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South Australia

Aboriginal Family Travelling
Aboriginal Family Travelling

By the time immediately prior to the British settlement of Australia, there were a large number of distinct societies and language groups in what is now South Australia. It is possible to speak of at least two dominant cultures present in South Australia prior to European contact, although there were many distinct societies within each of these cultures. The first was dubbed the “Lakes Group” by early anthropologists Elkin and Howitt. The “Lakes Group” culture stretches north of the Mount Lofty Ranges, up into the Flinders Ranges to around Lake Eyre, and across the Eyre Peninsula. This cultural grouping spoke at least somewhat mutually intelligible languages, which are known collectively as Thura-Yura languages. They also shared rituals. The second major group was (and remains) the “Western Desert group”, or the Western Desert cultural bloc. This group of cultures encapsulates the land north and west of Lake Eyre, and the land west of the Eyre Peninsula. It extends well beyond South Australia into Western Australia and the Northern Territory. The Western Desert cultures speak largely mutually intelligible languages, so much so that some linguists believe the separate languages should be called dialects of a wider “Western Desert language”. These languages are among the healthiest Aboriginal languages in modern Australia, including Pitjantjatjara and Yankunytjatjara. Many other cultures existed in South Australia at this time that do not fit neatly into the above groupings, such as the various societies that had been established along the River Murray, as well as the Ngarrindjeri of the Coorong and Lake Alexandrina area, and the various societies that existed to the southeast.

European Exploration:

The first recorded European sighting of the South Australian coast was in 1627 when the Dutch ship ‘t Gulden Zeepaerdt (The Golden Seahorse), skippered by François Thijssen, examined the coastline. Thijssen named his discovery “Pieter Nuyts Land”, after the highest ranking individual on board.

In 1801–02 Matthew Flinders led the first circumnavigation of Australia aboard HMS Investigator, a Royal Navy survey ship. French Captain Nicolas Baudin was also on a survey mission in 1802, independently charting the southern coast of the Australian continent with the French naval ships the Géographe and the Naturaliste.

Nicolas Baudin
Nicolas Baudin

The British and French expeditions sighted each other, and despite France and Britain being at war at the time, they met peacefully at Encounter Bay to the south east of the Fleurieu Peninsula.

Baudin referred to the land as “Terre Napoléon”. On the same voyage, Baudin named the Fleurieu Peninsula after Charles Pierre Claret de Fleurieu, a French explorer and statesman. In 1802 Flinders named Mount Lofty but recorded little of the area which is now Adelaide. Both missed the Port Adelaide River inlet, whose position was first accurately located and charted by William Light in 1836.

Charles Sturt led an expedition from New South Wales in 1829, which followed first the Murrumbidgee River into a “broad and noble river”, which he named the Murray River. His party then followed this river to its junction with the Darling River and continued down river on to Lake Alexandrina, where the Murray meets the sea in South Australia. Suffering greatly, the party had to then row back upstream hundreds of kilometers for the return journey.[3]

British Preparation for Establishing a Colony:

A group in Britain led by Edward Gibbon Wakefield were looking to start a colony based on free settlement rather than convict labor. Wakefield suggested that instead of granting free land to settlers as had happened in other colonies, the land should be sold. The money from land purchases would be used solely to transport laborers to the colony free of charge, who were responsible and skilled workers rather than paupers and convicts. Land prices needed to be high enough so that workers who saved to buy land of their own remained in the workforce long enough to avoid a labor shortage.

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