On 16 December 1871, businessman (and former convict) Emanuel Solomon placed an advertisement in the South Australian Register announcing that he would host a banquet at the Adelaide Town Hall to celebrate the 35th anniversary of the proclamation of South Australia. In doing so, he unwittingly set in motion the creation of a series of photographic mosaics depicting 19th-century settler society that is unique in Australasia.
In 2007, the State Library of South Australia embarked on a project to preserve and digitise ‘Old Colonist’ mosaics and a later series of ‘northern pioneers’, and worked to identify the more than 1700 men and women depicted. The inscription of the collection on the Australian Register of the UNESCO Memory
