The Three Colonies of Australia/Part 1/Chapter 19
CHAPTER XIX.
SOUTH AUSTRALIA.
1835 TO 1851.
LORD ALVANLEY, stopping at a country inn, met Beau Brummel's valet descending the stairs with an armful of crumpled clean cravats. "Pray," he inquired, "what are those?" "These, my lord," replied the valet, "are my master's failures." When the Beau emigrated to Calais, amongst other creditors, he owed an enormous bill to his laundress.
South Australia was the first, as Canterbury, in New Zealand, was the last, of Mr. Edward Gibbon Wakefield's colonising failures—failures which have been tried at the expense of every class of capitalist. But, his credit being now exhausted, it seems as if he would end his days without a good fit, thus, sharing the fate of other unfortunate philosophers and financiers, like Law, Owen, Cabet, and Louis Blanc, with this difference, that those gentlemen all sacrificed something to their theories—they lost fortune, or character, or country; but Mr. Wakefield, while his disciples have suffered in purse and in person, has contrived to patch up a character originally much damaged, and build a living, if not a fortune, out of a series of bubbles.
In 1829 Mr. Wakefield's charming little book, which was analysed in Chapter IX., with its really ingenious theory and really desirable aims—good wages, large profits, and complete civilisation—took the active world by storm; and no sooner was the serious business of carrying the Reform Bill completed, than a society was formed for carrying it into practical effect.
The extraordinary success with which this theory was received at home, although opposed by every intelligent colonist, may be traced to the skilful manner in which it combined the interests and conciliated the prejudices of the legislative and middle as well as the executive class. The capitalist for the first time saw himself painted as an injured victim, and presented with a new field for ample profits; the ratepayer was charmed at the idea of getting rid of an unlimited number of paupers; the educated gentleman hoped to live on his £20,000 with all the state, dignity, and luxury, physical and intellectual, that a landed estate of 100,000 confers in England or Scotland. The adventurous of the middle class dwelt on the charms of distinction which would be open to them in a new colony; while to ardent politicians and essayists, who in 1830 were for the most part deeply dissatisfied with all our ancient institutions, the idea of becoming founders and modellers of a model commonwealth was truly delightful. Even the government was eventually conciliated by the prospect of additional patronage which a new colony presented.
In 1831 Major Bacon, a fellow-soldier in the Spanish Legion with Colonel Wakefield, brother to the theorist, appears to have opened negotiations at the Colonial Office, then under Lord Goderich, for establishing a chartered colony in some part of Australia; and in 1832 these negotiations had so far progressed that a provisional committee of the South Australian Land Company had been formed, with Colonel Torrens, then one of the proprietors of the Globe newspaper, as its chairman, with a proposed capital of £50,000.
In a letter dated 9th July, 1832, Colonel Torrens transmitted a draft of the charter suggested by his committee, and drawn under the instructions of Mr. Wakefield. On perusing this draft Lord Goderich curtly closed the negotiation, on the ground that "it would virtually transfer to the company the sovereignty of a vast unexplored territory; that it would encroach upon the limits of the existing colonies of New South Wales and Western Australia; that the charter would invest the company, with powers of legislation, of erecting courts, of appointing judges, of raising and commanding militia; that all the powers of the company, involving in their practical effects the sovereign dominion of the whole territory, would be transferred to a popular assembly, which would be to erect within the British monarchy a government purely republican; and that the company would be receivers of large sums of money, for the due application of which they do not propose to give any specific security."
When the promoters offered to modify their plan they were informed, "that the views entertained by the proposed company are not sufficiently precise and determined to lead his lordship to apprehend that any advantage will arise from continuing a correspondence that has for some time been going on."
In 1833 another association was formed, and the chairman, W. W. Whitmore, Esq., M.P., opened negotiations with the present Earl of Derby, then Under Secretary for the Colonies. He proposed to found a colony on the site where it was eventually planted, to sell land at 5s. an acre ("this will ensure the concentration of settlers in proportion to the price at which land is sold"), and devote the proceeds to the conveyance of young pauper labourers of both sexes in equal numbers. The company to have a million acres at 5s. an acre. "On this land they will perform" such works as they may deem expedient, with a view to attract population thereto, while government will sell in an entirely unimproved state the land not purchased by the company to any individuals desirous of purchasing it."
This association, which contemplated fame and patronage rather than profit, included George Grote, the eminent historian of Greece; William Hutt, afterwards Governor of Western Australia; Henry Bulwer, since an Ambassador and K.C.B.; Colonel Torrens; H. G. Ward, since Governor of the Ionian Islands and K.C.B.; J. A. Roebuck; Sir William Molesworth; Benjamin Hawes, since Colonial Under Secretary; and Edward Strutt, since Chief Commissioner of Railways.
This negotiation also failed. Mr. Gibbon Wakefield's charter was not approved.
While approving of the plan of colonisation suggested as regarded the disposal of land, Mr. Secretary Stanley insisted that the government of the colony should be left in the hands of the crown until such tune as it was able to govern itself.[1]
After receiving this communication the South Australian Association decided to continue their operations for the purpose of forming a crown colony, provided that, by Act of Parliament, provision were made for the permanent establishment of the mode of disposing of waste land, and of the purchase-money of such land, devised by Mr. Gibbon Wakefield.
Before the negotiation concluded Mr. Stanley resigned. Mr. Spring Rice (now Lord Monteagle) became Secretary for the Colonies. Under his administration an act was passed, in the session of 1834, substantially embodying the terms agreed upon with Mr. Stanley, by which the present province of South Australia was established, the minimum price of land fixed at 12s. an acre, and the business of colonisation was placed in the hands of a body of commissioners.
Lord Aberdeen having become Secretary for the Colonies, eight commissioners were selected from the members of the South Australian Association, and gazetted May, 1835, Colonel Torrens being appointed chairman, because, as he stated in his letter of application, he had "more knowledge of the object and principles of the proposed colony than any of the other gentlemen willing to act."
It is important to note that, although the Colonial Office refused to permit the foundation of a chartered colony, in which the government and responsibility would have been in the hands of the colonisers, from first to last the personal friends and pupils of Mr.Wakefield had the sole control of every arrangement and the selection of every officer, and that every step was taken under the advice of Mr. Gibbon Wakefield, who was a constant attendant at the rooms of the association in the Adelphi.
The commissioners first offered the post of governor to the present distinguished General (then Colonel) Charles James Napier; but on being refused a small body of troops as police, and power to draw on the British government for money in case of need, he declined the dangerous honour, observing, with wise prescience, "While sufficient security exists for the supply of labour in the colony, and even forces that supply, there does not appear to be any security that the supply of capital will be sufficient to employ that labour." Thus South Australia lost an active governor, and India obtained a great general. Of two governors subsequently appointed, one was compelled to overdraw 400,000, and the next obtained a company of soldiers in lieu of an expensive police. The commissioners then selected as governor Captain Hindmarsh, R.N., a distinguished naval-officer, now Sir John Hindmarsh, Governor of Heligoland, and Colonel Light as chief officer of the survey department; Mr. Fisher, as resident commissioner; Mr. Robert Gouger, the editor of the "Letter from Sydney" and secretary of the South Australian Association, as colonial secretary—in all seventeen appointments, including two attorneys, and an unsuccessful merchant, "who had been found useful to the commission in selling land and raising money." The parties selected seem to have been studiously chosen for their innocence of all colonial, official, and agricultural experience.
While the political steps for founding the model colony were progressing, means for agitating the public mind in favour of emigration, on the new principle, to the unknown territory selected by the South Australian Association had not been neglected.
The theory propounded in the "Letter from Sydney" had been repeated and enlarged upon in a work called "England and America," and in a multitude of pamphlets, reviews in newspapers, speeches, and lectures. The active world began to believe that a political philosopher's stone had been discovered.
A newspaper, the South Australian Gazette, was published in London, with the view of being transplanted to the new colony as soon as a hut could be found for its reception; while the most influential daily and weekly organs re-echoed the statements and conclusions which received the admiring assent of all parties. Anything in the shape of opposition, or even doubtful criticism, from persons of colonial experience, was greeted with the utmost degree of scorn and contempt. They were hissed down, unheard, as the most stupid or jealously envious of mortals. The friends of Mr. Wakefield's theory had, from the first taken it for granted that nothing but the basest motives could induce any one to hesitate in accepting their panacea for colonial ills, and they had the same advantage in attacking the Colonial Office that a quack like Morison or Holloway has in ridiculing a venerable, high-charging, pill-and-potion, bleed-and-blister practitioner of the old bag-wig school.
A small book, published in 1834, entitled "The New British Province of South Australia, with an account of the Principles, Objects, Plan, and Prospects of the colony," one of scores of the same tendency which appeared about the same time, is a favourable and temperate specimen and the ingenious literary agitation which Mr. Wakefield perfected, if he did not invent. This work, adorned with maps, a picture of a bay, with palm trees and an emu, commences with an extract from one of Archbishop Whately's speeches, which now sounds excessively absurd, but which was then received with enthusiasm:—
"A colony so founded would fairly represent English society: every new comer would have his own class to fall into, and to whatever class he belonged he would find its relation to the others, and the support derived from the others much the same as in the parent country. There would be little more revolting to the feelings of an emigrant than if he had merely shifted his residence from Sussex to Cumberland or Devonshire."
And then, after devoting many pages to disparaging all other colonies and systems of colonisation, and promising a supply of labour and a state of refinement equal to that of an old colony, a considerable space is devoted to a description of the proposed country, particularly "Kangaroo Island," and its resources, with a list of probable exports. Seldom have more errors been propagated in so few pages, in so formal, so positive, and so pompous a manner. Out of five pages of tabulated exports only one, "wool," has been obtained, and that, not as promised, in greater, but in less quantities than in the older colonies. The means of communication promised by the seacoast, the Lake Alexandria, and the River Murray, remain unused to this hour, and Kangaroo Island is still a solitary waste.
A day in Adelaide at any time, from the founding of the city down to the time when the last ship left the port, would show how absurdly the following premises have been falsified:—
These were the inducements held out with eminent success to tempt men most unfit for the toil of early colonisation to emigrate to a colony which was to be founded, not by slow degrees, but complete. The land was to be sold in England, at such a fixed price as would, by preventing labourers from becoming landowners "too soon," preserve a "hired labour price," and secure high profits on good wages. The proceeds of the land sold were to be applied to supplying labourers with free passages, and thus a complete section of all the ranks and classes composing the parent state was to be transplanted, full grown, to the antipodes.
In the commencement the commissioners found difficulty in selling the quantity of land and raising a sufficient amount of the loan of £200,000, at £10 per cent., authorised by the government. But eventually these difficulties were overcome by the active assistance of Mr. G.. F. Angas, and Mr. John Wright, the once eminent and afterwards notorious banker of Covent Garden.
Mr. Angas resigned his post as commissioner, and formed the South Australian Company, which commenced operations by purchasing a large quantity of land from the commissioners with certain special privileges. A sum of £30,000 completed the preliminary financial operations, and the first part of the colonising career of South Australia commenced.
The South Australian Company, which had obtained special privileges in consideration of their large and early purchase, lost no time in sending out a pioneer expedition, with emigrants and officers, to make preparations for carrying on every kind of pursuit considered likely to be profitable in a colony—farming, sheep-feeding, banking, building, and whaling. We may mention here that after an experience of eleven years the company have found reason to subside into the humble but more profitable position of absentee landholders and land jobbers.
Colonel Light was despatched by the commissioners in March, 1836, and a surveying staff and a few emigrants; and when he arrived at the appointed rendezvous in Nepean Bay, on the 19th August, he found three vessels of the South Australian Company, which had brought a body of emigrants who were settled on Kangaroo Island; and in November the Africaine arrived with the colonial secretary, a banking association, and a newspaper.
In July Captain Hindmarsh, the governor, sailed in the Buffalo, a vessel of war, with a number of emigrants.
All this was done before the commissioners had received any report as to the suitability of the district selected for supporting emigrants.
Kangaroo Island, which had figured largely in prospectuses and speeches, was found to be unfit for colonisation, after time and money had been wasted by emigrants and the company in building and clearing. Colonel Light landed in the Gulf of St. Vincent, and after a survey fixed upon the site of the present city of Adelaide for the capital, and the present Port Adelaide for its harbour. It was then a narrow, rather shallow creek, about as wide as the Thames at Richmond, leading out of St. Vincent's Gulf. The landing was in a mangrove swamp, seven miles from the intended capital. Wharves, deep dredging, a solid road, and other improvements have now transformed the mangrove creek into a good harbour, not inconveniently distant from the capital, to which it will be soon united by a railway.
Governor Hindmarsh arrived on 28th of December, 1836, read his commission under a gum tree, in presence of about two hundred emigrants and officials; and then, looking round, felt extremely dissatisfied with the selection made by the resident commissioner and the surveyor-general. That he should have been dissatisfied with a selection which placed the capital in a picturesque but hot valley far from a port, and without the use of a navigable river, and that he should as a sailor have been forcibly impressed with the fearful cost of landing and conveying cargoes to the interior from such a harbour, is not extraordinary; nevertheless experience has proved that the site was as good as any that could have been chosen, and art has corrected the defects of nature.
Governor Hindmarsh attempted to change the site of Adelaide. Differences of a serious character arose between him and the resident commissioner: the colony became divided into two parties, one of which supported the governor and the other the resident commissioner. Both parties were greatly to blame. Lord Glenelg settled the question by. acceding to the request of the commissioners and recalling Captain Hindmarsh. In the sequel the site of the capital to which Captain Hindmarsh had objected was retained, and almost all the officials, from whom he had experienced most vexatious and insolent opposition, were found either incompetent or corrupt, and dismissed by his successor.[2]
To replace Captain Hindmarsh the commissioners recommended and secured the appointment of Lieutenant-Colonel George Gawler. 
Adelaide from "The Hills"
At the same time that Colonel Gawler was appointed governor he was also made resident commissioner—vice Mr. Fisher, dismissed—and thus united in his own person all the administrative powers of the colony.
In order to obtain money to commence operations, before the colony had been surveyed or even settled, the commissioners issued "preliminary orders," as a bonus to the first purchasers and colonists, at £72 12s. each, which entitled the purchaser to select, in a rotation settled by lottery, 120 acres of country land, and one acre in the intended capital of the intended colony. This capital city, before discovery or survey, was settled by the commissioners to consist of 1,200 acres, or nearly nine square miles—a space sufficient to accommodate the population of Westminster. As soon as the capital, Adelaide, had been selected and mapped, the holders of preliminary orders, forming the first body of colonists, selected their sections, and the whole surplus was put up for auction to the colonists, "as a reward for their enterprise," and sold at an average rate of £2 per acre. Thus, more than ten times the space that has ever been required was turned into and perpetually dedicated to building land. From that moment the great object of the first colonists became to puff, magnify, and sell to future colonists their building land in Adelaide. No crop was so profitable as land left in a state of nature, but called and sold for a street.
The first operation having been performed, by which the future site of what was intended to be a great city had been transferred into the hands of a few persons, chiefly consisting of the friends of the commissioners and the officials of the South Australian Company, the next was to sell as much land as possible in England, by giving English purchasers a decided advantage over those who, nevertheless intending to emigrate, declined to buy a pig in a poke.
Accordingly land orders were issued at 80 each, which entitled the holder to select eighty acres of country land in the order dictated by the date of payment. Thus, when any particularly desirable plot of land was brought into the market, a speculation arose to discover and purchase the oldest "order" in the colony. A class of Adelaide brokers arose who dealt in and professed to put a value on these "scrip," according to their respective dates. Sometimes an emigrant who had been months in the colony would be superseded by the holder of the land order of an absentee sent at the latest moment by ship letter. It was a foreshadowing of the railway stagging of 1846, and a revival of the famous days of the South Sea Bubble. On one occasion the supposed discovery of a lead mine, under an eighty-acre section, sent up the earliest-dated order to a premium of £500. After all there was no lead mine; but the lucky purchaser, being in command of the market made use of a later order, and reserved his £500 prize for future use.
After five days of the week had been consumed by those who purchased "land orders" in England in selecting the best sections, on the sixth the colonising emigrant who had preferred seeing before investing, or the frugal labourer who had saved enough to work for himself on his own land, was allowed to take his pick of the refuse. Such parties were required to send in a sealed tender. A person tendering for several adjoining sections had the preference over a person tendering for a single section. Thus, in every way, the cultivating colonist was discouraged, and land-jobbing speculation invited.
That no element of confusion might be wanting in the land arrangements of the model colony, the commissioners devised, and Mr. Wakefield approved, the "special survey system," which enabled them to raise large sums of money, by offering special privileges to capitalists; and it proved most effective in England. Under this system a capitalist was entitled to have 15,000 acres surveyed in any part of the province, on condition that he purchased not less than 4,000 acres at £1 an acre. In South Australia, as in New South Wales, there is a great scarcity of water, and good cultivable land lies only in patches surrounded by other land which is, at best, only fit for pasture. By judicious management the purchaser of a special survey could command all the water, and all the pastoral advantages of 15,000 acres, by purchasing 4,000; the remainder, 11,000 acres, being useless to any one else, fell naturally in his occupation, at an average of 5s. 4d. an acre. To increase the mischief, purchasers of special surveys were permitted to establish secondary towns, in addition to Adelaide, which was twenty times too large for the population; while the staff of surveyors were continually interrupted in their regular work, to the great injury of cultivating emigrants, in order to make these special surveys, at an expense often exceeding the total value of the purchase-money.
In a very short time all the good land in the neighbourhood of Adelaide was monopolised by the absentee capitalists and proprietors of the South Australian Company.
In a word, the whole system discouraged the proper pursuits of colonists, and propagated a spirit of land-jobbing, which, by its apparent profits, very soon infected the neighbouring colonies, and bewildered and deceived the merchants, the legislature, and the colonial department of Great Britain.
At an epoch in the existence of an infant state, when the first settlers ought to consist of a few gardeners, a few shepherds, a few farmers, and a few mechanics, with half a dozen men of superior attainments and energy, and plenty of sheep and cattle, and when a village with a wharf was all the town needed, South Australia had nine square miles of building land, a bank, two newspapers, and a population of speculative gentlemen. In England, paragraphs carefully culled from South Australian land sellers' newspapers were circulated as accompaniments to flaming advertisements in the English press, with the lectures and speeches of well-paid agents of the South Australian interest, combined to raise the colonising speculations and movements to fever pitch about the time that Colonel Gawler anchored in St. Vincent's Gulf.
- ↑ Letter from John Lefevre, Esq., to W. W. Whitmore, Esq., M.P., dated Downing-street, 17th March, 1834.
- ↑ The most serious evils that befel the South Australian colonists arose from the precipitancy with which emigrants were sent out, before the surveyor-general had reported whether the country was fit for settlement, and before any preparation had been made, by roads, wharves, barracks, conveyances, surveys, and importation of live stock, for employing or feeding emigrants, But it seems part of the system to care rather for producing a sensation of doing business in England than for the welfare of the emigrants. The same error was committed at Wellington, in New Zealand, where, with a shipload of colonists going they knew not where, Colonel Wakefield was obliged to settle at Wellington a fine harbour shut out by inaccessible mountains from the adjoining country. Even expensive military roads have not yet opened out land enough to feed the town population; and two secondary settlements at Wanganui, distant 100 miles, and New Plymouth were formed in order to obtain the quantity of land sold in England. On a second occasion Nelson was chosen without proper survey, where, in order to find land enough, two thousand colonists are obliged to spread over 150 miles of coast. Even in founding Canterbury, Mr. Wakefield had influence enough to persuade the directors to send out, at an enormous useless extra expense, a fleet of four large ships half filled, to the great inconvenience of the first colonists, in order to make a sensation in the English newspapers. The expedient failed.