Deed of settlement in 1836 gives South Australian Company special extra role in setting up new province
The South Australian Company's 1836 deed of settlement and royal charter document, with George Fife Angas, Thomas Smith and Henry Kingscote mentioned prominently at the start. The document was later held by the State Library of South Australia and included in the UNESCO Australian Memory of the World register.
Image courtesy State Library fo South Australia.
The deed of settlement and royal charter of incorporation of the South Australian Company, dated June 27, 1836, established it as purely commercial entity that took on extra responsibility because of the distinct nature of the founding of South Australia as a British province.
Unlike other Australian colonies, South Australia wasn’t started as a British penal settlement and wasn’t originally administered as a crown colony. (This happened in 1842 after setbacks in settling South Australia.)
The deed of settlement and royal charter for the South Australian Company was part of British economic expansionism at its 19th Century peak. In 1834, the British parliament passed the South Australia Act empowering the government to settle a province in South Australia. But the British government wouldn’t be the prime funder of the settlement.
Under the legislation, South Australia was not to proceed until the colonisation commissioners sold £35,000 worth of land in the projected province. The South Australian Company was formed in London in October 1835, to encourage the further purchase of land and to take their large part of the offerings.
About 300 shareholders of the South Australian Company signed the deed of settlement in June 1836. One the key signatories was company chairman George Fife Angas, who, as a member of the Baptist church, represented the founding force of British Protestant evangelical religious dissenters (outside the Church of England) who shared the wish for social freedom and advancement beyond the establishment confines of the United Kingdom.
Angas gathered other like-minded investors, with the same wish for freedom of religion and social advancement, but the South Australian Company had no direct link with the original South Australian Association, formed in 1834 with higher social ideals for the new province. At a meeting at Exeter Hall in the Strand, London, the association tried to get the lands taken up in the province on “benevolent principles” but failed. That’s when the South Australian Company, as a “purely commercial undertaking" – and not a "benelovent institution" – "came in and assisted the colonisation commissioners”.
South Australian Company manager John Brind was defending it in the 1860s and 1890s against criticism that it had profited excessively from its investment in the province. He pointed out that the deed of settlement was an agreement between shareholders over the range of the company’s business from the right to buy land to engaging in “the growth of wool, and to the pursuit of whales, seals, and other fishes in the Gulf, and the curing and salting of such fish”.
The South Australian Company became a model of Protestant capitalist drive in the province, playing a pivotal role in founding, early survival, and developing the colony, where the company built roads, bridges, ports, warehouses, and mills, and established agriculture, whaling, banking, and mining enterprises. Brind hoped that “no one acquainted with the risk encountered in the early investment of capital in this colony will grudge them such a revenue, or think it calls for special taxation.”
