Adelaide

What do you know about Adelaide, South Australia? Until deciding to create this blogpost, I knew almost nothing apart from the fact that the blogger Elsie "River" lives there. I also knew that the city had been named after Queen Adelaide who married King William IV in 1818. She had previously been a German princess, born Adelheid of Saxe-Meiningen in 1792.

Okay let me give you some key facts about Adelaide - just the low hanging fruit of my googling. First of all, the city should be called Tarndanya which was a name that indigenous peoples had used for millennia to describe the location. It means "male red kangaroo rock" after a particular stone outcrop that disappeared forever as the first European settlement grew.

St Peter's Anglican Cathedral

Adelaide is Australia's fifth largest city. Its metropolitan area has a population of 1,469,163 so if you removed Elsie River it would be 1,469,162. Adelaide is known for its food and wine industries, its coastline and hills, and defence and manufacturing industries. The city "consistently ranked within the top-ten most liveable cities globally for much of the 21st century".

North Terrace in the centre of Adelaide

The population density is around 1,100 people per square mile compared with Greater London - 15,000 per square mile or New York City - 29,300 people per square mile. 

The Luxe Cafe and Bakery on Sheffield Street. The city also 

contains a Yorkshire Street and two Hull Streets.

Adelaide really only came into being in the 1840s. It was a well-planned city that employed a logical grid system for its central area which was deliberately ringed with green spaces. Unlike Sydney, Melbourne or Hobart it had no connection with historical penal servitude. In fact, the city's optimistic founding fathers thought that it would be so law-abiding that a prison would be unnecessary. Several prominent churches were built from local stone in the nineteenth century, including St. Peter's Cathedral. Even today, Adelaide is sometimes known as "The City of Churches".

Typical homes in the Aberfoyle Park district

Ethnically, Adelaide has a fairly diverse community with immigrants from China, Vietnam, India and Germany amongst others but the core population identifies its ethnic origins as English (36%) and Australian (29%). Only 1.6% of the population is "Australian Aboriginal". No longer do they gather serenely at that male red kangaroo rock, in dreams of the natural world they inhabited for fifty millennia, little changing, at peace with their environment. Now there are cars, sirens and trucks carrying their payloads to retail parks while aeroplanes rise and fall like huge birds of prey over at the international airport.

The top picture is from Google Images but the other five pictures of Adelaide and its environs were randomly snipped from Google Streetview as I cruised around enjoying the comfort of my computer chair.

Angas Inlet between Torrens Island and Garden Island