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JOURNAL of the HISTORICAL SOCIETY of SOUTH AUSTRALIA CO NUMBER 18, 1990 THE HISTORICAL SOCIETY OF SOUTH AUSTRALIA Founded 1974 Objects: (a) to arouse interest in and to promote the study and discussion of South Australian and Australian history. (b)to promote the collection, preservation and classification of source material of all kinds relating to South Australian and Australian history. (c) to publish historical records and articles. (d)to promote the interchange of information among members of the Society by lectures, readings, discussions and exhibitions. (e)to co-operate with similar Societies throughout Australia. (f) to do all such things as are conductive or incidental to the attainment of the above objects or any of them. ********** Council 1990 Patron: Sir Walter Crocker, K.B.E. President: Dr R.P.J. Nicol Vice- President: Mr B J. Samuels Secretary: Mr M.B. Keaire Treasurer: Mrs A.A. Huckel Members: Mr A.H.F. Angas Mr R.M. Gibbs, A.M. Dr PA. Howell Ms S.E. Marsden Dr J.D. Playford, O.A.M. Mr W.S. Stacy Ms P. Sumerling Mrs E. Ulbrich All enquiries about membeship of the Society or purchase of the Journal should be directed to the Secretary. The Historical Society of South Australia. Institute Building, 122 Kintore Avenue, Adelaide, S.A. 5000. Correspondence with the Editor of the Journal should be directed to the same address. CONTENTS ARTIC:[.FS The Stretton Symposium: Social Science and Public Policy Robert Dare 5 Hugh Stretton's University of Adelaide, 1954-56 KS. Inglis 7 Committed Historians: Charles Pearson and Hugh Stretton John Tregenza 13 Sir Keith Hancock: A Tribute from a Grateful Pupil Colin Badger 18 The Press and the Aborigines: South Australia's First Thirty Years Keith Seaman 28 Paradise Postponed: The Story of the Failure of South Australian Country Towns Tony Denholm 37 Elites in South Australian Country Towns David Hood 51 South Australian Country Towns: Their Services and Functions Miriam Collins 66 Making Gum Saplings Resemble English Oaks: Burke's Colonial Gentry (1891 -1895) John Playford 75 Who was `Little Jacob'? Elaine Barker 83 A Doomed Quest: The Commonwealth Aircraft Corporation and South Australian Industrialisation in the 1930s D.C. Rich 94 Legislating for Social Purity, 1883 -1885: The Reverend Joseph Coles Kirby and the Social Purity Society Jim Jose 119 Flam! Barn!! Sham!!! The Gawler Humbug Society Brian Samuels 135 Melrose and T.W. Moran Jim Fault 143 REVIEW ARTICLE Tribunals and Tribulations P.A. Howell 147 REVIEWS Markets, Morals and Public Policy, edited by Lionel Orchard and Robert Dare (Walter Crocker) 154 Women's History, by Margaret Allen, Fresh Evidence, New Witnesses: Finding 161 THE STRETTON SYMPOSIUM: SOCIAL Mary Hutchison and Alison Mackinnon(Helen Jones) Transition, SCIENCE AND PUBLIC POLICY South Australian Manufacturing in 165 edited by T J. Mules (David Rich) The People's University: The SouthAustralian School of Mines and Industries ROBERT DARE of Technology 1889 -1989, and The South Australian Institute 167 by Annely Aeuckens (BernardHyams) At the end of 1989 Hugh Stretton changed jobs. During the year he reached the the Anglo-Australian Joint Project1946-1980, Fire Across the Desert: Woomera and 169 statutory age for retirement, and so in December left his position as Reader in by Peter Morton (John Love) History at the University of Adelaide. The following month he began work as a Emigrants to Hahndorf A Remarkable Voyage, 171 research fellow in Economics at the University of Adelaide, on a grant from the edited by Martin Buchhorn (IanHarmstori)' Australian Research Council and four floors down in the building he had worked Recollections of John Cornwall Just for the Record: The Political 173 in for a generation. The intellectual tasks he has set himself in his new job are (Jenny Tilby Stock) variations on old themes of his. He wants to do for the study of economics what he Down the Drain: The Story of Events andPersonalities Associated with has done for the social sciences generally: make it satisfy simple tests of truth and of South Australia, 125 Years of Drainage in the South -East 174 falsity, make it useful, and make it accessible to ordinary intelligence. by Malcolm Turner and Derek Carter(Bill Stacy) 177 In December 1989, the month of his retirement, Hugh was farewelled in a Henry Vere Barclay: Ccntralian Explorer,by B.W. Strong (Peter Donovan) public symposium by a large gathering of friends and colleagues from Australia, Fun Without Games: Autobiograffiti of aTeacher, 178 Europe and America. They were a professionally diverse group of students, by Don Harris (John Playford) academics, town planners, bureaucrats, politicians, environmentalists, natural scientists, welfare officers, housing experts, and ordinary people expert in all or none of these things. They included people who had worked with Hugh, or against OBITUARY him, people who were simply grateful to have known, or been taught by, or read 179 Australia's foremost social theorist. Mostly they were bound together by love of and James Francis Faull (1934 -1990) respect for him, and by an aversion they shared with him to the idea that we should put our opinions into neutral when we look for the truth about our past, present and future. REPORT Over two days, his friends heard papers on subjects particularly associated with 181 his work, given for the most part by people who knew him well. They listened to The Society's Activities, 1989 arguments about history, cities and housing, the public sector, social welfare, political economy, and the environment. They also listened to Hugh Stretton speculate on possible and desirable futures for Australia and the world. Two of the papers are reprinted here. As the authors explain, they are old colleagues of Hugh's in the Department of History at the University of Adelaide, and in the wider world of Australian scholarship. The papers should be read as transcriptions of speeches by friends to friends. Their intimacy of tone, their occasional mixes of selfdepracation and formal praise, are what we might expect in the recollection of an influential scholar's work by his friends and in his presence. But these qualities hint at something else as well. Hugh Stretton has always seemed a prodigy, especially when he was young and unpublished. Colleagues remember their first academic contacts with Hugh with a clarity only astonishment can preserve, and will no doubt remember their last in the same way. My guess is that many people have treasured bits of unpublished Hugh prose, written either to them or for them. Typically they display his talent for fusing personal whimsy and profound utterance, to scintillating effect. He is able to bring off. this feat as Editorial Committee: R.M. Gibbs, R J.P. Nicol, J.D. Playford,W.S.. Stacy Dr Robert Dare is Dean of Arts and Senior Lecturer in History at the University of Adelaide. With Dr Lionel Orchard he organized the Stretton Symposium and edited Markets, Morals and ISSN 0312 -9640 Public Policy (1989). 6 THE STRETTON SYMPOSIUM fluently in examination answers and personal correspondence as in prose polished for publication. Ken Inglis, in the essay that follows, quotes from one such HUGH STRETTON'S UNIVERSITY scrupulously preserved examination answer by the undergraduate Stretton, and OF ADELAIDE, 1954-56 Christopher Hill, in the volume of essays published to coincide with the retirement Symposium (reviewed by Sir Walter Crocker in this issue of the Journal) quotes from K.S. INGLIS another. Much of this awesome rhetoric is the product of casual meeting and chance contact, and we are fortunate to have some of it recalled in these papers. Hugh Stretton has always seemed sublimer than we have a right to expect in our Robert Dare said I needn't stick to the dates in the program so long as I stick to the down -at -heel, under funded universities. time. I'll begin rather earlier than 1954 and say a word or two about years after Ken Inglis and John Tregenza remind us of other ways in which Hugh defied 1956. expectation. Two injunctions have assumed the status of holy writ in universities When I was a student at Melbourne in the late 1940s I used to hear my seniors since he came to the University of Adelaide in 1954: you must move about if you speak of Hugh Stretton, who had gone to Oxford on a Rhodes Scholarship without are to get on, and you must soften and blur the boundaries between yourdiscipline finishing his Melbourne degree and who had been elected to a fellowship at and its close neighbours. Not only did Hugh Stretton begin his academic Balliol, before he had completed his Oxford degree. For his Melbourne teachers employment in Australia where he finished it, in the Department of History at the he had performed as no other undergraduate in memory. lire is part of his pass University of Adelaide, but he also held the inaugural Chair in the Department exam paper for British History B, done before he went into the Navy. Question: 'What grounds were there for Clarendon's claim for the period of after its division from Politics. In one way, as Hugh likes to point out, he didn't get on but went backward, by Charles I's personal government, that "the like peace and plenty and universal starting in a chair and ending in a readership. In doing so, though, he made space tranquility for ten years was never enjoyed by any nation " ?' from administration, and from the risk of having to teach three courses at once Answer: 'There is obviously something fishy about this assertion. To find just what when his colleagues were ill as well as running the Department, to write that stream is wrong we have only to find why a people enjoying to the full such "universal of books and articles that have made him a pre- eminent, and international, figure tranquility" should one day decide to have a bloody civil war.

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