From a backyard party to SA's biggest celebration: 175 years of the Royal Adelaide Show

Updated

Once a show in the yard of a Grenfell Street pub, now the Royal Adelaide Show has grown to be one of Australia’s most successful agricultural celebrations.

It is now a 10-day event that attracts close to 500,000 visitors.

The Royal Agricultural and Horticultural Society was established in 1839 and is the second oldest organisation in South Australia.

The society hosted its first four shows in a pub yard off Grenfell Street before moving to a site near where the Royal Adelaide Hospital now sits.

Following a visit by Prince Alfred in 1867, the society received approval by Queen Victoria in 1869 and were allowed to add Royal to the title.

It wasn’t until 1925 that the show arrived at its current location of the Wayville Showgrounds, where it has been held since.

Although it is celebrating its official 175th anniversary, this year’s show will be the 239th the society has run.

“For many years there was a spring and autumn show,” society president Richard Fewster said.

The show was not run during World War I and World War II and was cancelled for one year to help stop the spread of the Spanish plague in 1919.

Show bags and wild rides

Sample bags were introduced to Adelaide show crowds in the 1950s, with stall holders seeing the bags as a perfect way to introduce their products to those passing by.

Businesses slowly transitioned to selling the show bags, with more than 350 different bags now available.

Horse rides made way for rollercoaster rides, with the likes of the Mad Mouse scaring the daylights out of generations of South Australians until it was replaced in 2008 by the Big Dipper Loop Coaster.

Agriculture and Horticulture

As the society’s name suggests, the show was originally built around showcasing the state’s best in agriculture and horticulture.

The popularity away from the likes of sideshow alley continues to grow, with 61 different competitions attracting a record 31,280 entries for the show in 2013.

If we don’t stay relevant and make it entertaining we are going to go like a lot of shows have around the world and disappear. Richard Frewster, Royal Adelaide Show Society president

From the animals that call the showgrounds home for the period of the show, more than 220 dozen eggs are collected from the poultry stand and donated to the Salvation Army and 125 cows are milked each day.

Animals have always been a major drawcard for the organisation, with a few interruptions including horses being withdrawn for the first year in 2007 due to an equine influenza scare and brief interruptions due to Ovine Johne’s disease with sheep.

“While it took away some of our display, it actually drew home the importance of biosecurity in agriculture and it was deemed important enough not to bring horses to the show and risk the spread,” Mr Fewster said of the 2007 equine withdrawal.

"To me the sideshow and all of those other things are part of the celebration.

"The celebration of excellence of agriculture."

The people behind the scenes

It was a small group of volunteers that originally launched the Royal Adelaide Show, and as the event has grown, so has the need for volunteer judges, marshals and board members.

Hundreds of volunteers now work to make the show appear a seamless event.

Non-paid workers fill a wide and varied selection of roles as unusual as an official horse measurer that checked the heights of the 332 competition horses last year, to the judges that will present the 16,993 ribbons for prize winners in 2014.

Relevance and entertainment the keys to the future

Mr Fewster believes the main reasons the Royal Adelaide Show has survived for 175 years are staying relevant to the day’s society and offering many forms of free entertainment.

“We are competing with a whole lot of other activities today,” Mr Fewster said.

“If we don’t stay relevant and make it entertaining we are going to go like a lot of shows have around the world and disappear.”

The show's average attendance has gone from four hours to seven hours in recent exit surveys.

Mr Fewster believes the organisation's focus on offering more than 100 free activities which are included in the admission price has kept it relevant to current audiences and allowed those on a tight budget to still enjoy a full day of entertainment.

Topics: agricultural-shows, adelaide-5000

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