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PUBLISHED VERSION Kerryn Goldsworthy Acts of writing Adelaide: a literary city, 2013 / Butterss, P. (ed./s), Ch.1, pp.19-38 © 2013 The Authors. This work, with the exception of the poem, New York Nowhere: Meditations and Celebrations, Neurology Ward, The New York Hospital by Geoffrey Dutton, is licenced under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) License. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/bync- nd/4.0 or send a letter to Creative Commons, 444 Castro Street, Suite 900, Mountain View, California, 94041, USA. This licence allows for the copying, distribution, display and performance of this work for non-commercial purposes providing the work is clearly attributed to the copyright holder. Address all inquiries to the Director at the above address. Published version http://www.adelaide.edu.au/press/titles/adelaide-literary/ PERMISSIONS http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ 26 September 2017 http://hdl.handle.net/2440/105078 1 Acts of Writing Kerryn Goldsworthy The city of Adelaide existed extensively in writing before one house had been built, before one street had been surveyed, before the place had been named or its site determined. It was built on acts of writing, and it had existed in writing, a city built of paper and parchment, for years before it became a physical fact. The city itself, with its geometric streets and quarried stone, seemed to be somehow absent from all the documents surrounding its establishment, as though it were the hole in the middle of a large discursive doughnut. That might be understandable, given that the focus was on establishing the laws and limits of the colony, rather than on the city itself. But throughout the history of South Australian writing there seems to be surprisingly little emphasis on, or representation of, the city of Adelaide itself. South Australia has writers associated with Mt Gambier, Auburn, Penola and Eudunda; it has writers who write about China and Russia; it even has writers who write space operas. But by comparison with Brisbane or Perth or Hobart, much less with Melbourne and Sydney, there is relatively little writing grounded in the city of Adelaide, at least not in a way that brings it to life after the fashion of 20 Kerryn Goldsworthy Patrick White's Sydney or Helen Garner's Melbourne or David Malouf's Brisbane. In the many historical accounts, certain key documents are repeatedly mentioned as crucial points in the establishment of the colony of South Australia and the city of Adelaide. The earliest of these was published in 1829: Edward Gibbon Wakefield's A Letter From Sydney, in which he outlined his scheme for 'systematic colonisation', on whose principles the colony of South Australia was subsequently founded. The next is Two Expeditions Into the Interior of Southern Australia, published in 1833 by Captain Charles Sturt, whose description of the country around the lower reaches of the Murray and whose recommendation of it as a good place for settlement was influential both in the decision to establish a colony and in the choice of where the earliest arrivals would land. A third is the South Australia Act of 1834 (or 'Foundation Act'), which wrote the future establishment of the colony into British law, and a fourth is the Letters Patent of February 1836, which brought the colony into being as a geopolitical reality. A fifth, and the one that has had the most lasting resonance for South Australians, was the Proclamation that was read to the assembled colonists under the Old Gum Tree—or possibly under some other gum tree; the point is still disputed and the truth may be permanently lost—at Holdfast Bay on 28 December 1836. These are the five key documents on the basis of which the Province of South Australia and its capital or 'principal town' were established. But the word 'Adelaide' does not appear anywhere in any of them, and on the day that the Proclamation was read, the city's site was not yet decided on. Writing about place is almost always an act of mimesis. The writing is a response to and a representation of something that already exists. But although these early documents are all about the colony of South Australia, and by extension the city of Adelaide, this process is reversed in them: the city of Adelaide did not yet exist except as an imaginary place, and did not begin to exist until a fortnight after the Proclamation was Acts of Writing 21 read, when Colonel William Light began his survey near the corner of what became North and West Terraces. The city of Adelaide was brought into being by a succession of acts of writing: acts not of mimesis, but of projection. On the voyage out, the three earliest boatloads of settlers likewise kept shipboard diaries of a voyage whose destination was as yet non- existent. It was an imaginary basket into which they had put every egg of their lives and futures. In describing their fellow emigrants and anticipating their lives in the new country as they wrote their shipboard letters and journals, they were writing the community into existence, as were the settlers who followed in their wake. This chapter considers the genesis of Adelaide in acts of writing, tracing its beginnings as a planned city not only in terms of its physical layout, but also in terms of its social, political and economic workings. It looks at some of the literary aspects of the documents that brought the city into being, and at a tradition of literary references to Adelaide either as Paradise or as Utopia. And it gives some examples of the ways in which the idea of Adelaide as an abstraction, an ideal or an absence— and sometimes as more than one of those things at a time—has persisted as an influence and as a motif in writing about the city. It's a given that the establishment of the city of Adelaide was an act of Aboriginal dispossession; in spite of the surprisingly detailed and contemporary- sounding paragraphs concerning the rights and treatment of the Kaurna people of the Adelaide Plains in some of these early documents, Aboriginal culture here as elsewhere was literally overwritten by the process of white settlement. The condition of written-ness was one that automatically excluded, if not erased, the Aboriginal culture of the time and place. * * * 22 Kerryn Goldsworthy On 14 May 1827, Edward Gibbon Wakefield, then 31 years old, was sentenced to three years' imprisonment in Newgate for the abduction of a teenage heiress, something he had already done once before and so much more successfully that when the first one died in childbirth, her fortune had set him up financially for life, which did not stop him from trying it again. While in prison, he became interested in the fates and life stories of his fellow-prisoners, including men who had been or were about to be transported as convicts, and many of whom as victims of the Industrial Revolution had found themselves with no legal means of support. During this period Wakefield became a strong and inspiring advocate of emigration as a cure for the overcrowding and underemployment of the times. The study that he made of colonisation resulted in the writing and publication, in 1829, of his highly influential book A Letter From Sydney, The Principal Town of Australasia. It was, in fact, a letter from Newgate— in the event, Wakefield never set foot in Australia, much less in South Australia—but it used the reported weaknesses and failures of other Australian colonies as a basis for the scheme that he called 'systematic colonisation', as summarised here in Graeme Pretty's entry for Wakefield in the Australian Dictionary of Biography: Wakefield claimed that Australian colonies were suffering from chaotic granting of free land, shortage of labour and consequent dependence on convicts. He argued that if settlement were concentrated, waste lands of the crown could be readily sold and the proceeds applied to the emigration of labourers, preferably young married couples, thereby giving maximum population relief in Britain and ensuring a balanced, fruitful colonial society. But if the price for crown land were made high enough to discourage labourers from immediately acquiring land they could not use, such tribulations as those of the Swan River settlement would be avoided. Sufficiency of labour and a congenial society would attract capital, encourage emigration, assure prosperity, and justify the rights of a colony to elect representatives to its own legislature. Acts of Writing 23 Ideally the plan was self-perpetuating, like an executive toy. And it was a version of this scheme, though tinkered with here and watered down there, that was eventually put in place to establish the province of South Australia. Although reality intervened fairly quickly, the essence both of the plan and of the ideals behind it were enshrined in British law and in the history of South Australia. A Letter From Sydney is what we'd probably now call creative nonfiction. It's a factual document using fiction-writing techniques, most notably the invention of a first-person narrator purporting to be a colonist in Sydney who has observed what works and what doesn't in the Australian colonies, and is offering his scheme for colonisation from the point of view of imaginary personal experience. Wakefield makes his argument persuasive by the use of literary techniques: turning it into a dramatic monologue and a narrative, not to mention the exotic setting. It also, on its title page, contains in large letters the words 'Edited by Robert Gouger.' In one of the neater ironies of the only convict-free colony in the country, South Australia's two earliest founders and enthusiasts, Gouger and Wakefield, had both seen the inside of a jail.

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