The lands administrative divisions of South Australia are the cadastral (i.e., comprehensively surveyed and mapped) units of counties and hundreds in South Australia. They are located only in the south-eastern part of the state, and do not cover the whole state. 49 counties have been proclaimed across the southern and southeastern areas of the state historically considered to be arable and thus in need of a cadastre. Within that area, a total of 540 hundreds have been proclaimed, although five were annulled in 1870, and, in some cases, the names reused elsewhere.
All South Australian hundreds have unique names, making it unnecessary, when referring to a hundred, to also name its county (as is done in some land administration systems such as that of New South Wales).
With the exception of the historic Hundred of Murray (1853–1870), which occupied parts of five counties, all hundreds have been defined as a subset of a single county.
The hundreds of South Australia formed the basis for the establishment boundaries of most of the earliest local government bodies (that is, district councils). By the 1930s most of the settled hundreds in the state had their own district councils.[1] In the case of heavily settled lands, like the hundreds of Adelaide and Yatala, multiple town and city councils shared the governance of a single hundred. In the case of sparsely populated rural lands, adjacent hundreds were represented by a single district council. In every case, the hundred boundaries largely shaped the initial boundaries of such district councils, as seen with the large-scale expansion of South Australian local government in the District Councils Act 1887.
- ^ Marsden, Susan (2012). "A History of South Australian Councils to 1936" (PDF). Local Government Association of South Australia. Retrieved 19 July 2017.
From the 1850s until the 1930s, as a general rule, every settled Hundred gained and retained its own District Council.