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the old school, habituated to the employment of a most autocratic command, and as such was not well suited for a position of merely nominal superiority. Complaints were forwarded to the Secretary of State for the Colonies, Lord Glenelg, who wrote sharply to the effect that, upon his own showing, Captain Hindmarsh appeared to be incapable of carrying on the government; with the exception of the Judge and the Harbour-master, he was, more or less, at variance with all the official functionaries of the colony." He was recalled in 1838, and Mr. George Milner Stephen was sworn in as Acting-Governor.

During Hindmarsh's term of office, a Supreme Court was established. On April 3rd, 1838, Mr. Joseph Hawdon arrived overland from Sydney with a mixed herd of 335 head of cattle. Soon after, Mr. E. J. Eyre arrived with another herd of 300 head, and Captain Charles Sturt (afterwards Colonial. Secretary) with one of 400 head. At this point in the colony's progress the habitations erected were of the flimsiest materials. Government House was merely a reed hut, and most of the other dwellings were structures of a similar description. In January, 1839, the old Government House was burnt down, and nearly the whole of the executive and legislative records up to that date were destroyed. Cultivation continued to languish, and food was daily growing dearer. Flour was worth £30 per ton, beef ls. a lb., tea 4s. a lb., and other things in proportion; and these prices were sometimes exceeded. The only watchmaker received 17s. for cleaning a watch. The Australian Company tried to carry on the whale-fishing, and for some years the only exports were whalebone and oil, but there was no external trade in either mineral, pastoral, or agricultural products.

Governor Hindmarsh's successor was Colonel Gawler, K.H., who arrived in the colony on the 12th October, 1838. When Governor Hindmarsh arrived in the colony the population was 546 souls; when he left it had increased to 2,377. When Colonel Gawler arrived there was a population of 3,680. The new Governor found the affairs of the colony in a deplorable condition, and he made strenuous efforts to evolve some show of order, but his headstrong actions only served to involve the settlement in still deeper confusion. The finances were in such a perilous state that in 1838, when the expenditure totalled £16,580, the revenue amounted to only £1,448. The people, too, instead of opening up the country, remained in the city; while of the rural holdings, which were in the hands of the proprietors, only about 200 acres had been devoted to the plough. The Governor did his best to get the people to proceed with the cultivation of the soil, and with some success. projected extensive public works to provide employment for the landless, and had, of course, to incur a heavy expenditure. He drew upon the Home Government to meet current liabilities, and his bills were returned dishonored.

He

The revenue for 1839-40-41 amounted to £75,773; the expenditure during the same period was £357,615; thus leaving a deficit in the

public accounts of £281,842. In consequence of this, Colonel Gawler was recalled, and he was superseded by Captain George Grey, to whom Governor Gawler had extended the utmost consideration on his arrival in Adelaide some time previously, ill, and suffering from spear-wounds inflicted by the blacks.

There is little doubt, at this distance of time, that Colonel Gawler was treated by the Commissioners somewhat unfairly. They sent out shipload after shipload of emigrants, for whom their representative had to provide in some manner; but they did not furnish him with the wherewithal to do this. He believed in the province, and drew on its future. When he left, after three years of office, the population had more than doubled; the land under cultivation had increased from 86 to 2,503 acres; the sheep depastured from 28,000 to more than 200,000; and the export trade from next to nothing to over £100,000 in annual value. With Gawler's dismissal came a period of acute crisis. Confidence in the colony was not only severely shaken, it was well-nigh destroyed, and adverse criticism from without attacked its fundamental principles. For a time economists unhesitatingly pronounced the Wakefield scheme of colonisation to be a failure. The colonists, however, stood loyally by their departing Governor, and showed their sense of his integrity and ability by farewell addresses and a gift of £500; while the Duke of Wellington is reported to have said of him, on one occasion, "Gawler could not act otherwise than wisely, for he never did a foolish thing in his life."

Colonel Gawler personally took part in the exploration of the colony, and during his administration sent out various parties to discover land suitable for settlement. One of the most sensational efforts to penetrate the mystery of the interior was undertaken at this period. This was the great journey made by Mr. Edward John Eyre, in 1840, to reach Perth overland from Adelaide. After untold sufferings, the murder of his white companion by treacherous aboriginal servants, theft of provisions, and desertion, he accomplished 1,500 miles of travel along the coast-line, breaking at one point his monotonous journey when he fell in with, and was succoured by, a French whaling ship in command of Captain Rossiter. Refreshed by a long rest and abundant food, he ultimately reached Albany, after an absence of nearly thirteen months from Adelaide, where he had long been given up for dead.

The departure of Governor Gawler marked the conclusion of the experimental stage of colonisation. The office of the Commissioners in London had been abolished, and the Government of South Australia was vested in the Secretary of State for the Colonies. Captain Grey, the new Governor, was instructed to inaugurate the most drastic retrenchment, the sudden collapse of the financial credit of the province pressing with peculiar insistence on the attention of the British Parliament. A Select Committee was appointed to investigate the affairs of the struggling settlement, and an outcome of its report was a

vote of £155,000 as a loan to cover some of Colonel Gawler's bills. This amount was afterwards converted into a free gift. Besides this sum, £27,900 was loaned to the colony for the payment of Colonel Gawler's bills on the Colonisation Commissioners, and £32,646 to meet bills drawn by Captain Grey for the support of the " pauper immigrants," and to meet the interest on the bonded debt of the colony temporarily assumed by Great Britain. These amounts were repaid, and the debt due to the British Government was thought to have been extinguished in 1851; but, as late as 1887, a claim for £15,516 on account of interest was made against South Australia. Although the colony was not legally called upon to satisfy this demand, the amount was paid over, and with this incident terminated the monetary difficulties arising from Gawler's policy.

Captain Grey began his office as Governor of South Australia in a period of financial disaster, which his policy of retrenchment and taxation was alleged to have aggravated; hence his rule was intensely unpopular from its very inception. The colony was in a state of bankruptcy, and numbers of people were ruined beyond redemption. The colonists felt their troubles intensified by the cessation of that partial control over their own affairs which the previous Governor had allowed. The new Governor was the servant of the Secretary of State, and the province had practically become a Crown colony. It was ruled, under instructions from England, by Captain Grey and his Executive Council, the people having no voice in the imposition of taxation, or the expenditure of revenue. The Governor exercised his power to its fullest limit, but he certainly had an unpleasant and unpopular task to perform. His chief effort was directed to force an unwilling people to leave the town and settle in the country, and in this he had some slight measure of success. Before his arrival a Municipal Council of Adelaide had been elected, but Captain Grey found that it interfered with his independence of action, and he determined to get rid of it. As his relations with the Council became more and more strained, he questioned the legality of its acts and disregarded its suggestions, and finally the Corporation, which was the first ever established in a British Colony, became defunct. Grey's unpopularity continued to increase, and at a public meeting of the citizens his policy of taxation and retrenchment was denounced in unmeasured terms. The Governor was, however, inflexible, and showed that he was determined to adhere at all hazards to the line he had marked out for himself. As time wore on, things began to improve, and the relations between the autocrat and the settlers became more endurable, so that on the eve of his departure from the colony he enjoyed a measure of public favour which might, indeed, be almost regarded as popularity.

However much or little may have been due to Captain Grey's policy, there is no doubt that during his administration the colony passed through its darkest hour. Before the close of his term of office, pastoral products were found to be increasing, and agriculture was spreading

rapidly, although the prices of all staple commodities were low in the extreme. But at a time when sheep were being boiled down for their tallow, and wheat was worth but half-a-crown a bushel, the splendid copper-mines of Kapunda and Burra-Burra were successively discovered, and proved the salvation of the province. The only capital invested in Burra-Burra was £12,320; while the return in copper, before the workings were stopped in 1877, amounted in value to close upon five millions sterling. These valuable finds occurred very opportunely. The Home authorities had so little faith in South Australia's future, that Governor Grey was instructed to send to Sydney all the immigrant labourers then employed on Government works. The Governor took the responsibility of ignoring his instructions. He was aware that numbers of persons had already left for New Zealand and other settlements. He was aware also that the expense of deportation would be much greater than that which would be incurred by keeping the labourers employed. at the cost of about £4,000 per quarter, and he advised the Imperial authorities to the effect that, had he at once sent all the immigrants away, the colony would have been irretrievably ruined, and the whole expenditure laid out upon it utterly lost. He writes: "I should, in the first instance, have had to send away 2,427 souls-that is, one-sixth part of the whole population; the fact of having done so would have made paupers of a great many more, who must have been removed in the same manner, and there would have been no labourers remaining in the colony to procure food for those who were left." When Captain Grey assumed office the population was 14,562; when he retired on the 25th October, 1845, it had increased to 21,759. The steady increase in the number of the people was one of the constant embarrassments of his position. Throughout his term of office the ordinary revenue was never equal to the expenditure, and recourse had constantly to be had to land sales, the proceeds of which were levied upon to meet current liabilities.

In 1840, in the time of Governor Gawler, there had been some trouble with the aboriginals, who had murdered the seventeen white survivors of a wrecked brig named the Maria; and two of the natives were court-martialled and summarily hanged. About nine months

afterwards, in 1841, Mr. Inman, while overlanding sheep, was, with two drovers, severely wounded, while all the sheep, numbering some 7,000, were carried off by the aborigines who had attacked the party. Major O'Halloran was sent out with an expeditionary force to trace and punish the offenders; but was recalled in consequence of the censures passed on Colonel Gawler for his execution of the two murderers concerned

in the Maria outrage. Thereupon some volunteers under Lieutenant Field, R.N., took up the enterprise This second party of whites was surrounded by a body of natives, some 200 or 300 strong, and, after shooting some of their assailants, its members barely escaped with their lives. Another expedition was then organised in Adelaide, but Governor Grey intervened, and refused to allow it "to levy war or to exercise

any belligerent actions" against the offending blacks. A police party, consisting of an inspector and twenty-nine men, sent to the protection of some settlers in one of the disturbed districts, next encountered a tribe of disaffected aborigines. A conflict between the two parties took place, and thirty blacks were killed and about ten wounded. Although there was a strong disposition in certain quarters to blame the police, an official investigation resulted in their complete exoneration; but, to obviate as far as possible the occurrence of similar troubles in the future, Mr. E. J. Eyre was appointed Protector of Aborigines, and stationed at Moorundi, on the Murray. He soon secured the confidence of his charges, and from that time outrages by the blacks upon white travellers entirely ceased. In the second year of Grey's administration, Captain Frome, R.E., Surveyor-General, led an expedition to examine the country round Lake Torrens, but did not penetrate far beyond Mount Serle, the country proving so inhospitable that he was forced to beat a retreat. Several other unsuccessful attempts were made to reach the centre of the Continent, but notwithstanding these failures, Captain Sturt was despatched, at the instance of the Imperial Government, on a similar quest. He left Adelaide on August 10th, 1844, and returned in March, 1846, having been absent for about nineteen months. This expedition was rich in discoveries of fine pastoral country now occupied by prosperous squattages; but it was made tragic, also, by the horrors of the Great Central Desert. The terrible privations of Captain Sturt so greatly affected his sight that he gradually became totally blind. He was granted a pension of £600 per annum by the South Australian Government, which he enjoyed until his death, in 1869.

On account of the trouble in connection with the Maori War, the Imperial Government, anxious to employ the proved ability of Captain Grey, sent him to New Zealand, and provided what was practically a locum tenens in Lieutenant-Colonel Frederick Holt Robe, who was suddenly summoned from the Mauritius, and assumed control of the colony on the 25th October, 1845. The administration of this officer, who was privately sworn in as Lieutenant-Governor only, was particularly colourless, his policy being chiefly confined to following in the footsteps of his predecessor. In the few instances in which Governor Robe took personal initiative, he invariably made mistakes; what he did was afterwards reversed, and what he refused to do was afterwards carried into effect. He imposed an impolitic royalty on minerals, which was soon abolished. In the face of strong opposition he devoted public money to the support of religion, and thereby stirred up a great deal of strife. He granted to Bishop Short, as the site for an Anglican Cathedral, an acre of land in Victoria-square, in the very heart of the city, close to where the General Post Office now stands; but the validity of the grant was successfully contested by the City Council on behalf of the citizens, in 1855, the Supreme Court deciding that the Executive had no power to alienate any part of the public estate. The Lieutenant-Governor also refused his consent to a proposal to