"The Great South Land:" Four Articles on Emigration, designed to exhibit the Principles and Progress of the new colony of South Australia

[SMILLIE, William] SOUTH AUSTRALIAN COMPANY

Edité par E. Johnstone, Stirling, 1838

A propos de cet article

Octavo, 31 pp., with a folding engraved map; stitch-sewn, in old wrappers binding, "Emigration to South Australia 1838" on manuscript label to front wrapper. First edition, rare Scottish-printed appeal to emigrants, showing the South Australian Company promoting emigration barely two years after the first South Australian settlement late in 1836. A second edition was published in London later in the same year. William Smillie (1810-1852) was a Scots lawyer who later emigrated to South Australia and was Advocate-General in the 1840s. The state's origins were unique in Australia as a freely-settled, planned, British province rather than a convict settlement. Following the 1834 South Australia Act, which enabled the province to be established, official settlement began on 28 December 1836, when the state was proclaimed at The Old Gum Tree by Governor John Hindmarsh. The book is based on articles which had appeared in the Stirling Observer in March 1838; it includes a short "advertisement by the publisher" printing a letter from John Hutt the Superintendent of Emigration, and also openly encourages the curious to apply directly to the South Australian Company in London. A 3-page postscript prints excerpts from Macarthur's Emigration to New South Wales, on the grounds that Sydney and Adelaide are 'situated nearly in the same latitude.' There is good evidence that Smillie's newspaper articles, gathered here together for separate publication, had some influence in persuading British would-be emigrants that the new colony of South Australia would be a fruitful place in which to settle. The other interesting inclusion is a later issue of the map of "Part of Southern Australia", based on that in the 1834 work South Australia. Outline of the plan of a proposed colony with the details of the Murray River. This issue of the map was printed by "J. Grieve, Zinco., 33 Nicholas Lane"; John Grieve was a lithographer and zincographer based in London, which is interesting because the Scottish publisher of the book must have been supplied with the maps from London, no doubt at the behest of the South Australian Company. It shows principally the coastal settlements round Spencer's Gulf, Gulf St. Vincent, Investigators Strait, Encounter Bay, and on Kangaroo Island. .

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Détails bibliographiques

• Titre: "The Great South Land:" Four Articles on Emigration, designed to exhibit the Principles and Progress of the new colony of South Australia
• Éditeur: E. Johnstone, Stirling
• Date de parution: 1838
• Reliure: Couverture souple
• Édition: Edition originale
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