Dunstan – Felicia

Don Dunstan and Wakefield

Short excerpt from

 Felicia, the political memoirs of Don Dunstan

 by Don Dunstan,

Macmillan, Melbourne, 1981.

Chapter 1: The Wakefield Legacy

[copyright demands I be brief with my quotes]

[1] On the face of it, South Australia might have seemed an unlikely and unrewarding area for the experiment….

South Australia’s founding had been unique in British Colonial history. [He continues by relating that eastern Australia had been annexed by Britain for convicts, flax and timber, and as a base for Pacific trade.]

[2] England was burdened in the 1820s with a large and starving pauper population. Numbers of ’systematic colonisers’ believed that relief could be obtained by exporting them to lands owned by Britain where they could grow food, and be self-supporting.

The inspiration for South Australia’s foundation came from one of the eighteenth century’s more flamboyant theorists. Edward Gibbon Wakefield had occupied a minor diplomatic post in France and thought to imporove his future by eloping with a schoolgirl heiress and marrying her at Gretna Green. Convicted of abduction, along with other members of his family, he was not transported to Australia, but thrown into Newgate Prison, whence he announced to a surprisingly interested world that he would henceforth devote his life to philanthropy. His first work was a series of fictional letters (later published as a book entitled A letter from Sydney) purporting to come from a gentleman who’d gone with money, goods, library and tenantry to establish himself as a landed proprietor in New South Wales. To his chagrin, although he was able to get a suitable grant of land he could not keep workmen on it, because they were able to take up land for themselves. Attempts to work with convict labour proved fruitless, as it was uncontrollable away from the military. And so the author decided that it was simply not possible to live the life of a ‘gentleman’ in New South Wales since whatever his capital the necessary labour could not be found.

[There follows a lengthy quote from the Letter, however as I hope to transcribe the whole thing later I will not put it in here.]

Where was the remedy? A new settlement should be created of free settlers only, without convicts and on the principle that land was sold at a sufficient price to be beyond the means of the ordinary labourer. The proceeds from the land sales should then be used to bring out pauper emigrants with free passage who would then form a permanent working class. Thus there would be capital for the labour, labour for the capital, and the class structure of the old country would be maintained. Wakefield regarded such a settlement not merely as a new colony but as an extension of the old country, and added, ‘if labourers and capitalists poured into the colony at the rate which seems probable under the circumstances supposed, colonisation would be very rapid as well as good in kind, or civilised: and the sole cause of improvement would be the sufficient price.

The theory appealed to a group of radical members of parliament and disssenting churchmen who gave support to some of the theories of Jeremy Bentham. They were not so much Chartists as benevolently concerned with the welfare of the poor, including their spiritual welfare. They saw the dual opportunity to create a replica of English society in what they believed was its properly ordained order: masters and men, those with money, and those who worked for them: but a society which did not reproduce what they saw was the major unfairness of the England in which they lived…

[For this book, published in 1981, copyright demands I be brief with my quotes. Other sources I have quoted at length elsewhere on this site are outside of the copyright period.]