heart of Adelaide's central business district, while to the east a corrugated line of hills defines its inland boundary. To the west, the coastal plain slips gently away...

...(pop. 1,150,000) has always been a free-spirited, free-thinking type of place -- the first to outlaw sexual and racial discrimination, the first to do away with capital punishment, the first to recognize Aboriginal land rights and legalize nude swimming, and the first state to give women the vote. Perhaps that's because Adelaide was the only capital to have been settled by free settlers, rather than convicts, and was totally self-sufficient, receiving no financial backing from the British government. The fledgling colony promised settlers civil and religious liberty, a 19th-century vision of utopia that attracted thousands of European immigrants escaping religious persecution.

Australians who...