The State of Firsts

South Australia’s celebration of the first ever AFLW showdown is a moment 126 years in the making.

The same year that the Victorian Football Club (now known as the Australian Football League) was founded, women in South Australia were already creating history.

We were the first state in Australia to allow women to vote and the first in the world to give our women the right to stand as members of parliament.

South Australia has a history of firsts. And we’re proud of that.

We were one of the first free settlements in the world.

We were the first Australian colony to ensure evidence from Aboriginals could be accepted in courts of law (1844).

We were the first to offer the vote to Aboriginal men alongside white men (1856) and the first colony in Australia (and the fourth place in the world) to grant adult women the right to vote…and this included Aboriginal women (1894).

Our state was the first part of the British Empire to legalise trade unions (1876); the first to prohibit discrimination on the grounds of race, colour or country of origin (1966); the first to decriminalise homsexuality (1975) and the first to return freehold title to Aboriginal communities (The Pitjantjatjara Land Rights Act 1976).

We achieved these reforms in the 19th and 20th century — because we were settled with a purpose.

At the launch of A New State of Mind, Premier Peter Malinauskas said it perfectly: “this is South Australia’s time”.

From our climate-friendly technology (we now rival Denmark as number one in wind and solar power generation in the world, and we expect to be the largest global generator of green hydrogen by 2025) to growth industries across defence, space, high value metals mining, health, medical and creative industries South Australia continues to show today – as it did 126 years ago – that we live and work with a deeper purpose.

Want to know more about the purpose you can find in South Australia? Read some inspiring stories of people who call South Australian home.