Colonel William Light was appointed the surveyor General for the colony of South Australia apparently a second choice , his first was that of Governor General . He was the son Captain Francis Light the founder of penang in Malaysia . Colonel Lights' other postings were as the Cheif intelligence officer for the Egyptian navy and captain of one of their ships . Colonel Light died a couple of years after arriving in south Australia.
The city was founded in 1836 as the centre of a planned colony for free immigrants and so has no convict history. The colony promised settlers civil and religious liberty and by 1839 Lutherans fleeing religious persecution were arrived from Prussia.
Colonel William Light, on his planning of Adelaide, faced enormous problems, not the least of which was the constant criticism of his choice of site. In the dry environment, his prime motivation was the steady water supply and fertile land provided by the River Torrens. Numerous sites had been investigated, including Kangaroo Island, where whalers had developed a settlement some time before.
Light started with a distinctive grid pattern, which covered one square mile exactly, then surrounded it with a belt of parkland, which, over 150 years later, lends an air of tranquillity to the now bustling city. 'South' Adelaide was to be the centre for business and North Adelaide the residential area. Light named the new city after Queen Adelaide, wife of the British king at the time, William IV.
Adelaide's founding was based on an ambitious social plan, conceived in an English prison by Edward Gibbon Wakefield, who was serving a sentence for abducting a teenage English heiress! His theories were supported by influential and visionary businessmen, many of whom later settled in the colony.
Critical of the convict system of colonisation, he suggested that crown land in the colonies be sold and the proceeds used to set up a fund to assist free labourers and their families to emigrate. Once those labourers had worked for a few years, they would then be in a position to buy their own land. The new settlement was to be the 'Athens of the south' - a free settlement, offering civil and religious liberty. As a free settlement, it was unaided by convict labour or funding from Britain.
After coming ashore at Glenelg, the first settlers endured tough times, living in makeshift shelters and with few comforts, but so too did the local indigenous population. Prior to 1836, the area was populated, for many thousands of years, by the Kaurna people. It was known as Tandanya, meaning red kangaroo. While the philosophy behind the new colony sought to protect such groups, the reality was less than the ideal. Within fifty years, the Kaurna population had fled to the nearby hills.
The streets of Adelaide's central business district follow a grid pattern. Victoria Square sits in the centre of the grid.
Adelaide has A population of 1.47 million with just over a million people living in the metropolitan area.
'Amongst all these people who had been present at the birth of a city , helping and hindering , only one group seems to have been entirely carefree , fascinated but feckless . The aboriginiess watched the surveyors' pegs being hammered in , camped along the river between the two halves of the town , were amused at the clothes Hindmarsh provided for their nakedness , but never realized what was happening , since the very idea of a city was beyond the comprehension of their wandering lives . No doubt brown was speaking the pefect truth when he wrote to Wakefield , 'as to the idea of any right to the land , or any feeling that we are trespassers , i am sure they think nothing about it . Had we slain their kangaroos they might have had the idea suggested , as it is , they see us with plenty of our own food ....and they look upon our coming as an advantage rather than a wrong .' Brown to Wakefield , 13/2/37
|
 |
|
