More Free Websites for South Australia Genealogy and History...

Back in 2011 I compiled my 33 Free Websites for South Australia Genealogy post, and despite having written it almost 4 years ago, it is still one of the most looked at posts on my blog. Since then a lot of new South Australian records and sites have gone online, so I felt it was time for an update. Many people think that genealogy costs a lot of money, let me tell you that all of the links below are free. Personally I find that it’s often a matter of knowing where to look beyond the big-name websites, and hopefully this will help with that. Although I haven’t titled this “Discovering Links”, I’m putting in that series of posts since it contains a whole bunch of links. These are I have discovered, or found useful, and want to share with others. You can see my previous Discovering Links posts here. It’s not intended to be an exhaustive collection of links, but simply ones that many will find useful, and it may include some that you may not have known about. === SOUTH AUSTRALIA === GENERAL HISTORY South Australian Historical Archaeology Database The Historical Archaeology of Adelaide Project is based in the Department of Archaeology, Flinders University. It is a long term project to record and document archaeological data from three key site types throughout South Australia: cemeteries, standing structures (buildings), and monuments/memorials. The project data has been compiled by second and third year undergraduate archaeology students as part of their work in the topic. These databases are available as a public resource for heritage research. History As it Happens History is not only about things that happened long ago. It is happening here and now and we are all part...

21 December 1860 – The Date Water Was Turned on in Adelaide...

The date 21 December 1860 was a Friday, and this was a big day for the city of Adelaide, as that is the day that the water from the pipeline in the Adelaide Hills was turned on, and water came through. The time was 3.00pm, and a small group of people surrounded the fire hydrant on the corner of Flinders and Pulteney Streets, and then it was time. They turned in on … and …  the water didn’t just come, it GUSHED! In fact it gushed 7o feet into the air!! It sounds spectacular doesn’t it. And in fact the water coming to Adelaide, changed Adelaide’s history. It was obviously mighty useful for the local fire service of the time. It meant the city could have drinking fountains, and water was also used to power the first non-passenger lift to be installed in Adelaide which allowed goods up and down several floors, which by the way was Harris Scarfes. And thanks to the vast reach and power of the water, it was used to clean multi-storey buildings in the city as well. I got all of these interesting, useful tid-bits of history from the South Australian Engineers Heritage Conference that I attended last week. Being an Engineering history conference, of course the history of water supply and pipelines fall into the category! Anyway back to Adelaide’s water … all didn’t go smoothly with the work on the pipeline and reservoir, but then again does anything? Here’s an article from the beginning of 1860 which mentions a few of the problems. This is just a portion of the article, so if you want to read the full entry just click on the hyperlink in the caption. Work obviously continued throughout...

Trove Tuesday: 1 March 1954, The Day the Earth Shook South Australia...

This post is about earthquakes, but let me start off by saying that South Australia is not known for its quakes. In fact it is more known for the lack of quakes, which is why it is big news if we have one. Yesterday was one of those rare days when South Australia (well parts of it) shook. I found this when I was driving home from work and heard it on the news. The report said that South Australia had had two small earthquakes (see the picture below). Remember I said we don’t get them here, so even the small ones make news! Anyway I did my usual weekday routine of getting up and off to work, then busy, busy all day. And I can confirm that I wasn’t one of the ‘hundreds’ who claim to have heard or felt the earthquakes, so I can’t say what it would be like, and don’t particularly want to go through one. Now going back a few years to when I was eight years old, my family moved into the “Springvale” property at Gumeracha in the Adelaide Hills. This is an old house, dating back to pre-1900. And from the day I moved in, till when I left, I felt the walls in my room would collapse whenever there was a big storm as there were huge cracks in the walls, which I was told was from the 1954 earthquake. Having known nothing of the ’54 earthquake as it was way before my time, I headed over to Trove, and found some amazing articles. Here’s the first one I found. It is a LOOOOONG article, so I’ve only copied a small portion of the beginning of the article here. For the...

History Meets Street Art in Adelaide...

History and street art are not something that you would think would ever be on the same page, let alone sentence, yet Peter Drew has managed to combine the two into an amazing art form. Peter’s collection of Adelaide’s Forgotten Outlaws  is the most amazing street art that I’ve ever seen, and I’m so fortunate that they have been showcased in my own home town.  Not only are they images simply stunning in their own right, they really are. But to know that they are portraits of actual criminals from Adelaide in the 1920s adds a whole new level of fascination and admiration. I can’t imagine what it would be like to actually see an image of an reli 2.5m high on a street wall. No doubt very surreal, but I still think it would be amazingly cool. Sadly none of the images are of my reli’s Before I go on, here’s the story of the Forgotten Outlaws street art from Peter himself … Having made illegal street art for years without being caught I’d started to forget that it was a crime. So when I was finally arrested I began to think more seriously about its criminality. This interest grew into a ‘side project’ which quickly blew out into the largest street art campaign I’ve undertaken. I started by searching through the police documents at the South Australian State Records. The photography of the early 1920s stood out immediately for its technical qualities so I narrowed my search to the record GRG5/58/unit103. I began selecting criminal’s mug shots based mostly on the immediate impact of the image. Whether through their defiant pride, amused irreverence or shamed humiliation some faces drew me in and those where the ones I...