Proclamation speech at Adelaide's Holdfast Bay on December 28, 1836, puts stress on rights of the Aboriginal people
Aboriginal people are depicted (at right) as outsiders in the background to the proclamation ceremony at Holdfast Bay on December 28, 1836, as illustrated by John Michael Skipper.
Image courtesy Art Gallery of South Australia and State Library of South Australia
Governor John Hindmarsh didn’t proclaim the establishment of the province of South Australia at Holdfast Bay on December 28, 1836. The words read by the governor’s private secretary George Stevenson only confirmed what had been established in London by the South Australia Act 1834 and the Letters Patent in February 1836.
The proclamation announced the start of colonial government, rather than management by the South Australian Company, led by George Fife Angas.
The proclamation called upon the colonists “duly to respect the laws” but spent most time on the governor’s “resolution to take every lawful means for extending the same Protection to the Native population as to the rest of His Majesty’s Subjects”. It was the governor’s aim "to punish, with exemplary severity, all acts of violence or injustice which may in any manner be practised or attempted against the Native who are to be considered as much under the safeguard of the law as the Colonists themselves, and equality entitled to the law as the Privileges of British Subjects.”
James Stephen of the British colonial office, lobbied by the Quaker abolitionist Aborigines Protection Society, is credited with instructing Hindmarsh to make the legal rights of Aboriginal people "the centrepiece of his proclamation speech in 1836".
Both parts of the 1836 Letters Patent, with the first (February 19) declaring the province’s geographic boundaries and the second (February 23) provided authority for its governing council, also expressly protected the rights of “Aboriginal natives”.
Governor Hindmarsh and his rival, the resident commissioner James Hurtle Fisher, received instructions on how to acquire land from Aboriginal people. The resistant colonisation commissioners for South Australia were also aware of these instructions. Fisher, who was in charge on land sales, was told to make sure that no land that Aboriginal people possessed was offered for sale without their specific approval.
In sign of fragility of the commitment to Aboriginal rights among settlers, the emigration agent John Brown, who didn’t believed Aboriginal people “actually occupied” land in an European sense, offered to be the colony’s first protector of Aborigines. The position was filled at first on part-time or interim basis by George Stevenson, Walter Bromley and William Wyatt. When Wyatt approached the resident commissioner Fisher in 1837 and asked for some land to be preserved for Aboriginal people, he was bluntly told that the Act admitted for no such thing.
