Edward+Gibbon+Wakefield+1829

Please click here to return to Year 5 Topics

While spending three years in prison for having run off with a fifteen-year-old schoolgirl, Edward Gibbon Wakefield began to have some good ideas about how to run a successful colony. He wrote his ideas in an article called //A Letter From Sydney// in 1829. He said that land to be sold at a ‘sufficient price’ so that it should not be wasted. Labourers and their wives should be helped to migrate to work the land. Above all there should be no convicts.

With Robert Gouger, Wakefield pressed for the founding of a new colony in the South of Australia. Wakefield, Torrens, Currie, Grote, Gouger and Whitmore formed the South Australian Association. These men were all practical and idealistic. In 1834 the British Government passed an Act of Parliament for creating the new Province of South Australia. George Fife Angas joined these men to form the South Australian Company.

Knowing of the reports of Flinders, Sturt and Barker, Wakefield had in mind the land that was to become SA, thinking that the coastline afforded good “inland navigation.”

Please click here to return to Year 5 Topics