Land Survey and Disposal

The sale of Crown Land was the principal source of government revenue for funding emigration and public works. An orderly system of land survey, therefore, was essential to promote sales and to simplify the recording of ownership. The South Australian survey system was the chief means by which the Wakefieldian ideals of the colony's initial promoters were perpetuated.

Colonel Light had been instructed by the Colonisation Commissioners to divide the province into towns and Counties; however, the first nine Counties were not proclaimed until 1842. The early surveys had proceeded within a framework of Preliminary Districts and Special Surveys (see map).

By 1846 it was clear that units smaller than Counties would be needed as a framework for surveying rural Sections and for delimiting the extent of temporary grazing rights which early purchasers of land had over the neighbouring unsold Sections. A system of Hundreds, as used in some parts of England, was adopted. Hundreds in South Australia were frequently, but not universally, of about 100 square miles.

During the 1850s, theory and experience blended to produce a fairly rigid survey hierarchy of Counties, Hundreds, rural Sections and town allotments. After 1860 no land could be sold unless located within a proclaimed County and Hundred. The Hundred was the most important unit of survey and the device by which governments regulated both the pace and the location of land sales and settlement.

From 1861 to 1894 the Lands Department was administered by G.W. Goyder, a remarkably energetic and capable Surveyor-General. Appointed to the post at the age of thirty-four, he must rank as South Australia's foremost civil servant in respect of the diversity, extent and durability of his official decisions. His actions and advice on the survey of rural Sections, roads, townsites, reserves and early forest plantings have made a lasting impression on the landscape of South Australia.

Except for the earliest settled lands, the dates of the declaration of Hundreds give a fair approximation of the successive outwards spread of agricultural as distinct from pastoral settlement. During periods of optimism the popular clamour for land was so great that Hundreds were declared in land with poor soils or scanty rainfall in anticipation of sales which never eventuated.

The first step in surveying a new Hundred was a reconnaissance survey noting drainage and water-supply, soil quality and vegetation, suitable townsites, likely direction of traffic and existing features such as clearings, tracks and pastoral buildings. The Surveyor-General or his deputy would then issue a sketch plan showing the preferred town-site, major roads and desired average sizes of rural Sections. The task of the local surveyor was to transform this concept plan into pegged survey lines, access roads and farm Sections, and make reserves for such community purposes as stone quarries, cemeteries, schools and travelling stock.

The plans were plotted in field books and forwarded to Adelaide where they formed the basis of small-scale survey maps of each Hundred. The surveyors' original large-scale plans, bound in leather volumes, are still in use at the Lands Department, and record all subsequent changes in survey information. Although the quality of detail varies many of them form a unique record of the condition of the land on the eve of closer settlement.

The Hundred of Kadina by Surveyor Hardy in 1874, the Blackoaks Plain was typical of many grassy openings in the thick mallee scrub, a consequence probably of local soil conditions or Aboriginal firing. Before the arrival of the farmers, these openings were grazed by pastoralists, and teams of woodcutters felled the nearly scrub for fuel for the Kadina copper mines.

Virtually nothing remains of the landscape sketched by Surveyor Hardy before he pegged and measured his allotment boundaries. But the rigid geometry of his roads and Sections endures.

Towns

The establishment of country towns was an integral part of the colonisation process. At least 140 private towns and 370 government towns have been surveyed in South Australia apart from those in suburban Adelaide. The remarkably even sprinkle of townsites meant that the South Australian farm settlers were rarely more than 5 to 10 kilometres from an urban centre providing for their commercial, educational, social and religious needs.

Before 1865 the government showed little interest in creating country towns. Apart from river ports on the River Murray, seaports such as Port Augusta, Robe, Port Lincoln and some copper mining towns, it was left to private landowners and speculators to lay our towns. Most privately created towns in the early settled agricultural areas were surveyed before 1865.

After 1865 it was government practice to survey at least one township in each Hundred, although there were some exceptions in areas of low productive value. There were two periods of vigorous government activity in town creation - during the wheat boom of the 1870s in the Central and Northern regions, and from 1895 to 1930 in the Murray Mallee and the Eyre Peninsula. In the second period, town creation went hand in hand with the survey of railway-lines and the establishment of water-tanks, rain-sheds and bores before the farmers took up their land.

An adaptation of the model used by Light in surveying Adelaide in 1837 was widely used by government surveyors. The typical plan had three elements: an inner core of town allotments, a surrounding ring of parkland, and an outer ring of suburban allotments. Parklands were laid out in 249 of the 370 government towns. It was as though a die, cast in the image of Adelaide, was stamped out with little variation, hundreds of times across the face of the country. Today some of these parklands are still in uncleared mallee, serving as windbreaks and sometimes as rubbish dumps. Others have been used for sports grounds, swimming pools, golf courses, schools, hospitals and cemeteries. Nowhere else in Australia has the encircling parkland been such a widely favoured feature of urban design.

Until about 1880 the outer ring of 'suburban' lands was surveyed into small blocks useful for intensive farming or semi-rural living on the edge of a large town such as Adelaide, but of little use in a small wheat country township. Many of the unsold existing blocks were allocated in the 1890s as 'working men's blocks' to provide a basis of subsistence of rural workers in times of depression. Many other 'suburban' lands were later amalgamated as rural Sections and are now indistinguishable from surrounding farmlands.