Adelaide was monopolised by the absentee capitalists and proprietors of the South Australian Company.
In a word, the whole system discouraged the proper pursuits of colonists, and propagated a spirit of land-jobbing, which, by its apparent profits, very soon infected the neighbouring colonies, and bewildered and deceived the merchants, the legislature, and the colonial department of Great Britain.
At an epoch in the existence of an infant state, when the first settlers ought to consist of a few gardeners, a few shepherds, a few farmers, and a few mechanics, with half a dozen men of superior attainments and energy, and plenty of sheep and cattle, and when a village with a wharf was all the town needed, South Australia had nine square miles of building land, a bank, two newspapers, and a population of speculative gentlemen. In England, paragraphs carefully culled from South Australian land sellers' newspapers were circulated as accompaniments to flaming advertisements in the English press, with the lectures and speeches of well-paid agents of the South Australian interest, combined to raise the colonising speculations and movements to fever pitch about the time that Colonel Gawler anchored in St. Vincent's Gulf.
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.
