Robert Gouger has key role in forming South Australian Literary and Scientific Association in London from 1834
South Australia's first colonial secretary Robert Gouger (in portrait by A. Stephens) played a key role in setting up the South Australian Literary Association (later literary and scientific association) in August 1834. The association sent its collection of books and periodicals on the Tam O'Shanter, one of the first fleet carrying European settlers to South Australia in 1836.
The South Australian Literary and Scientific Association, formerly the South Australian Literary Association (or Society), was active in London in 1834 before South Australia was settled as a British province.
On August 29, 1834, a few weeks after the founding South Australian Act was passed by the British parliament, a group led by the future province’s colonial secretary Robert Gouger, with solicitor Richard Hanson and prominent proponents of the province, including Ernest Giles, Edward Gibbon Wakefield, John Morphett, Robert Torrens senior and first governor John Hindmarsh, formed the South Australian Literary Association at Adelphi Chambers in London.
Within a month, the title was changed to the more inclusive South Australian Literary and Scientific Association. Its aim was "the cultivation and diffusion of useful knowledge throughout the colony by all means which may lie in its power", in particular literature, the arts, history and natural science. The specified means for obtaining these objects included “a Library of reference and circulation … lectures … and periodical meetings for conversation.”
Gouger played a key role in the society. He had been working with Hanson and Wakefield in developing a research library with material regarding Australia but also from the experiences of the British colonisation of Canada and North America. Other significant people – Rowland Hill, Edward Furniss and John Brown – involved in founding Southern Australia were also in the association. It attracted 40 members to its first 16 months of fortnightly meetings in London. Many of them became prominent colonists.
Association members were predominantly radical reformers holding ideals of social equity and separating church and state. They were wealthy and well-educated. The association’s ideals overlapped to some degree with the lower-brow Mechanics Institute movement, with both originating from the huge increase in industry, printed matter, knowledge and ideas in the early 19th Century. They wanted to use this new knowledge to improve themselves and society, using lectures, classes and libraries.
Although the South Australian Literary and Scientific Association lapsed and meetings ceased, a collection of books donated by members and intended as the basis of the new province's library, was sent to South Australia on the Tam O’Shanter, one of the first fleet of ships carrying settlers, that arrived on December 18, 1836. These books would be the genesis on what became the South Australian Museum, the State Library of South Australia (via a merger with the Adelaide Mechanics’ Institute, creating the Mechanics' Institute and South Australian Library) and the Royal Society of South Australia.
