The powerful party whose pecuniary interests and personal pride, as colonising philosophers, are alike concerned in upholding the system on which South Australia was founded, have long been in the habit of attributing the rise of that colony to the merits of their system, and its fall to the extravagance of Colonel Gawler; and they have passed uncontradicted, because actual colonists are ill represented in Parliament and the press, and it has not been worth the while of the public to dive into blue books or examine colonial evidence for the truth.[1]
A very slight examination of the history of South Australia will show that it was what is called the extravagance of Colonel Gawler which caused those sales of land, that export of emigrants, that speculation in building lots and houses which was supposed to be prosperity. If a million sterling had been at the disposal of the governor at the time when, to speak commercially, the colonial government stopped payment, the mania for land-buying might have been continued some time longer, but it must have stopped sooner or later, just as the railway-scrip mania came to an end, because the purchasers and sellers were producing nothing; and no amount of imported population and capital could have made the colony produce enough to pay for its consumption until time had been given to raise some staple article saleable in a foreign market. Wool cannot be produced, like calico or cloth, by steam power; for agricultural produce there was no foreign demand worth mentioning; the existence of mineral wealth was not suspected. When Colonel Gawler resigned his office into the hands of his successor, South Australia was in debt about £400,000, on account of the colonial government; the private debts of the colonists to English merchants were at least as much more. The utmost extent of excess in Colonel Gawler's expenditure was £20,000, or five per cent. on the expenses.
It always takes a considerable time to inoculate the English people with new ideas. About the time that Captain Hindmarsh was recalled and Colonel Gawler sailed, the fruits of skilful agitation began to be reaped by the South Australian Commissioners. No unfavourable accounts of the new colony were allowed to appear in any organ of influence; flourishing reports of the beauty, the fertility, and the commercial importance of the new city were industriously circulated. Colonel Torrens, in lectures he condescended to deliver, stated and believed that the situation of the city of Adelaide would give it the same importance with respect to the valley of the Murray that New Orleans held with respect to the valley of the Mississippi:—the Murray,
- ↑ This, true when written, has ceased to be true in 1853, since the failure of Canterbury colony—a failure predicted by the author.
