The Origins of Literary Adelaide

All cities are literary cities: places where people read, places where people write, places people write about. Perhaps, though, not all cities can claim to have their very origins in the domain of the literary. The theory of ‘systematic colonisation’, on which the European settlement of South Australia was based, received its first book-length airing in 1829 in Edward Gibbon Wakefield's A Letter from Sydney, but the volume was hardly the straightforward, first-hand account of life in New South Wales implied by its title. In her essay in Adelaide: A Literary City, Kerryn Goldsworthy describes Wakefield's volume as ‘a factual document using fiction-writing techniques’ (23). A recent PhD thesis calls it ‘largely a work of imaginative speculation’ (Radzevicius 8).

Even if A Letter from Sydney counts in some senses as ‘literary’, much more relevant to Adelaide's future life as a literary city is its central argument. Wakefield's book sets out a utopian vision of a new colony in which literature might have an integral place. Its narrator criticises Sydney, finding that ‘intellectual society’ is notably absent and observing that writers, scientists and philosophers are unlikely to emigrate to locations where their skills will not be valued and rewarded (40). By contrast, he asserts that a colony based on his principles will attract a long list of British citizens, including all the components of a literary culture: ‘printers, schoolmasters and schoolmistresses, booksellers, authors, publishers, and even reviewers’ (187).