Our Monday in Adelaide started with breakfast at our hotel (with no espresso machine!) and then a facetime chat with Arthur and Hannah (with a cameo appearance by Carrie). Always a great way to start the day!

We then headed out for a three-hour walking tour. We walked all over the CBD and learned a ton about Adelaide and the state it is in, South Australia. We were told by our Cairns tour guide that South Australia is very proud of the fact that it is the only Australian state that was not built by the forced labor of convicts sent from Britain, and our Adelaide tour guide confirmed that. Instead, Adelaide was started by selling plots of land to investors in Great Britain for a colony in the general area–the exact site for the colony had not yet been chosen. The money earned from selling the unspecified land was used to finance nine ships full of British citizens who freely chose to come here.

Adelaide is a planned city designed with a one-mile square town center with a somewhat smaller residential area on the other side of the River Torrens. Both areas are laid out in a grid and are surrounded by greenspace still to this day–expansion of the city has occurred beyond the greenspace. It is about ten kilometers from the ocean because that was determined by the original settlers to be a better place to build than the marshy, flood-prone land on the coast.

South Australia has always been a progressive place–for example, it was the first Australia state to allow women to vote (in 1894), and Adelaide University was the first college in Australia and the second in the English-speaking world to allow women to enroll in all majors. Our tour guide also said that South Australia has been more progressive with regard to the civil rights of indigenous people than the rest of Australia.

Here are some photos from our tour:

The photo below is a building on the campus of the University of Adelaide. The man who donated the money to build the building stipulated that it had to be built in a specific location because building it there would prevent the city from extending a city road through campus, which was being considered to ease traffic problems. It also had to have slanted floors, because he was a staunch Methodist and did not want his building to be used for dancing.

The photo below is a statue of a famous comedic actor Rene Roy, who was known for playing a character named Mo McCackie from the 1930s to the 1950s. He apparently had several catch phrases that became part of the Australian lexicon, including “Don’t come the raw prawn with me,” which means don’t try to trick me. I think I’ve done pretty well weaving the Australian use of across into my daily speech, as in, “Are you across the story of Mo McCackie and his catch phrases?” but I’m not sure the raw prawn one is going to make the cut.

Our tour guide said this fountain has been on the Rundle Mall–a long pedestrian shopping and dining area–since it opened in 1976, and on opening day champagne flowed from it! And yes, that is a K-Mart in the background; apparently it did not go bankrupt here like it did in the U.S.

He also told us the story of the Beatles visiting Adelaide in 1964. The city was not originally included in their Australian tour, but the city lobbied for it and the Beatles added the city and played three shows here. Over 300,000 people came out to welcome them to Adelaide, which is said to be the largest crowd the Beatles ever attracted. They greeted the city from a balcony on town hall; there is a picture of them from that day on that balcony today. Look carefully–you will notice that there was a substitute for one of the band members. Ringo apparently had tonsilitis, the the Beatles in Adelaide were John, Paul, George . . . and Jimmie.

This wasn’t part of the tour, but we thought this bike repair station was cool:

After our tour, I went back to the hotel do work on this blog post and do some planning for our next stops, and Rich wandered around the city. We met up for some shopping on Rundle Street and then went to dinner. While we were eating dinner at a sidewalk cafe, we were treated to an impromptu Irish dancing performance by some preteen girls in town for a competition. You could tell they genuinely loved performing, so they were really fun to watch! We then took the free city tram back to our hotel.