Adelaide

The Adelaide Plains are Kaurna country, a landscape of grassy woodland burned and managed for thousands of years, with the area of the city centre known as Tarntanya. In December 1836 the colony of South Australia was proclaimed at Glenelg, and Colonel William Light chose the site inland on the River Torrens. His plan of 1837 gave the new town a grid of wide streets, five public squares and a second grid across the river at North Adelaide, the whole surrounded by a belt of park lands that was never built on. The city was named after Queen Adelaide, the consort of William IV. Within a generation the Kaurna had been dispossessed of the plains.

South Australia took no convicts, and Adelaide grew instead on free settlement, wheat and minerals. Copper from Kapunda and Burra in the 1840s paid for the stone banks, churches and mansions that still line the centre, and German Lutheran settlers gave the surrounding valleys their villages and vineyards.

The twentieth century made the city industrial. Premier Thomas Playford's government, in office from 1938 to 1965, built factories, the satellite town of Elizabeth in the north and a British migrant population to staff them. Under Don Dunstan in the 1970s the state led the country in social reform and built the Festival Centre on the riverbank. Adelaide held the Formula One Australian Grand Prix from 1985 to 1995, after which it moved to Melbourne, car making ended with the closure of the Holden plant at Elizabeth in 2017, and the city has since leaned on defence shipbuilding, health, universities, wine and its festivals.

Adelaide's identity is built on festivals. For a few weeks from late February the Fringe fills theatres, tents, pubs and car parks with thousands of shows, the Adelaide Festival runs its curated programme alongside it, and WOMADelaide takes over Botanic Park; locals call the whole overlapping season Mad March. The city was named a UNESCO City of Music in 2015, and live music runs from pub rooms to the state orchestra.

Sport is the other constant. Two Australian rules clubs, the Adelaide Crows and Port Adelaide, share Adelaide Oval and divide the city between them, test cricket is played there in the summer, and in January the Tour Down Under brings professional cycling through the suburbs and hills.

The old reputation is of a quiet, church-going and slightly conservative city, and the nickname City of Churches has stuck to the spires along the terraces. The record is less tidy than that: South Australia legislated some of the country's earliest social reforms, and the small-bar laneways of Peel and Leigh streets came out of a deliberate loosening of licensing rules.

Postwar migration from Italy, Greece, Vietnam, China, India and Africa shaped the suburbs and their food, and Kaurna language and names are increasingly used, with Victoria Square also called Tarntanyangga and the Torrens known as Karrawirra Parri. Adelaide people are direct, proud of how easily their city works, and quick to note that everything is twenty minutes away.

Close to 1.5 million people live in Greater Adelaide, roughly three-quarters of the state's population, in a long, low-density metropolis stretching between the Mount Lofty Ranges and the gulf. The leafy inner east, the beach suburbs to the west, the old industrial north around Elizabeth and Salisbury, the southern suburbs towards Noarlunga and the villages of the hills all have distinct characters, and most households depend on a car.

Work has shifted from factories to services. Defence shipbuilding at Osborne, hospitals and the medical research precinct on North Terrace, the universities, wine, food processing, tourism and state government are the big employers, and the closure of car manufacturing still shapes the northern suburbs. Housing costs less than in Sydney or Melbourne but has risen sharply, and keeping graduates from moving interstate is a standing worry.

The rhythm of the day is early. Offices and schools start before eight, the city empties in the evening except in festival season, and summer life moves to the beaches, the parklands and backyard barbecues. Sundays are quiet by the standards of larger cities. Water is a constant concern in the driest state of the driest inhabited continent, and the health of the lower Murray, pressure on public hospitals and the risk of bushfire in the hills are the issues that recur in local news.

The Central Market, trading since 1869 in the middle of the city, is Adelaide's kitchen. Dozens of stalls sell cheese, smallgoods, bread, fruit, seafood and coffee, and the surrounding blocks hold Chinatown's food courts and the restaurants of Gouger Street, where Cantonese, Malaysian, Vietnamese and seafood kitchens sit side by side. A farmers' market runs at the showground, and Italian and Greek delicatessens are still a fixture of the inner suburbs.

Local specialities are cheap and particular. A yiros, the Adelaide name for the wrapped skewered meat sold late at night, is a city institution, as is the AB, a plate of chips, doner meat and sauces particular to the state. Pie carts once parked outside the railway station made the pie floater famous, and Haigh's has been making chocolate in the city since 1915. Frog cakes and pasties fill the bakery windows.

Seafood comes from the gulfs — King George whiting, garfish, blue swimmer crabs, prawns and oysters — and the produce of the hills and plains is close at hand. Wine is closer still. The Adelaide Hills begin twenty minutes from the centre, McLaren Vale and the Barossa are within an hour, and the Magill Estate, where Penfolds began in the 1840s, lies inside the eastern suburbs.