Adelaide is the only Australian capital settled entirely by free colonists, and the evidence stands in plain sight: Colonel Light's 1837 grid, bluestone gaols and asylums, and Kaurna Country along Karrawirra Pari. Three days of walking through it.
Australia's oldest Aboriginal-owned multi-arts centre, opened 1989 on Kaurna land at 253 Grenfell Street. Rotating galleries of First Nations painting, bark work and weaving, plus a shop buying direct from remote art centres.
Opened 1841 and one of the oldest surviving public buildings in South Australia, it held prisoners until 1988. Forty-five executions took place inside; the hanging tower, exercise yards and cell blocks are all walkable on a self-guided route.
An 1846 bluestone mansion on North Terrace, home of Henry Ayers, seven times Premier of South Australia. The hand-painted ceilings and stencilled walls by Charles Gow are the finest surviving colonial interior decoration in the state.
The River Torrens is Karrawirra Pari, the redgum forest river, and its banks were Kaurna camping ground long before 1836. The cast-iron rotunda arrived from Glasgow in 1882 and still faces the water it was built to overlook.
Housed in the 1852 Destitute Asylum on Kintore Avenue, where unmarried mothers and the destitute were confined. Galleries trace arrivals from German Lutherans in 1838 to postwar displaced persons, with the asylum's own grim record laid bare.
Unveiled 1931, carved from Angaston marble with a bronze Youth on the prologue face and Spirit of Duty on the epilogue. It anchors a monument walk running east past Light, Bragg and the Boer War horseman.
The West Wing opened 1889, the East Wing not until 1939 — fifty years of argument in one facade. Inside, South Australia's 1894 vote giving women both suffrage and the right to stand is documented where it was passed.
Licensed in 1846 on Stanley Street and among the longest continuously licensed pubs in South Australia. Low ceilings, original stone walls and a front bar that has served North Adelaide through six generations of publicans.
Set in an 1850s bond store on Lipson Street, in the state's only surviving intact colonial port precinct. Immigrant ship berths, the ketch trade and the 1869 Port Adelaide Lighthouse you can climb are all part of the ticket.
Australia's largest railway collection sits at 76 Lipson Street on the old Port Dock yards. Broad, standard and narrow gauge locomotives stand side by side — the physical evidence of colonies that could not agree on a rail width.
Governor Hindmarsh read the Proclamation establishing the province under this river red gum on 28 December 1836. The Bay Discovery Centre in Moseley Square adds the Kaurna and Holdfast Bay side of that landing.
Opened 1837, the oldest colonial cemetery still operating in Australia, with 150,000 burials across 27 hectares. Jewish, Quaker, Chinese and pauper sections map exactly how the young colony sorted its dead.