George Kingston's poor survey skills spared him for London trip to get resources for big South Australia task

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.

The major task of surveying country South Australia beyond the city and North Adelaide faced surveyor general William Light’s survey team in the first half of 1837.

Boyle Travers Finniss, third in charge of Light’s survey team, took over the role of deputy surveyor George Strickland Kingston whose lack of surveying skills had been quickly exposed. Light started marking out land into country sections by dividing his surveyors into two groups.

One section, that Light controlled, began work along the north bank of the Torrens River and moved westwards towards the sea. The other, led by Finniss, worked the area south of the river parallel to the first party. Kingston, who should have taken charge of the second group, was supplanted by the energetic Finniss who surveyed the southern country sections.

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

A group of influential landholders wrote to the 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, 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.

Finniss was the first suggested but he was now too valuable to the surveys to waste on such an errand. Kingston, who was willing to go, could easily be spared. The robust aggressive deputy surveyor general was a poor choice for such a mission but, as Light ruefully admitted later, Kingston was totally incapable of triangulating a country. 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 country sections on the Adelaide plains with inadequate equipment.

• 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.