The Patriotism Bit

(Or, Why I Love My Home State, aka This is All Karlie's Fault)

I was born in Adelaide, South Australia, and I grew up in the city. It's not a big city, as far as the world goes, after all, it only has 1 million people. But that's enough to make it a reasonably large metropolis, so you'd think you wouldn't have to live in Australia to know where it is. After all, you ask an Australian to point out, say, Liverpool on a map of England and you'd have a pretty good chance of them striking gold. But say you come from Adelaide, and you get the "where's that" response so often you end up defaulting to "Adelaide, South Australia".

Amazing that hardly anyone's heard about such a nice place. We've got a Mediterranean style climate, the perfect kind of habitat when you think about it. It never gets down below freezing in winter, and the summers are not as extreme as they could be. The city is full of parklands, and has been ever since Colonel Light laid out the central plan. You can drive up to the Adelaide Hills in a half hour and get a brilliant vista over the whole of the city from the summit of Mount Lofty (gotta love the sense of humour of those early explorers). Or you can take a day trip out to the Barossa Valley, the Southern Vales, Victor Harbor, Murray Bridge, etc.

There's not a lot to see tourist wise in Adelaide proper, which is partially what makes it such a great place to live. It's a great place to live, but I wouldn't want to visit, is my description of Adelaide.

The other great bits:

We have the world's best Australian Rules Football team, the Adelaide Crows (Go you Crows!)
We have the best University in Australia (IMHO, and also in the opinion of the grant-giving research councils), the University of Adelaide.
Almost all of my old Uni friends are still living in Adelaide.

If you would like to see more gratuitous South Australian references on this page, please feel free to contact me.

This page was last updated: Sunday, April 19, 1998.