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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.

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To replace Captain Hindmarsh the commissioners recommended and secured the appointment of Lieut.-Colonel George Gawler.

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.

THE SOUTH AUSTRALIAN COMMISSIONERS' MANAGEMENT, FROM 1838 TO 1841.

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 twelve hundred acres, or nearly nine square miles, a space sufficient to accommodate the population of Westminster, or even of Paris. 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

*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 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 fix on Wellington, where a fine harbour is shut out by inaccessible mountains from the adjoining country, and 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 complete the original sales of land. 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.

THE PIG-IN-A-POKE SYSTEM OF LAND SALES.

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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 ever has been, or in this generation is ever likely to be, 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 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 colonizing 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. Α 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

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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 monopolized by the absentee capitalists and proprietors of the South Australian Company, one of whom alone had the misfortune to thus invest sixty thousand pounds.

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 maize-growers, and a few mechanics, with half a dozen men of superior attainments and energy, and when a village with a wharf is all the town they need, South Australia had nine square miles of building land, a bank, two newspapers, and a population of speculative gentlemen; while paragraphs carefully culled from the colonial press circulated as accompaniments to flaming advertisements in the English newspapers, lectures and speeches of zealous disciples of Wakefield, and well-paid agents of the South Australian interest, combined to raise the colonizing speculations and movements in England and Scotland to fever pitch about the time that Colonel Gawler anchored in St. Vincent's Gulf.

CHAPTER XVI.

COLONEL GAWLER'S GOVERNMENT.

1838 TO 1841.

INJUSTICE TO GOVERNOR GAWLER - FALLACIOUS CALCULATIONS- THE STREET MANUFACTURE IN ADELAIDE-A CONTRAST-COURT OF GOVERNOR GAWLERTHE OVERLANDERS-THE CRISIS-A RIVAL COLONY-THE BUBBLE BURSTS. NOLONEL GAWLER arrived in South Australia on the 13th October, 1838, and was recalled in May, 1841.

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Under his administration the colony attained the highest state of external prosperity, the population quadrupled, the port was filled with ships bringing imports and emigrants; public buildings, shops, mansions, warehouses, and paved roads were constructed on land which four years previously had been an uninhabited desert, wharves and roads on a swampy creek which was converted into a convenient port; ornamental gardens were laid out, farms were cultivated, live stock introduced by tens of thousands, a large amount of English capital invested, the interior explored, and the whole colony rendered more familiarly and favourably known to the intellectual portion of the British community than any other colony; and under Colonel Gawler the land sales ceased, labour could find no employment, capital and labour emigrated, insolvency was universal, and the colony, loaded with public and private debt, collapsed almost as rapidly as it had risen. The powerful party whose pecuniary interests and personal pride, as colonizing philosophers, are alike interested 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's, and they have generally passed urcontradicted, because actual colonists are ill represented in Parliament and the press, and it has not been worth the while of the public, which endured the speeches of Mr. Aglionby or read the caustic colonizing essays of the Spectator, to dive into blue books or examine colonial evidence for the truth.

A very slight examination of the history of South Australia will show that it was not 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 taken 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, and is, 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 probably as much more. The utmost extent of excess in Colonel Gawler's expenditure was £20,000, or 5 per cent. on the expences. We have thought it right to devote some space to the history of the rise and fall of this speculation, the first authentic and complete statement that has ever been published, because, from time to time, efforts are made to repeat the South Australian colonization scheme on new ground.

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 in 1851 had not yet been navigated by anything beyond a whale-boat, and a range of lofty mountains divides it from Adelaide! An influential agent in the South Australian interest not only produced a magnificentlycoloured plan of the new city, divided into streets and squares, but, by a further stroke of imagination, anchored a 400-ton ship in the Torrens, opposite Government House-the River Torrens being a chain of pools in which the most desperate suicide would ordinarily have difficulty in drowning himself, and across which a child may generally step dryshod.

Thus land was sold and emigrants were shipped off before the commissioners had time to receive further accounts from their new and trusted governor and commissioner.

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