George Kingston sent to London in June 1837 to get resources, with impatience for South Australian rural survey

Because of his incompetence as a surveyor, George Stickland Kingston was spared to go to London in June 1837 to get extra resources for William Light's team facing the huge task of marking out country South Australia.

On March 23, 1837, the preliminary Adelaide city town lots were selected by those who were the first to buy them in Britain and the remaining lots were put up for auction on March 27 and 28.

The major task of surveying country South Australia beyond the city and North Adelaide the faced surveyor general William Light’s team. Before that, a detailed plan was needed to determine the exact amount and location of land available for subdivision on the Adelaide plains

The colonists soon realised that, unless the survey was speeded up, it would be another two years before farmers could take up their holdings in the wider country. But marking out such a huge tract of land in the country was beyond Light’s small group, especially with its lack of depth in skills.

A group of influential landholders wrote to the South Australian resident commissioner James Hurtle Fisher urging extra survey staff so that the preliminary surveys could be done in six months.

After unsuccessfully trying to entice skilled labour from the eastern colonies to South Australia, it was decided suitable men would have to be recruited in England. To explain the situation to the South Australian colonisation commissioners in London – and to do some quiet lobbying for their cause – Fisher and Light agreed someone should return home as their confidential agent.

Assiatant surveyor Boyle Travers Finniss was the first suggested to go to London but he was now too valuable to the surveys to waste on such an errand. George Strickland Kingston, who was willing to go, could easily be spared. Kingston, the robust aggressive deputy surveyor, was a poor choice for such a mission but, as Light ruefully admitted later, Kingston was totally incapable of triangulating a large area. Kingston had confessed to Light that he was an engineer and surveying wasn’t his forte. 

Kingston, carrying confidential papers from the resident commissioner as well as Light's request for 12 competent surveyors, 200 men, carts, oxen, drays, instruments and tents, left the colony on the Rapid on June 5, 1837, on a journey that was expected to take a year. Until he returned, the remaining surveyors had to continue their big task of marking out the sections on the Adelaide plains. 

• Information from “The life of Boyle Travers Finniss (1807-1893)” by Cleve Charles Manhood BA (Hons) Dip Ed, presented as thesis for degree of master of arts, history department, University of Adelaide, 1966.