Village settlements in 1890s South Australia strongly opposed by conservative MPs and 'Register' newspaper
Under pressure from conservative opponents of the scheme, John Moule (chairman) and Peter Gillen (crown lands commissioner) were among members of the South Australian parliamentary select committee at Lake Bonney during an inquiry in 1895 into workings of the village settlements along the River Murray. Other committee members, pictured with Kingston villagers, are E.L. Batchelor, W.J. Blacker, T. Burgoyne, J. McLachlan and Tom Price. The women, sporting fashionable wasp waists, are presumably committee secretaries.
Image by the South Australian government photolithographer, courtesy State Library of South Australia
The South Australian 1890s village settlements scheme, an experiment that attracted international attention of humanitarians and economists, also attracted the negative efforts of the “pull-down brigade”.
During an economic depression with high unemployment, the village settlements scheme was introduced by the South Australian government for those with at least £50 to contribute to communal expenses. The villages could take up leases to unallocated crown land, through as association as body corporate, up to a limit of 160 acres for each member. This was seen as a bold, even inspiring, experiment in communal land settlement by small capitalists.
But ,with the deepening depression of 1893-94, the scheme was widened to include those with no capital at all, and many urban unemployed of Adelaide were resettled in 1894 and 1895 in 13 villages, mostly along the River Murray. This didn’t stop international interest in the scheme. Louis Vigouroux, a French economist, Michael Davitt, an English social reformer, Albert Métin, a French socialist intellectual, and William Pember Reeves, New Zealand labour minister, all visited, and all published positive, though thoughtfully critical, accounts of the experiment.
But the scheme wasn’t trumpeted inside South Australia, even by premier Charles Cameron Kingston who introduced it, due to a political campaign waged throughout 1895 by an informal alliance of conservative parliamentarians and the Register and Observer newspapers edited by John Finlayson.
Besides communal societies and their challenge to the capitalist system, Andrew Handyside, pastoralist and politician, gave another conservative slant that “if the(village) settlers had remained in the town, wages would have fallen.”
Butm aside from a group in parliamentarians resenting Kingston, no specific campaign against the settlements, aside from rumblings about them being too democratic, began until well into 1895. This was partly due to very wide public support for the scheme. A Land Settlement Aid Society was formed by a radical architect Thomas Hyland Smeaton and a prominent Methodist minister Joseph Berry, with Julia Barr Smith among prominent donors to the cause.
In April 19585, one of the villages’ strongest supporters inadvertently gave the opening for the conservative attack. Primitive Methodist minister William Corly Butler, who ran a mission boat, the Glad Tidings, to the settlements, gave a lecture to raise funds for this work. Butler stressed the settlements’ poor finances, claiming they were much worse than the government suggested.
Butler thus opened two political grounds to attack Kingston's government as overspending and misleading the public and signalled that more funds would be required for the settlements. This set off a series of themes for attacks in parliament and through the Register against the settlements: their debt; the "injustice” to small independent farmers who were not getting government support; and the alleged secretiveness of crown lands commissioner Peter Paul Gillen.
The Kingston ministry, rattled by the the conservative strategy of appealing to the rural vote against the village settlements, accepted the demand for greater government control of the settlements” and tighter control by the commissioner of their spending. The Labor party’s Weekly Herald also slipped away from the original socialist philosophy of autonomous communal settlements.
The villages were defended as a cheaper way to handle urban unemployment than direct relief or relief works. This defence also was adopted by the Kingston ministry but the effectiveness of the Register campaign about the waste of taxpayers' money saw Kington abandon the settlements when faced with a threat to his remaining in government.
