What Is A Person From Adelaide Called?

If you’re travelling to Adelaide it’s always appropriate wherever you travel to know how to address the locals and be respectful of them and their cultures. All over Australia, you will find each area has different names for the people that live there. Adelaide is no different.

The typical name for a person from Adelaide is called Adelaidean. While Adelaide is the capital of South Australia, you will be hard-pressed to find a person who identifies as Adelaidean, most will say that they are South Aussies. Australians from other states might call a person from South Australia a Croweater.

How South Australia Got Its Name

Aside from being the fact that it is in the Southern part of the continent of Australia, the main reason for it being South Australia is because it is named after the South Australian Company.

After the South Australian Colonisation Act was passed in 1834, George Fife Angas partnered with other merchants to start the South Australian Company. The company was founded in London to encourage the advance purchase of the land in the new colony.

In 1836, the capital of the new settlement was called Adelaide, after Queen Consort of King William IV. In July of that year, George Angas sent 4 fleets to Kangaroo Island, only to find that the island was not suitable for farming. It was then the Company moved to the mainland.

The first commercial building facility was the Rosetta Head Whaling Station in Encounter Bay on the mainland. Whaling, milling and fishing were the prime industries until the discovery of the Burra copper mine in 1848.

Before the British Empire came along in 1770, courtesy of Lieutenant James Cook, Adelaide was known as Tarntanya, which means red kangaroo rock by the local tribe. The First Nation people in Adelaide are the Kaurna people, and South Australia has over 30 Aboriginal tribes with different practices and languages.

Currently, Victoria Square also bears the name of Tarntanyangga. It was the central camp of the dundagunya tribe. There is a statue of Queen Victoria in the centre of the square, and it is still a common meeting place for many of the Kaurna people.

What Do You Call Someone From South Australia?

Officially, a person from South Australia is a South Australian, but ask the locals and they will be more specific. For example, a person living around the hills southeast of Adelaide would be from Adelaide Hills.

Those living near regions of McLaren Vale down south until Victor Harbor would say that they are from Fleurieu. If they are from Eyre, they are referring to the triangle region sandwiched between the Spencer Gulf and the Great Australian Bight.

If they say they are from Woop Woop, it means that they are from a very remote place in the outback and the town is not famous. Other ways you tell people you are from a remote area include Oodnagalahbi, Kickastickalong and Bullamakanka. Some old-timers will refer to the state as Posh Pocket, as it was the first free settlement on the continent.

How Did South Australians Get Their Nicknames?

In 1984, the coat of arms was proposed to have a koala and a wombat holding the shield-bearing an Australian Piping Shrike within a gold disk, with the Sturt’s desert pea on the top with a helmet. The grassy mount beneath the animals had fruits, a pickaxe, wheat and barley, and cogwheels.

The Coat of Arms was later changed to remove the koala and the wombat, but the rest remained the same. Hence, the people thought it featured a crow being served on a plate, and called the South Australians a Crow-eater.

Before 1984, the coat of arms features a man holding a sheer and sheep’s wool on the right, a woman holding wheat and a “horn of plenty”. On the top was England’s Golden Lion with the Southern Cross flag. The shield between the man and woman has a rising sun on a blue background.

Below the shield was a wattle plant with the motto “Faith and Courage” at the very bottom. The first coat of arms was granted by King Edward VIII when the country was founded in 1936.

Another enduring myth about Crow-eaters came from the days of the Gold Rush, where it is documented in a newspaper that a group of South Australians killed and ate crows as they had run out of food during their travels to Bendigo to pan for gold. No one knows if they did it to survive or for other reasons, but since then, anyone who came from South Australia became the Crow-eaters.

What Do South Australians Say Differently?

In 1839, a group of German Lutherans arrived to settle in South Australia, the group stayed on in the Adelaide Hills and established farmland to grow food. While the first winter was hard, the group managed to grow enough food to be sold in Adelaide. The women in the settlement would pack up the products and walk from the hills to town, lending some influence to the language in Adelaide.

Lending to the fact that South Australia has British and German settlers, the people of South Australia speak a little differently compared to the other states. In Adelaide, the tendency to use a broad A (ah) sound makes them sound posher. Other states pronounce the A as a flatter A (an).

Another difference is that South Australian drawls the L into W. This makes them sound more British and other states will think that a South Australian is a posh person.

There are also words that South Australians use more than other states. In Adelaide, fritz is luncheon meat created by a butcher named Fritz using top-end cuts of meat encased in the sheep’s appendix. Those power poles are known as Stobie poles, after James Stobie, the guy who used steel and concrete to hold power lines.

Are South Australians Posh?

Even though South Australia was the first free settlement in the country, and its people may sound a little posh (according to the rest of Australia), Adelaide is a laid-back and friendly city to be. Because the city is not big, you can get around places within 20 minutes.

The people of Adelaide are always ready to lend you a hand if you need help. They are also never too posh to eat a pie floater with a spoon.