History of South Australia
The history of South Australia includes the history of the Australian state of South Australia since Federation in 1901, and the area's preceding Indigenous and British colonial societies. Aboriginal Australians of various nations or tribes have lived in South Australia for at least thirty thousand years, while British colonists arrived in the 19th century to establish a free colony. The South Australia Act, 1834 created the Province of South Australia, built according to the principles of systematic colonisation, with no convict settlers.
After the colony nearly went bankrupt, the South Australia Act 1842 gave the British Government full control of South Australia as a Crown Colony. After some amendments to the form of government in the intervening years, South Australia became a self-governing colony in 1857 with the ratification of the Constitution Act 1856, and the Parliament of South Australia was formed.
Meanwhile, European explorers went deep into the interior, discovering some pastoral land, but mainly large tracts of desert terrain. Sheep and other livestock were imported, wheat and other crops were grown where possible, and a thriving viticulture industry was established. German Lutheran refugees set up mission stations and developed the wine industry in the Barossa Valley. Copper was discovered at Kapunda in 1842.
The colony became a cradle of democratic and land reform in Australia. In 1858, it was the first place in the world to institute the system of land registration and transfer named Torrens title after its designer and promoter, South Australian parliamentarian Robert Torrens. Women were granted the vote in the 1890s. South Australia became a State of the Commonwealth of Australia in 1901 following a vote to federate with the other British colonies of Australia. While it has a smaller population than the eastern States, South Australia has often been at the vanguard of political and social change in Australia.
Since World War II refugees and other migrants have boosted both the size and the multicultural nature of the population.
Aboriginal settlement
The first people to occupy the area now known as South Australia were Aboriginal Australians. Their presence in northern Australia began at least 65,000 years ago with the arrival of the first of their ancestors by land-bridge from what is now Indonesia. Their descendants moved south and occupied all areas of Australia, including the future South Australia. Temporary campsites in the Roxby dunefields have been dated to 19,000 years ago, and Aboriginal people have continuously occupied South Australian deserts since at least that time. Conservative estimates of the Aboriginal population of South Australia by the time of European contact are around 15,000 with a larger concentration in the southern part of the region. According to mitochondrial DNA research, Aboriginal people reached Eyre Peninsula 49,000-45,000 years ago from both the east and the west.Aboriginal society was made up of small bands, usually numbering around 25, which lived together on a daily basis and shared a particular range of land. The bands comprised one or more extended families, but the membership was fluid and would change depending on available food resources and personal circumstances. Several bands made up one clan, which also had a defined territory and was united by claimed descent from a single ancestor, and several clans made up one tribe, of which there were around 48 in South Australia by the time of European settlement. There was little uniting the clans of an Aboriginal tribe aside from their common language.
The Aboriginal tribal groups all had Dreamings, which were religious traditions tying them to the land. The Dreamings serve as both stories about their ancestors and as the foundation of their societal laws. For example, for the Ngarrindjeri of the lower Murray River, the ancestral hero Ngurunderi fashioned the physical world and gave the people their laws. At the end of his life he traveled to Kangaroo Island, where he passed on to the sky-world. As a result, the Ngarrindjeri viewed the island as a stepping stone for the soul of a dead person to the under world. It was seen as a psychic landscape, not existing in a physical sense, and as a result the island was uninhabited by Aboriginal Australians when Europeans first arrived, and the archaeological record suggests that humans had last lived on Kangaroo Island 4000 years ago.
European exploration
The first Europeans to explore South Australia were the crew of a Dutch vessel, the Gulden Zeepaert, led by Captain François Thijssen in 1627. From Cape Leeuwin in Western Australia, the ship followed the southern coast of Australia east for 1,000 miles, reaching the edge of the Great Australian Bight. He named the whole area he'd explored Nuyts Land, after Pieter Nuyts, a distinguished passenger on the ship.In 1801–02 Matthew Flinders led the first circumnavigation of Australia aboard, a Royal Navy survey ship to verify that the eastern colony of New South Wales and the western land called New Holland were part of the same landmass. In March 1802 he reached Kangaroo Island, and was surprised to find it uninhabited. French Captain Nicolas Baudin was also on a survey mission in 1802, independently charting the southern coast of the Australian continent with the French naval ships the Géographe and the Naturaliste. The British and French expeditions sighted each other on 8 April 1802, and despite believing that France and Britain were still at war at the time, they met peacefully at Encounter Bay.
Following the discovery of Kangaroo Island by Flinders, lawless sealers known as "Straitsmen" came to the island. Their main work was hunting seals and whales. Once they had become established on the island, to satisfy their need for wives the sealers kidnapped Aboriginal women from Tasmania and the mainland and brought them there. By 1820, there were reportedly nine sealers living on the island with Aboriginal wives, and by the mid-1820s as many as 30 of them. The "wife-collecting trips" to the mainland were violent affairs, sometimes involving killing the women's husbands.
Charles Sturt led an expedition from New South Wales in 1829, which followed first the Murrumbidgee River into a "broad and noble river", which he named the Murray River. His party then followed this river to its junction with the Darling River and continued down river on to Lake Alexandrina, where the Murray meets the sea. He wrote:
Sturt recommended further examination of the area, and New South Wales Governor Ralph Darling sent Captain Collet Barker to carry out a survey of the area in 1831. After swimming across the mouth of the Murray River alone, Barker was killed by Aboriginal people. Sturt thought that might have been out of revenge for the atrocities committed by sealers. Despite that, his more detailed survey led Sturt to conclude:
While travelling through the lower regions of the Murray, Sturt also wrote that he was surprised by the large number of Aboriginal Australians he encountered, but the Aboriginal population of the region was struck by an epidemic at the same time as Sturt's expedition, leading to a much smaller native population when colonists arrived seven years later.
British preparation for establishing a colony
In 1828 Robert Gouger and Edward Gibbon Wakefield were both looking to start a colony based on free settlement. Gouger met with Wakefield in January 1829, and Wakefield suggested that instead of granting free land to settlers as had happened in other colonies, the colony should use the principle of "the universal sale of land instead of land grants, and the exclusive employment of the purchasers' moneys to promote emigration".Gouger established the National Colonisation Society in February 1830, and although initially the proposal didn't attract much attention, after Sturt's discovery of the Murray River became public knowledge, its prospects were revived. By December, the Gulf St Vincent was being pitched as the location of the colony, and the National Colonisation Society put their proposal to the Colonial Office in May 1831.
Founding organisations and laws, 1834–1836
The South Australian Association, with the aid of such figures as George Grote, William Molesworth and the Duke of Wellington persuaded the British Parliament to pass the South Australia Act, 1834. The Act defined the province of South Australia as being "that part of Australia which lies between the meridians of the one hundred and thirty-second and one hundred and forty-first degrees of east longitude, and between the southern ocean and the twenty-six degrees of south latitude, together with all and every the islands adjacent thereto, and the bays and gulphs". South Australia thus became a colony authorised by an Act of Parliament. The colony and its capital city were named prior to settlement.The planners and founders of South Australia called for the colony to be their ideal embodiment of what they perceived to be the best qualities of British society. They sought: to prevent a reliance of convict labour found in other colonies, thus also reducing unemployment; to eliminate religious discrimination and; to make the colony economically self-sufficient. It was intended that free settlers would be attracted on the basis of freedom in the political, economic, civil and religious spheres, as well as opportunities for wealth through farming and commerce.
Hence the transportation of convicts from the United Kingdom was forbidden by the South Australia Act, despite many convicts being transported to penal settlements in New South Wales, Van Diemen's Land, and Moreton Bay.. "Poor Emigrants", while they were assisted by an Emigration Fund, were required to bring their families with them. The Act further specified that the colony was also intended to be developed at no cost to the British government.
So that South Australia stood a better chance of being self-sufficient, a £20,000 surety had to be created and £35,000 worth of land was to be sold in the colony before any settlement occurred. These conditions were fulfilled before the end of 1835, possibly with Raikes Currie or his family bank, Curries & Co., acting as surety.
The Act also included a promise of representative government when the population reached 50,000 people.
A guarantee of the rights of "any Aboriginal Natives" and their descendants to lands they 'now actually occupied or enjoyed' was included in the 1836 Letters Patent enabling the South Australia Act included.
The western and eastern boundaries of the colony were set at 132° and 141° East of Greenwich, and to the north at the Tropic of Capricorn,. The western and eastern boundary points were chosen as they marked the extent of coastline first surveyed by Matthew Flinders in 1802.
The South Australia Act 1834 imposed various financial obligations on the colonists that had to be met before the province could be created. In order to meet one of these obligations, pertaining to the sale of land, George Fife Angas created the South Australian Company, along with his banker, Raikes Currie. Both Angas and Currie contributed significantly to the sale of property, with the former contributing £40,000 and the latter contributing £9,000.