Middle class bourgeois society for Anglophone civilisation: Edward Gibbon Wakefield ideal South Australia colony

Edward Gibbon Wakefield, as a proponent of the Anglophone civilisation being given the conditions to grow in the South Australian colony,  opposed the concept of far-flung uncontrolled and scattered frontier settlements as had happened in the United States of America.
Image courtesy State Library of South Australia

Edward Gibbon Wakefield, principal theorist for the proposed South Australia colony, presented a vision for a settlement civilised by a bourgeois middle class.

His most practical suggestion for organising the new colony focussed on how land would be allocated. His idea was for land in the colony to be sold at a price sufficiently high enough to be out of the early reach of the working class, thus keeping them as a source of labour. At the other end of the scale, he opposed the sale of huge lots of land.

Selling large lots of land also went against his concept of a close settlement, that kept a balance between land and population. As a proponent of the Anglophone civilisation being transplanted and given the conditions to grow in the South Australian colony, he opposed the concept of far-flung uncontrolled and scattered frontier settlements as had happened in the United States of America.

A colony of yeoman farmers on small concentrated allotments was his ideal.

Wakefield, with his brother Daniel, drafted the legislation to found South Australia and his principles were embodied in "An Act to empower His Majesty to erect South Australia into a British province or provinces and to provide for the colonization and government thereof", passed by the British parliament on August 15, 1834. Wakefield’s ideas were eroded from there.

To ensure that the new venture wouldn’t become a financial burden on the British government, land to the total value of £35,000 had be sold before settlement could begin. The foundation Act provided for a board of colonisation commissioners to control the survey, sale and lease of land and the migration scheme.

The commissioners sold preliminary land orders, each entitling the buyer to one town acre and one section of country land at 12 shillings per acre. Wakefield saw this as too low. The holders of these preliminary orders could take first choice of the land when it had been surveyed and present their orders to the resident commissioner in the colony in the land office, to receive their title deeds or land grants.

The 12/- price was only available for preliminary land orders and it rose to £2 per acre after preliminary sales were achieved thus giving an assured profit incentive to the first purchasers.

Land sales didn’t go very well until the price of country land was reduced. Then George Fife Angas, Henry Kingscote and Thomas Smith, who established the South Australian Company, bought enough land orders to make up the balance of £35,000. Acting more quickly than the colonisation commissioners, the South Australian Company began sending ships to South Australia’s Kangaroo Island before the survey party was ready.

Although a "uniform price" was adopted, it was made ineffective as a tool because special surveys put large tracts of land under the control of private entrepreneurs. These special surveys – 4,000-acre holdings – could be subdivided, bringing smaller holdings onto the land market on credit terms – in competition with the sale of government land and destroying the purpose of Wakefield's "sufficient price".  Special surveys alienated the land without control of location or the balance between land and population.

In 1841, Wakefield claimed that special surveys were speculations not adding to the wealth or advancement of the colony but giving "a false appearance of pecuniary prosperity". He said that this money would have been better spent on introducing stock from other colonies