The Early Heroes of South Australia

Facing the jetty at Glenelg beach, between the Stamford Grand Hotel and the old Town Hall with its clock tower, is a granite monument standing about 10 metres tall. Glenelg was where the British started to build Adelaide. The monument was erected in 1936 to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the establishment of South Australia.

This was the area where Governor Hindmarsh and the pioneer settlers first landed to establish the new province. His name is prominent on the west side of the monument facing the sea and jetty. Symbolically, Queen Elizabeth and Prince Phillip landed here on their Royal Jubilee Tour in 1977.

On the northern wall of the monument, it says founders. Here you will find the surnames that you associate with roads and places in South Australia. Wakefield is right at the top. He has a special recognition. Then there are Gougher, Angas and Torrens. The idyllic river that splits Adelaide into north and south is named after the latter. The others have lent their names to prominent roads. The inscription says they ”overcame difficulties to secure the South Australia Foundation Act of 1834”. By that, I believe these people were the politicians of the day.

The names of the prominent pioneers occupy the southern wall (pun not intended). Gougher is at the top. The road in the city named after him has become part of Chinatown. Further down are Nuyts, Flinders (a university is named after him), Baudin, Sturt (the Sturt Highway goes all the way to Sydney), Barker, and Light (a surveyor-general, regarded as the founder of Adelaide). These people were honoured for being the first explorers and first settlers, meaning that they opened up the outback, and started farming.

They were the ones who were given land roamed and hunted on by the indigenous people of this southern land mass. Of course, the Aborigines did not have a concept of ownership or land titles of the Western type. It took more than two hundred years before a common man, Eddie Mabo went to the High Court in 1992 to successfully overcome the concept of terra nullius (land without settled inhabitants and settled law), and to get the court to recognize that the indigenous people had rights to land i.e. native title, and that the aborigines were the original “legal owners” of the land.

These names on the monument were the movers and the shakers of that era, the people who have left their footprints on the sands of time, the heroes of the new province of South Australia.

Adelaide was first populated by free settlers, not convicts as in Sydney and many other cities in Australia. In recent years, it has had a mayor of Chinese origin, Alfred Huang.

Today it is a sizeable modern metropolitan with a population of about 1.1 million.

The Afghans and their camels have been credited with the development of outback Australia. The first Afghan landed in Port Adelaide in 1838, only two years after the establishment of South Australia. Today, camels run free in the arid areas of Australia. So it is perhaps fitting that on a weekend, you will find two camels and an Afghan owner, 20 metres from this monument, providing rides on Glenelg beach.

Out in Adelaide city, the world’s first solar-powered electric bus is moving people too. Its passengers probably include indigenous people and migrants or descendents of migrants from over 100 countries of the world, with aspirations not very different from the ones who first landed on Glenelg beach back in 1836.