# The Three Colonies of Australia/Part 1/Chapter 20

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London: Ingram, Cooke and co., pages 217–231
CHAPTER XX.
COLONEL GAWLER'S GOVERNMENT.
1838 to 1841.
COLONEL GAWLER arrived in South Australia on the 13th October, 1838, and was recalled in May, 1841. 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, and paved roads were constructed on land which four years previously had been desert; wharves and warehouses on a swampy creek, which was converted into a convenient port; ornamental gardens were laid out, farms were cultivated, live stock was imported by thousands, 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, capital and labour emigrated, insolvency was universal, and the colony, loaded with public and private debt, collapsed more rapidly than it had risen.
​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.
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, ​which in 1851 had not yet been navigated by anything beyond a whale boat, and which a range of lofty mountains divides from Adelaide! An influential agent in the South Australian interest not only produced a magnificently-coloured 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.
Colonel Gawler being an amiable, enthusiastic, simple-minded, yet ambitious man, was dazzled with the idea of becoming the founder of a great, civilised, self-supporting community. He accepted the theories of Mr. Wakefield as solemn, immutable truths, and the calculations of the commissioners as the emanations of the highest financial ability. Confiding in the private assurances of the commissioners, he was most bitterly and cruelly deceived.
Under the original plan of the colony the commissioners had calculated that an annual sum of 10,000, over and above any revenue to be derived from customs or local taxation, would be sufficient to defray all the govermental expenses of South Australia. This calculation was founded on what they hoped to be able to raise, and not on the necessities of the case. In order to make it fit they fixed on an arbitrary number of officials at arbitrary salaries.
The statements made in a despatch written by Colonel Gawler, immediately after his arrival, show that if he had been less zealous to carry out the views of the commissioners and more cautious about his own personal interests, he would have at once brought the progress of colonisation to a stand- still, strictly followed his written instructions, and retired with his private fortune uninjured, to his own profession.
He found the treasury empty the accounts in confusion. Twelve thousand pounds, being two thousand pounds more than the whole amount authorised to be drawn for in England in the year, had been drawn in the first six months; a large expense was required for the support of emigrants sick of fever and dysentery; provisions, wages, and house rent were enormously high; custom-houses, police-stations, a gaol, and offices for transaction of public business were urgently required; a police establishment, at colonial wages, in the absence of a military force, was indispensable; the commissioners in their ​calculations had omitted to provide for a postmaster, a sheriff, or a gaoler for letters, debtors, or criminals; the surveys were seriously in arrear; the head of the staff and all his attendants had resigned; the late resident commissioner and accountant-general, the colonial treasurer, and several other officers were found insubordinate, irregular in their accounts, and grossly inefficient; it was necessary to supersede two of them peremptorily almost immediately; all officials were dissatisfied with low salaries in the face of the high prices of provisions, house rent, &c.; Governor Gawler himself, with Mrs. Gawler, his children, private secretary, and servants, was compelled to occupy a small hut, and expend 1,800 a year whilst receiving a salary of 800. With this imperfect machinery, and an empty treasury, a population of some four or five thousand souls, partly encamped on the site of the city of Adelaide, and partly dispersed in pastoral pursuits over a tract of country one hundred miles long by forty miles broad, instead of being, according to the theories of the commissioners, concentrated on ten square miles, engaged in reproducing English agriculture, had to be governed, customs dues and debts had to be levied, criminals imprisoned, and aborigines repressed.
As to the prospects of the colony, and character of pursuits of the colonists, the inspector of the Australasian Bank at Sydney wrote to his Directors in October, 1818, about the time Governor Gawler landed:
"I venture to express my fears that the price received for the sale of land will be found insufficient to pay for the transplantation and government of emigrants; and, unless funds be provided by the British government, it will be impossible to provide for the administration of police and law. There appears also to have been a great want of experience and decision in directing the energies of the colonists to that source from which alone they can hope to rise to wealth or prevent themselves from sinking into poverty, until an article of export be produced in considerable quantity; as otherwise the funds of the colonists must be expended in paying for articles of import and luxuries considered as necessaries of life. Wool is the only article of export that can be produced, and on this subject the colonists seem as supine as they have been eager to purchase town allotments and build houses, giving the place what seems to me a false appearance of commercial prosperity. Had it been left to me I should have delayed establishing a branch bank until I could be sure there were at least 100,000 sheep in the settlement, and that provision was made for the efficient administration of the law."
The new governor, full of colonising enthusiasm and innocent of colonial or commercial experience, was dazzled and deceived by the building activity which had excited the serious apprehensions of the experienced bank manager. He found a. large body of educated, ​apparently intelligent men, who had encamped on the site of the city 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 Whit-more street. All the notabilities of the South Australian interest were thus immortalised. 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, pise huts, wooden houses imported from England, shops of slabs, 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 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 valley of the Torrens fertile; and emigrants of capital poured in, burning to commence realising the golden dreams they had enjoyed during a three months' voyage.
Colonel Crawler was carried away by the stream. The very con fusion 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 Colonel Gawler's 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 civilise the aborigines. He contributed to two expeditions which were unsuccessfully made by Mr. Eyre in search of tracts of fertile country. To every charitable claim his purse was open; while his hospitalities 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, fetes, 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 realised fortunes, and hundreds were entirely ruined, there were men of considerable fortune who endeavoured to realise 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. These gentlemen purchased what in English eyes appeared considerable tracts of land; loaded ships with furniture, with curious, useless agricultural implements, with live stock of choice breeds; brought domestic servants, labourers, and even tenants, and landed intent on making, according to the cant cry of the hour, the "desert blossom like the rose."
The example of one gentleman, whose name it would be cruel to mention, will exemplify the case of scores of his class, although less wealthy, who sank and died without notice in other colonies, or in England. Mr. B—— possessed 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 brokenhearted, a victim of the "sufficient price" delusion.
Among the successful there were scarcely any of the head-working, 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 an 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 canvass spread on the brush. The next and successive days 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 out almost as soon as the house; an early investment was made in poultry, they requiring 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 a 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 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 took up their abode in the city of Adelaide. Several times, before the small, bright green, highly ornamented wooden summer house 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 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, too, 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 manoeuvres were practised. It was a life like that of one of the little gambling courts and watering-places of Germany, with more heartiness, in consequence of the constant arrival of friends and victims from England. The town lots of Adelaide formed the great rouge-et-noir table. The climate rendered out-of-door life delightful, the imaginary streets swarmed with well-dressed crowds; so much really good society, so many ​fashionable men, had never before been found in a colony; every one fancied himself the hero of a great enterprise, and enjoyed all the pleasures of gambling, while dreaming that he was helping to found an empire.
In the morning the men dashed about on horses, in dog-carts, barouches, and four-in-hands, which cost fabulous sums, in search of eligible sections and sites for villages. In the evenings grand dinners were given in tents and huts, where champagne, hock, burgundy, and every luxury that could be preserved in a tin case abounded; fashionable dance music and the songs of Rossini and Donizetti resounded from the cottages of the "great world;" and at cock-crow beaux in beards and white waistcoats, "half savage, half soft," might be met picking their way, in the thinnest, shiniest boots, through the dust or mud of a projected crescent or arcade. There was scandal written and spoken; political intrigue; a court party and an opposition, with each a newspaper; and everybody flattered everybody else that building, dining, dancing, drinking, writing, and speechifying, "was doing the heroic work of colonisation."
Young men of spirit were not satisfied to retire into the bush and look after a flock of silly sheep while it was possible to buy a section of land at 1 an acre, give it a fine name as a village site, sell the same thing at 10 an acre, for a bill the bank would discount, and live in style at the Southern Cross Hotel; for when a man had made such a speculation he could not, and did not, do less than invite a party of new-made friends to celebrate his good fortune by a dinner, a ball, or a pic-nic, with a few cases of champagne imported by the merchant on credit.
At this period a romantic air was infused into the simplest transactions. For instance, in the old colony exploring expeditions had been undertaken either by a government surveyor, who marched out from some remote station without any special demonstration, or by a squatter who, with a friend or two, a stockman, and perhaps a couple of black boys, all on horseback, set out as quickly as possible to find new pastures for his stock. In South Australia they managed things very differently. Mr. V. Eyre having undertaken to explore the interior of the province, on the day appointed for his setting out a grand entertainment was given, over which the governor presided. At the close of an affecting speech a band of young ladies clothed in white garments marched up the room, and presented, amid the cheers of the men and the sobs of the women, a banner which they worked, to be planted on the limits of his proposed discovery.
Mr. Eyre's journey, and a second expedition, proved the hopeless barrenness of a great part of the province. He afterwards became ​lieutenant-governor of the small settlement of Nelson, in New Zealand. It is rather curious that two gallant but unsuccessful exploring expeditions, that of Mr. Eyre and that of Lieutenant (now Sir George) Grey, should have led to the appointment of two governors.
During the administration of Colonel Crawler important assistance was afforded to the colonists by the arrival of the overlanders, who, led by love of adventure and hope of gain, found their way from the bush of New South Wales and Port Phillip, across inhospitable deserts, over precipitous hills, through dense forests, rivers, and swamps, and, in spite of tribes of fiercely hostile savages, brought flocks of sheep and "mobs" of cattle and horses to the South Australians, at a time when butchers' meat was rising to famine price, when a good pair of bullocks could earn 60 a week in working from the port to the city, and horses which had arrived from Van Diemen's Land, after a long voyage of alternate calms and adverse winds, mere skeletons covered with sores, were sold as a favour at 100 each.
The overlanders saved the colony from total abandonment during the first crash of insolvency. The strength of Australia is in her pastures: sheep to the Australian, before the discovery of copper and gold, were what the pine-tree was to the Highland laird, who on his death-bed said to his son, "Jock, be aye putting in a tree: it will be growing while ye are sleeping." The natural pastures and the climate grow the wool, and men, women, or children can be shepherds who have neither strength to fell timber, nor power or skill to plough, to sow, or to thrash. Besides, a pack of wool is always worth cash, while a bushel of wheat in Australia may be worth 10s. one year and nothing the next; in the worst of times ewes go on breeding and increasing, and wethers boil down for tallow, while a field allowed to go out of cultivation under an Australian climate, after devouring all the capital spent on reclamation, very soon becomes as much waste as before the plough turned the first furrow. The overlanders who brought these invaluable animals were many of them men of education: the enormous profits reaped by the first parties, in spite of the loss of both men and beasts by drought and skirmishes with the blacks, made the overland route a favourite adventure with the young bushmen. They brought with them, as well as live stock, "old hands," who taught the cockneys how to fell a tree and make a fence, and sometimes gave the Gawler police a good deal of trouble.
The gentlemen overlanders affected a banditti style of hair and costume. They rode blood, or half-bred Arab horses, wore broad-brimmed sombreros trimmed with fur and eagle plumes, scarlet flannel ​shirts, broad belts filled with pistols, knives, and tomahawks, tremendous beards, and moustachios. They generally encamped and let their stock refresh about 100 miles from Adelaide, and then rode on to strike a bargain with their anxious customers. Before the journey became a matter of course, the arrival of a band of these brown, bearded, banditti-looking gentlemen created quite a sensation—something like the arrival of a party of successful buccaneers in a quiet seaport, with a cargo to sell, in old Dampier'a time.
In a few days the stock was sold; the overland garments were exchanged for the most picturesque and fashionable costume which the best Hindley-street tailor "from Bond-street" could supply; and then, with hair combed, brushed, oiled, and gracefully arranged after Raphael or Vandyke, the overlander proceeded to spend freely the money he had so hardly gained, and, as one of the lions of the place, to cast into the shade the pert, smooth, political economists and model colonists fresh from the Adelphi.
New arrivals from England, fortunate enough to be admitted to the delightful evening parties given by a lady of the " highest ton," the leader of the Adelaidean fashion, were astonished when, to fill up basso in an Italian piece, she called on a huge man with brown hands, brown face, and a flowing beard, magnificently attired, in whom they recognised the individual they had met the day before in a torn flannel jersey, with a short black pipe in his mouth.
The overlanders included every rank, from the emancipist to the first-class Oxford man. By the end of 1840 they had introduced nearly 50,000 sheep into the colony, and taught the wiser colonists the necessity of looking to pastoral pursuits for the safe investment of capital.
The trade of turning wild land worth a few shillings an acre into building sections, to be sold at from four or five pounds to one thousand pounds an acre, by the simple expedient of a few pegs and a coloured plan, was too good to be monopolised by South Australia. The government and private speculators followed the ingenious example in New South Wales and Port Phillip; while in England a dozen foolish or fraudulent schemes were started, under the patronage of names as respectable as those who patronised the South American mines of 1824, and the railway delusion of 1845, for colonising New Zealand, the Chatham Islands, New Caledonia, the Falkland Islands, and other countries having the inestimable advantage of being very distant and almost unknown; all to be divided into "town, suburban, and country lots," to be sold in England at a "sufficient price."
The competition of these new bubbles, home and colonial, diverted ​the attention of intending colonists from South Australia, where the high price of town lots left but small margin for profits or premiums. Besides, in those epochs of speculative frenzy which periodically recur in England and Scotland, unknown schemes have a certain advantage. About the end of the second year of Colonel Gawler's administration, the resources of South Australia as an investment for capital were partly known, while, as nothing was known about the resources of New Zealand, not even whether there was any available land there at all, it became an excellent and fashionable subject for speculation.
Colonel Gawler piteously complains in some of his despatches of the misrepresentations of rival colonists, and of parties who, after a very partial inspection of the port and coast, had departed, exclaiming, "All is barren!" But the fact was, that the capitalists who had landed found no advantageous opening for the investment of capital; town lots had been driven up to an enormous premium; the cultivation of land did not pay, and has never paid the employer of labour on a large scale in any new country. Wool-growing and other pastoral pursuits were more profitable in Port Phillip and the new districts of New South Wales; besides, under the puffing forcing system, enough land, supposing it all fertile, had been sold to support a population of 200,000. The population of the colony was 15,000, of which 8,000 were settled in Adelaide, gambling with each other. As for the labourers, they were partly employed in waiting and working for the white-handed emigrants who had come out under Mr. Wakefield's advice "to labour with their heads, not with their hands," and who, therefore, required more work done for them than old-fashioned colonists, who were not ashamed to mend their own tools or carry their own packages, and partly in executing works for the government and for the South Australian Company. A considerable number were in the hospital, and others were working at such sham labour tests as drawing fallen timber from the park, to be used for fuel in the government offices.
It had been found impracticable then, as in all subsequent attempts, to carry out the scheme of obtaining recruits for free passages "exclusively of young married couples not exceeding twenty-four years of age." The labouring classes have their feelings and affections as keenly in regard to family ties as their superiors in fortune and education; they are not to be draughted out, as the Wakefield theory proposes, like sheep or cattle; and the parties charged with supplying the quota of labourers required for the ships, so recklessly despatched to South Australia, completed the number by a per centage who from age, feebleness, or unfitness for colonial labour, became almost immediately chargeable on the ​government. All who were shipped, if able to work, claimed under their shipping order a minimum of 5s. a day.
When more houses had been built than could be let—when the capital, of which a large portion was exported for the importation of labour which it was impossible to employ profitably, began to grow scarce—the price of land orders fell, and the rate of wages. Then the frugal labourers began to retire from service, to settle down on pur chased sections, and combine to purchase and divide sections of 80 acres, to the extreme disgust of the hired-labour and sufficient-price theorists.
In England the large draughts of the governor, in conjunction with the falling off of land sales, had driven the commissioners to endeavour without success to negotiate the remainder of the loan authorised by their two acts of Parliament, and then to apply for assistance to the Treasury, which was in the first instance granted to a limited extent.
In the colony Colonel Gawler was travelling on a declivity, and could not arrest his course. When he found the commissioners could no longer' meet his bills he drew upon the Treasury for the expenses of government. The first bills were met; but eventually a series of draughts, to the amount of £69,000, were dishonoured.
The commissioners, who had been perfectly content with Colonel Gawler, as long as the public continued to purchase land, fell upon him like a herd upon a stricken deer, repudiated acts to which they had given tacit approval, and tried to throw the failure due to their absurd plan and improvident conduct on "the governor's extravagance." He was recalled abruptly, and left to hear of the dishonour of his bills by a circuitous private source. The commissioners themselves were soon after ignominiously dismissed.
When the news of the dishonour of the governor's bills reached the colony the bubble burst; land became immediately unsaleable; an insolvency all but universal followed, from which the banks, from early private intelligence, were able to protect themselves. The chief sufferers were English merchants, shippers, and manufacturers. The colonial speculators had long been trading on fictitious capital. A certain number of colonists of fortune were reduced to absolute beggary. A rapid re-emigration of capital and labour took place. Many labourers were thrown on the government for support. The price of food, rent, and wages fell rapidly. Adelaide became almost a deserted village. The only persons busy were officials whom the commissioners had forgotten to appoint, viz., the sheriff and his officers, engaged in pursuing beggared debtors, and the Judge of the Insolvent Court, by whom they were rapidly whitewashed.
​Colonel Gawler retired, after having sacrificed a considerable private fortune to his faith in an impracticable system, and became the scapegoat for the criminal absurdities of the colonising theorists in London. But his hospitality, his charity, his truthfulness, his genuine kindness of heart, rendered him respected and beloved in South Australia, especially among the humbler classes, or those who were humble in his time.
He was succeeded by Captain (now Sir George) Grey, who, happening to be in London at the time Colonel Gawler was recalled, and able to afford the Colonial Office some information about this pantomime colony, received and accepted the ungrateful office of governor.
From that day it has been the endeavour of the theorists and their orators to charge to the extravagance of the ruined ex-governor the inevitable result of an attempt to plant a colony without the preparations dictated by common prudence—to regulate the flow of capital and labour—and to raise revenue and profits from the application of capital and labour to unproductive works. The commissioners sent ship-loads of colonists, where, had they been wise, they would have sent sheep.
* ↑ This, true when written, has ceased to be true in 1853, since the failure of Canterbury colony—a failure predicted by the author.
* ↑ Report of House of Commons on South Australia, 1841, p. 146.
Footnotes