Adelaide Aboriginal History

Adelaide is an exciting City filled of diversity and heritage, and is a great place to discover the secrets of the past.

Prior to European settlement, the Adelaide Plains were solely occupied by Aboriginal People.

A hunter-gatherer society, the Kaurna People lived on Adelaide’s coastline where seafood was plentiful and would move inland upon changing conditions.

The tribe was grouped into smaller self-governing family structures and lived in separate territories and during times of hardship, the whole group would come together and live on land with resources sufficient to sustain the entire tribe.

These special principals of sharing land and resources conflicted with the values of the Europeans who settled in Adelaide in 1836, and before long much of the Kaurna culture ceased to exist.

Over time, this missing piece of Adelaide’s history has been rediscovered, and the Kaurna language and culture has been revived.