South Australia (free-settler)

The colony that was planned, and never took convicts. South Australia was founded in 1836 on Edward Gibbon Wakefield's theory of systematic colonisation: land would be sold rather than granted, at a price high enough that labourers had to work before they could buy, and the proceeds would pay the passage of more emigrants. The scheme was meant to reproduce an English social order without transportation. It nearly went bankrupt within five years and was rescued by copper at Kapunda and Burra in the 1840s, but the free-settler founding stuck as an identity and still distinguishes the state. Religious dissenters came in numbers, including Lutherans fleeing Prussia who settled the Barossa and planted its vines, and the colony guaranteed religious freedom with no established church. That combination produced an unusual record of political firsts: South Australia gave women the vote in 1894, the first place in the world to also let them stand for parliament, and Aboriginal men had voted from 1856. Its planning ambitions extended to the map, with Adelaide laid out on a grid inside a ring of parkland by William Light. The wheat frontier pushed north until it hit Goyder's Line, a rainfall boundary surveyed in 1865 that farmers ignored and drought enforced. Dispossession was not gentler for being planned, and the Kaurna were displaced from the Adelaide plains within a generation. The state now leads the country in wind and solar generation. Adelaide is the capital. The Coober Pedy opal fields are largely underground. Roxby Downs holds one of the world's largest uranium deposits. The state's wine regions supply most of Australia's exports.

• Existed: 1836 CE – present
• Type: Entity