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of Adelaide, all hopeful, active, speculating, dealing with each other and with each party of newly-arrived emigrants, full of magnificent plans for every sort of investment, in markets, warehouses, arcades, ship-building, and whaling. A bit of painted board nailed to a tree created a Wakefield, a Torrens, an Angas, or Whitmore street. All the notabilities of the South Australian interest were thus immortalized. Each speculator having so large a space to deal with endeavoured to draw the tide of trade or fashion into his own locality, and thus, instead of one compact village, as near as possible to the port, tents, wooden huts, pisé huts, wooden houses imported from England, shops of wood, brick, and stone, and elegant cottages of gentility, surrounded by iron rails, were scattered over a vast park of 1,130 acres.

Those who had not been able to secure town lots at prices to their mind had proceeded into the suburbs, where at one time, with the aid of surveyors' pegged lines, not less than thirty villages were founded, for sale to those who could not afford to give the city price; others were building mansions, laying out pleasure grounds, and even contemplating deer parks. The climate was delightful, the soil of the valley of the Torrens fertile, and emigrants of capital poured in, burning to commence realizing the golden dreams they had been enjoying during a four months' voyage.

Colonel Gawler was carried away by the stream. The very confusion in which he found public business, the inefficiency of all the officers selected by the commissioners, the backward state of the surveys, were to a certain extent an encouragement; because he sanguinely contemplated that, if so much had been done under no system, or the worst possible system of administration when no accounts were kept, when the governor and the resident commissioner held rival public meetings, and the colonial secretary and colonial treasurer fought in the streets; how much more might be done under an orderly, regular government, such as he lost no time in establishing.

He proceeded to supersede the incompetent officials, to bring all the government business into a regular form, to press on the surveys, and to make proper arrangements for the reception of the emigrants into barracks, and the numerous sick of ship fever and dysentery into an hospital. In order to obtain a revenue from customs dues, to keep down illicit distillation, and protect the public from criminals, it was necessary, as Colonel Napier had foreseen, to raise a police. As labourers were worth from 10s. to 15s. a day, and indifferent horses cost £50 each, this was an expensive affair; but by giving a tasteful uniform, and making the appointment rather honourable, he succeeded in

obtaining a highly respectable body of men, including some poor gentlemen, at 5s. a day.

The port on his arrival was a narrow swamp, through which, for seven miles, emigrants dragged their luggage and merchandise. Under his arrangements a road was constructed, and wharves and warehouses erected. He built a government-house of no extravagant pretensions, but which, nevertheless, cost, from the price of labour and materials, £20,000; and he also built custom-houses, police-stations, and other public buildings which were indispensable for transacting public business. He expended a large sum in protecting and endeavouring to civilize the aborigines. He contributed to two expeditions which were unsuccessfully made by Mr. Eyre in search of tracts of fertile country. Το every charitable claim his purse was always open; while his hospitalities, although rather of a serious complexion, from his peculiar religious opinions, were on a liberal scale.

The result of his measures was to give an extraordinary impetus to the apparent prosperity of the colony. The brilliant reports of public and private buildings in progress, building land sold at £500 and even £1,000 an acre, of balls, fêtes, pic-nics, horticultural shows, dexterously reproduced in England, tempted men of fortune to emigrate, capitalists to invest, and merchants and manufacturers to forward goods of all kinds on credit. Port Adelaide was crowded with shipping, which discharged living and dead cargoes, and departed in ballast. When 14,000 colonists had arrived, in the fourth year after the foundation, scarcely a vestige of an export had been produced. The land sales and the custom-house receipts rose to enormous amounts.

In the midst of a career of infatuation, by which some half dozen money lenders realized fortunes and hundreds were totally ruined, there were men of considerable fortune who endeavoured to realize the Utopia they had been taught to dream in England, and introduce the comforts and the scientific cultivation of an English country gentleman, as sketched in Mr. Wakefield's letter from Sydney.

They purchased what in English eyes appeared considerable tracts of land; they loaded ships with furniture, with curious, useless agricultural implements, with live stock of choice breeds; they brought domestic servants, labourers, and even tenants, and landed intent on making the "desert blossom like the rose." But they were bitterly undeceived. Not one of the promises of South Australian colonizers was realized.

The example of one gentleman, whose name it would be cruel to mention, will exemplify the case of scores of his class, although less

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wealthy, who sank and died without notice in other colonies, or in England. Mr. Bpossessed an English estate which brought him in about £1,000 a year: fascinated by Mr. Gibbon Wakefield's writings, he sold his estate, and landed in South Australia with an extensive land order, built a house of no great size or comfort at a vast expense, fenced in a farm, and began to cultivate; but the cheap labour promised in the commissioners' pamphlets was no more forthcoming than the roads. He soon found that he was sowing shillings to reap halfpence. After spending a great deal of capital he gave up farming in disgust, and went to live in Adelaide: there, thrown constantly among the company of speculators, having a considerable balance at his banker's, he was inclined to do as everybody did, and speculate. He lost everything, at middle age returned home with his family penniless, and, after living a few years dependent on the bounty of his relations, died broken-hearted, a victim of the "sufficient-price" delusion.

Among the successful there were scarcely any of the headworking, white-handed class, but a number of hard-working, frugal men, who, landing without a penny, accumulated enough by labour to purchase a good eighty-acre section, and there, by growing vegetables and wheat, rearing pigs and poultry, with the help of their wives and families, throve steadily, and made money, in spite of the system which was intended to retain them for an indefinite time as labourers at some three shillings a day. These people often derived considerable advantage from sections of land adjoining their own being the property of absentees. On these sections they were able to pasture their live stock without expense. Where labourers could not afford to buy a whole section they clubbed together and divided one; for free men will have land whenever agriculture is the only manufacture; and no protective laws can prevent them.

It was these cottier farmers and a few sheep squatters who saved the colony from being totally abandoned when the inevitable crisis came. A Scotch gentleman of ancient lineage and no fortune, in every respect the converse of Mr. B., afforded a striking instance of what may be done in a colony by industrious hard work, with the help of a large family, without that capital which, according to theorists, it is indispensable that a landowner should possess. He arrived in the colony very early, the owner of a single eighty-acre section, with twelve children, one half of whom were stout, well-grown lads and lasses his whole property consisted of a little furniture, a few Highland implements, a gun or two, a very little ready money, and several

barrels of oatmeal and biscuit. His section had been selected for him previous to his arrival. It lay on the other side of a steep range of hills, over which no road had then been made, ten miles from the town. He lost no time and spent no money in refreshing or relaxing in Adelaide; he found out a fellow-countryman who lent him a team of oxen, dragged his goods over the hills to his land, and encamped the first night on the ground, under a few blankets and canvas spread on the brush. The next day, and from day to day, the family worked at cutting trees; there was timber plenty for building a house. This house, situated on the slope of a hill, consisted of one long, low, wooden room, surrounded by a dry ditch to drain off the rain, and divided into partitions by blankets. The river lay below: any water needed was fetched in a bucket by one of the young ladies. A garden, in which all manner of vegetables, including tobacco, and water melons soon grew, was laid almost as soon as the house; an early investment was made in poultry; the poultry required no other food than the grasshoppers and grass-seeds on the waste land round. Until the poultry gave a crop of eggs and chickens, the guns of the lads supplied plenty of quail, ducks, and parrots. In due time a crop of maize, of wheat, and of oats, was got in. Before the barrels of oatmeal were exhausted, eggs, chickens, potatoes, kale, and maize, afforded ample sustenance, and something to send to market. Labour cost nothing, fuel nothing, rent nothing, keeping up appearances nothing; no one dressed on week days in broadcloth, except the head of the house. First a few goats, and then a cow, eventually a fair herd of stock, were accumulated. Butter and vegetables found their way to Adelaide; and, while the kid-glove gentry were ruining themselves, the bare-legged boys of the Highland gentleman were independent, if not rich. The daughters, who were pretty, proud, and useful, have married well. In another generation families like this will be among the wealthiest in the colony.

Now, it is certain that every shilling taken from industrious settlers like this Scotch family, under pretence of supplying labour, was money very unprofitably invested, as it would have fructified more rapidly in their own hard hands.

A lady who landed at Port Adelaide a few months after the governor, in a MS. letter describes the then "dreary appearance of the shores; the anchoring of the ship in the narrow creek where, as far as the eye could reach, a mangrove swamp extended; disembarking from a small boat into the arms of long shoremen upon a damp mudbank, under a persecuting assault of musquitoes." On this mudbank lay

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heaps of goods of all descriptions, half covered with sand and saturated with salt water, broken chests of tea and barrels of flour, cases of hardware, furniture of all kinds, pianos and empty plate-chests, ploughs, and thrashing-machines. A little further, at the commencement of the "muddy track which led to Adelaide, bullock-drays stood ready to hire for conveying our baggage. The lowest charge for a load was £10. All along the side of the track were strewn baggage and broken conveyances, abandoned in despair by their owners.' "We stopped at a small public-house to get a little refreshment. For a cup of tea, with brown sugar, bread, and oily butter full of insects, we paid 4s. 6d. each. The butter seemed spread with a thumb."

"Our troubles partly vanished when we reached the beautiful site of Adelaide, where it almost seemed as if a large party of ladies and gentlemen playing at gipsying had encamped. This was the third removal of some who had pitched tents on Kangaroo Island, then built huts in Holdfast Bay, and finally taken up their abode in the city of Adelaide. Several times, before drawing up before the highly ornamented wooden summer-house, bright green, small, and hot as an oven, which had been engaged for us, our carriage had like to have been upset over stumps and logs. Every one we met seemed in the highest spirits; and it was more like a walk in Kensington Gardens than in a colony scarcely two years old."

This bit of contemporary description affords a key to much that is singular and contradictory in the early accounts of the foundation of South Australia. Nat Lee, the mad poet, sings, "There is a joy in madness that none but madmen know;" and there was a charm about the gipsy encampment of Adelaide, with its wild speculation, perpetual excitement, liberal hospitality and charity, constant succession of new faces, splendid luxuries, and curious shifts, to which the survivors look back with the feelings of a mariner to the months he spent with jolly companions on a desert island, with plenty of turtles and plenty of rum puncheons the difference being, that in the one case the shipwreck preceded, and in the other followed, the jollification.

Governor Gawler held a little court, which was graced by the magnificent uniforms of the officers of the volunteer corps, a corps which consisted of some two dozen officers, from a cornet to a brigade-major, and four or five privates. There were courtiers and ladies in plumes and great airs; there were fashionables, and exclusives held to be the crême de la crême; there was an aristocracy composed of the principal officials; there were balls given, to be invited to which great manœuvres were practised. It was a life like that of one of the little gambling