Population 1881

A map of population distribution is one of the most effective ways of showing the relationship between a society and the land it occupies. The maps (1) and (2) depict the South Australian population as recorded in two censuses a hundred years apart. The census taken in South Australia on 3 April 1881 was part of the first simultaneous census taken in the Australian colonies and in most of what was then the British Empire. It was also the first South Australian census to record the population of small towns and villages in a manner suitable for mapping.

In 1881 there were 276,327 people in South Australia apart from the 3538 recorded in the Northern Territory. The South Australian population had just experienced one of its most rapid periods of growth; there were nearly 65,000 more South Australians than at the previous census of 1876, reflecting a never-to-be-repeated annual rate of growth of 6%. The metropolitan dominance of Adelaide had already been well established. Although the census did not attempt to define the limits of Adelaide and its suburbs, 'urban Adelaide' is the area on the Adelaide Plains south of Grand Junction Road. With 100,926 people, the urban area so defined had 36% of the South Australian population and was eighteen times greater than Moonta, the second largest town. The main zone of rural settlement extended from Victor Harbor in the south to Hawker in the north; it closely matched the distribution of soils most favoured for wheat growing in the nineteenth century - hard red duplex soils and calcareous earths. A secondary zone of settlement was in the South-East on the drier and more fertile soils. These two zones contained a sprinkle of sixty small towns and villages of less than a thousand people. There were eleven towns, apart from Adelaide, with more than a thousand people; their combined population of 21,318 was only 7.7% of the South Australian total, leaving 56.3% of South Australians in the category that recent censuses class as 'rural'.