Osmond Gilles mixes astute business skills with benevolence and brawling in early South Australian province
Osmond Gilles (left) donated land at the eastern end of Carrington Street, Adelaide city, for an 1850s proposed German and British hospital (seen in concept in Adelaide's Mercury newspaper) but was never full completed, due to political and economic influences.
Images courtesy State Library of South Australia
An astute business acumen, alongside benevolence and brawling, was brought by Osmond Gilles to the fledgling province of South Australia in 1836.
Gilles’s merchant partnership with his brother in law Philip Oakden had started in the German port of Hamburg in 1816. Oakden and Gilles’s brother Lewis both emigrated to Van Diemen’s Land in the early 1830s and had mixed success in agriculture and banking, with Oakden also noted for his Wesleyan benevolence.
Profiting by his experience in Germany and links to Oakden, Osmond Gilles was an early importer of sheep to South Australia from Van Diemen's Land and sheep and rams from Saxony. Gilles business activities extended beyond stock to land, money lending and general trading.
His ventures in land were among the most extensive in the province and included town acres in Adelaide (the largest holder in 1837) and Port Lincoln, sections in Adelaide suburbs and country, and, with Edward John Eyre, a special survey of 4,000 acres at Moorundie on the River Murray. Osmond also made the most of winning, with his secretary William Finke and a few others, the right in the ballot to buy town acres at seaside Glenelg.
Osmond was one of the sheep owners, with others including George Anstey and Charles Bonney, who, from 1837, had shepherds looking after up their sheep at the entrance to the Adelaide foothills and taking advantage of Tea Tree Gully’s fresh water supply. Osmond also bought a property, alongside the River Torrens, to the northeast of the city where he bred sheep. It was later called Gilles Plains. In 1874, Gilles Plains had the largest hay farm in South Australia owned by J. A. W. Sudholz.
In 1839, Gilles originally bought the land that became inner western Adelaide suburb of Ridley suburb after he sold it, in 1842, to John Ridley, inventor of the agricultural stripper reaping machine. Ridley subdivided the land in 1878. Rosewater, another western suburb between Grand Junction and Torrens Roads,, subdivided in 1855 by Philip Levi, had originally laid out by Osmond Gilles in 1847 and was known as Yatala.
Another diversion for Gilles was the 1839 discovery of silver-lead on his home property at Glen Osmond. Gilles handed over the running of the mine to his brother Lewis but their relationship and the venture broke down, with a dispute taken to the supreme court over payment of royalties. In the early 1850s, Gilles turned his Glen Osmond property over to growing wines – the precursor to the Woodley winery.
German settlers were frequent guests at his Osmond Villa in Glen Osmond. Fluent in French (from his Huguenot background) and German, Gilles was especially interested in immigrant welfare and, in 1852, gave land in Adelaide city for a proposed German hospital. Annual gatherings of the German Rifle Club were on his property.
On a wider scale, Gilles was credited among those who wanted to secure parklands in pans for Adelaide city. Gilles was highly regarded for his generosity in helping establish many churches, cultural societies and charities.
