George Fife Angas's dissenter vision for South Australian colony overrides Edward Gibbon Wakefield ideas

George Fife Angas (at right) , founding chairman of the South Australian Company, wanted the South Australia to be "a refuge for Pious Dissenters of Great Britain", His captilatist zeal in creating that vision overrode the systematic colonisation sche of Edward Gibbon Wakefield (at left) that had inspired the main supporters of the South Australia project.
Images courtesy State Library of South Australia

For South Australian Company chairman George Fife Angas, founding the South Australian province in the 1830s was more than a business venture. For Angas, it would be a bastion of pious middle class Christian capitalism.

Angas hoped for South Australia would “to provide a place of refuge for Pious Dissenters of Great Britain, who could in their new home discharge their consciences before God in civil and religious duties without any disabilities”. This was a hope for middle-class Protestant freedom of religion and opportunity. Angas brought this fixed vision for a colony where, with no established church (Church of England), his fellow Protestant dissenters might enjoy civil and religious liberty.

Angas joined the committee of the South Australian Land Company in 1832. Angas bought shares in the South Australian Land Company. Based on Edward Gibbon Wakefield’s systematic colonisation ideas, the land company would buy land to fund transport immigrants to new province to be administered by land company.

When the British government’s colonial office quashed the proposals as too radical, Angas, who was less interested in Wakefield’s systematic colonisation, was discouraged but remained a member of the later South Australian Association formed in 1833 to lobby the British government to allow the South Australian province.

Wakefield, Robert Gouger and Robert Torrens were leaders in the struggle that led to the British parliament passing the South Australian Act of 1834.  The Act enabled a colonisation commission to oversee the settling of South Australia according to Wakefield’s ideas. Persuaded by Gouger, Angas became a member of commission in 1835.

With Torrens as chairman, the commission's first duty was to sell £35,000 of land before colonising could begin. Angas lay sick at Dawlish when the price of land in South Australian was fixed for sale at 20 shillings an acre. In line with Wakefield ideas, this was much higher than the minimum of five shilling s in New South Wales. When South Australian land sales came to a standstill. Angas formed a joint-stock company to take up the remaining land at 12 shillings an acre. With little alternative, the commissioners agreed.

With Henry Kingscote and Thomas Smith, Angas bought 13,770 acres (two-thirds of the unsold land, and in January 1836 transferred them to the newly-formed South Australian Company that Angas chaired. Despite his pecuniary interest, Angas continued to attend commission attend and pressed for special surveys, wheree the large capitalist willing to buy 4000 acres could select them anywhere in the colony. This was contrary to Wakfield vision for a province of small yeoman properties.

Angas also persuaded the colonial office to allow the South Australian Company to send an expedition ahead of the land surveyors. In February 1836, the South Australian Company sponsored the first ships with emigrants, livestock and provisions on board. The company supervisors were provided with detailed instructions by Angas. A banking business in 1837, separated as the South Australian Banking Company in 1840, at the behest of Angas, played an important part in the early growth of the colony. Angas worked on behalf of the bank in England, giving lectures, writing pamphlets and supplying information to newspapers.

During the early years, Angas became South Australia’s the largest landowner, including holding seven special surveys: a total of 105.000 acres, with the later Angaston, Keyneton, Nuriootpa, Stockwell, Tanunda and Truro towns within that area. It was all part of creating South Australia in Angas’s vision, not Wakefield’s.