South Australia gets its first special/high constables for law and order from 1837 – soon after colony proclaimed
Adelaide in 1837, illustrated by William Light and engraved by Robert Havell in a lithograph, with several small settlers' houses. Inset: One of the colony's first high constables, William Williams.
Image courtesy State Library of South Australia
South Australia had its first special constables – William Archer Deacon, William Williams, and Joseph Lee – sworn in from January 1837, a month after the new colony was proclaimed.
William Deacon arrived at Kangaroo Island on the Africaine, part of the original European settlers' first fleet of ships, in November 1836. He had come out under an agreement to work for the South Australian Company but especially to establish a hotel and coffee house in the colony, having previously run Deacon's Coffee Shop and News House in the City of London.
Deacon found himself in the unlikely role of "having by Her Majesty’s Government here been chosen as High Constable of the Whole Island" and having to "contend with some of the most diabolocial wretches (in the form of men) that ever disgraced civilised society". This was due to "mutiny" among laborers off the settlers' ships with "Captain Nelson having introduced spirits"
The colony's other high constable from January 1837, William Williams, also later, like Deacon, to later become an Adelaide hotelier, was sent to “clear up that rascal’s paradise” – Kangaroo Island – that was riven by fights after an oversupply of rum. Williams was paid £30 annual salary to enforce law and order on the island and act as colonial gaoler but had his appointment cancelled in July 1837. (James Windbank was also paid £7 for his services.)
Special constables, drawn from the general public, were a resource used for much of the 19th and early 20th centuries for the authorities in British empire countries to deal with civil unrest. In South Australia, their use meant the end of hopes of avoiding the need for a police force in the early colony.
The royal marines who arrived with South Australia's first governor John Hindmarsh as his bodyguard and as nominal keepers of law and order, became drunken and riotous, with the settlers having to appoint peace keepers to guard against them.
The settlers in the “free colony” were apprehensive from the start about the “curse of convictism” – of being infiltrated by escaped convicts from New South Wales and Van Diemen’s Land (Tasmania). This already was happening from Van Diemen’s Land in 1837, prompting Hindmarsh to bring in Samuel Smart from that colony as sheriff.
Although opposed by his official rival (resident commissioner James Hurtle Fisher), Hindmarsh sent a forceful dispatch in November 1837 to London arguing that a strong police body for South Australia could no longer be deferred. By April 1838, the situation reached crisis after a crime outbreak, with convicts from the eastern colonies infiltrating the Adelaide Hills. Hindmarsh, having already received consent from London to prepare a cost estimate, moved quickly to set up a police force.
By that time, at least 23 young male settlers already had been sworn in as special constables on a part-time fee-for-service basis, usually acting in that role for only a day or so.
