adelaide,thecapitalcityof south australia,isthekeyto（thecapitalcityof南澳大利亚阿德莱德,isthekeyto）（10页）.docVIP

Metropolitan Adelaide: a short history Susan Marsden This essay first appeared as chapter 7 of Jenny Walker (ed.), South Australia’s Heritage, Department of Environment Planning, Adelaide, 1986, pp. 87-100. It is republished here with permission, but without the illustrations or the inserted boxes prepared by Iris Iwanicki that are in the original. Adelaide, the capital city of South Australia, is the key to the history of every region in the State. It is the seat of power, the financial and cultural centre, and the starting-point and terminus of all the transport routes which enmesh the State as intricately and deliberately-centred as a spider’s web. South Australia is and has always been a City State, with a huge hinterland dominated by a town built ‘before there was any country population or country produce to support it’. The reasons for this pre-date colonization itself. It was established by an expansionist European country whose growing economic and political power found expression in the creation of a series of little Britains across the world. This new province was planned, advertised and sold with a merchants efficiency even before its first settlers had sailed. Colonel William Light was instructed to site the new capital city, and from that point, to subdivide the country into 80-acre blocks. Adelaide was a commercial act in itself; its very creation a form of investment. As with other such ‘commercial cities’, it was established to open up the hinterland for exploitation, and to tie in with Britains advanced industries and the surplus of labour. The city of Adelaide and its suburbs grew rapidly from the start as skills, the labour force and capital were imported, and as the hinterland was brought into primary production. With a mere two months allowed to select the city site, Colonel Light concentrated on the east coast of Gulf St Vincent, near the fertile lands praised by previous explorers, and centrally situated to the rest of the colony. Ligh