Adelaide city (regional capital), history - - Pictures
There were Dutch sightings of the South Australian coast as early as 1627 and these were followed by French and British contacts in 1792 (Admiral d'Entrecasteaux) and 1800 (Lieutenant James Grant). Matthew Flinders exploring in the Investigator in 1802 discovered the gulfs and central highlands and reported promising land for settlement. The publication of Two Expeditions into the Interior of Southern Australia (1833) by Charles Sturt was very influential upon those potential colonists in England who were keen to put theories of systematic colonization into practice and needed a site free from existing colonial restrictions. Sturt's glowing report of the terrain of South Australia decided them: Adelaide was founded as a private venture by free settlers, mostly from southern England but also including significant numbers of German immigrants escaping religious persecution, who would become the basis of South Australia's wine industry. Various associations of would-be colonists, including the South Australian Association, were founded to put into practice the ideas and theories set out in Edward Gibbon Wakefield's A Letter From Sydney (1829)— actually written while he was imprisoned in London's Newgate gaol for abduction. The “Wakefield System” proposed that land should be available only at a “sufficient price” whereby men of capital would become landowners and land sale proceeds would underwrite the provision of immigrant labour. Convict labour had no part in this scheme so Adelaide never at any time received convicts and South Australia (which included the Northern Territory until 1911) is the only Australian state never to have received transported convicts. Wakefield in fact disowned the significantly modified South Australian version of his scheme and it was the surveyor, Colonel William Light, who stamped his vision and personality most enduringly on the infant city.
The first settlers landed on Kangaroo Island (July 27, 1836), because the Adelaide site was not ready; Light arrived that November and began his survey of Adelaide; and Governor Hindmarsh arrived in HMS Buffalo and proclaimed South Australia a province on December 28. From the very beginning the new colony floundered on the brink of disaster and was only temporarily relieved by copper discoveries at Burra and Kapunda in the mid-1840s. Gold strikes in eastern Australia merely underlined Adelaide's difficulties, though there was an increase in demand for South Australian grain to feed the influx of immigrants. While Sydney and Melbourne prospered, it seemed that Adelaide was fated to remain the uninspiring centre of a huge agricultural and mining hinterland. On the eve of the world economic depression in the 1930s, Adelaide's almost exclusively rural economy was critically vulnerable and it was hit very hard. However, 32 years of Liberal-Country League (LCL) conservative government (1933-1965) and the long personal ascendancy of Thomas Playford (1938-1965), the LCL's most famous figure in that period, produced growing prosperity and political stability for Adelaideans, during which the provision of power for industrial purposes and the range and variety of secondary industries developed considerably.
