I am working with Sumner La Croix (University of Hawai‘i) on final revisions of a book manuscript on the early colonial history of South Australia. The book’s title is: From Utopian Colony to Self-Governing Democracy: Economic and Political Change in Colonial South Australia, 1829-1857.

Captain Matthew Flinders first explored the coast of South Australia in 1802 but there was little interest in Britain in establishing settlements in the area until an 1829-1830 expedition by Captain Charles Sturt discovered that the Murray River extended from New South Wales to the South Australian coast. The Sturt explorations came at about the same time as a 32-year-old prisoner in the London’s Newgate Prison wrote a series of letters on British colonization that were published in London’s Morning Chronicle. Edward Gibbon Wakefield criticized the use of unfree labor (e.g., slaves, convicts, indentured labor) in British colonies, and proposed the establishment of a new colony based on his principles of systematic colonization and the exclusive use of free labor. Wakefield’s principles included sales rather than grants of colonial land, emigration subsidized by revenues from colonial land sales, geographically concentrated settlement, balanced migration of young men and women, and a self-supporting colonial government. A group of radical MPs, intellectuals, and wealthy men became strong supporters of Wakefield and they lobbied Parliament and the Colonial Office to establish a colony in South Australia based on Wakefield’s principles. In August 1834, Parliament overrode objections of the Colonial Office and authorized the new colony. Ships with settlers sailed in 1836 and Governor Hindmarch proclaimed the colony on 28 Dec. 1836.

How did things work out for the utopian colony? Our project applies narrative methods, modern economic and political theory, and econometrics to examine in depth how various aspects of the Wakefield principles of systematic colonization played out in South Australia; why so many aspects of his system were quickly abandoned; how the colonyʻs systems of relief employment worked; how the discovery of copper revived the economy without generating substantial Dutch disease (i.e., not crowding out the colony’s other major exports, wool and wheat); why Britain agreed to grant self-government to the colony of South Australia in 1850; and why, less than two decades after the colony’s founding, its residents chose to establish some of the worldʻs most democratic political institutions.

The British colonial invasion of South Australia occupied lands that Aboriginal nations had continuously used for about 45,000 years. Promises made by the colonial government prior to settlement to respect Aboriginal human and land rights were quickly shattered, as indigenous lands were taken without treaty or compensation. We estimate that the indigenous populations in the productive southeastern area of the colony fell from an estimated 9,000 -21,000 people in 1836 to 6,000-7,000 people in 1861 due to colonial violence, disease, and displacement from their lands and accompanying resource base (native plants and animals). While Aboriginal people responded actively across multiple economic dimensions to their changed situation, we conclude that the welfare of the surviving population was greatly diminished after the invasion.

Edwyna Harris is a senior lecturer in the Department of Economics.