SOUTH AUSTRALIA, FLAG OF

Australian flag consisting of a blue field (background) with the Union Jack in the canton and a magpie emblem at the fly end. The flag is sometimes referred to as a defaced Blue Ensign. In accordance with the Colonial Naval Defence Act of 1865, each British colony was required to fly the British Blue Ensign defaced with a badge that readily identified the colony. On March 2, 1870, South Australia's proposed badge included the Southern Cross constellation and two pointer stars (a total grouping of seven white stars) with various numbers of points. Following the addition of a black escutcheon, it became the official design on July 22, 1870, although privately owned vessels unofficially used the stars without the black background. On November 28, 1878, a new badge appeared on the flag. Based on a seal dating from at least 1839, it showed a naturalistic figure of Britannia facing a seated Aboriginal with a large rock or cliff in the background. In 1901 a request was sent to Premier F.W. Holder of South Australia for a simpler local seal. The one submitteda design supposedly created by Robert Craighad a yellow disk representing the sun, against which appeared a white-backed magpie (locally known as the piping shrike) perched on a piece of gum tree branch. On January 13, 1904, that seal replaced the badge of 1878 and remains on the British Blue Ensign to this day. The magpie also appeared on the new coat of arms of South Australia introduced on February 1, 1984, replacing a design approved by the British king Edward VIII in 1936. Whitney Smith History The period before British colonization Human habitation in the area that is now South Australia has ancient origins. Archaeological discoveries on the Nullarbor Plain in the west indicate forms of human life for a period dating from at least 23,000 years before the present, and Kangaroo Island witnessed settlement from at least 16,000 years ago. Other locations in Australia possess much earlier evidence of habitation, which suggests that South Australia either was settled later or has received less intensive archaeological investigation. It is clear, however, that for thousands of years there were numerous centres of Aboriginal population, especially along the banks of the Murray River, and that substantial trade existed between Aboriginal groups separated by vast distances, some extending across Central Australia as far as Cape York. But the Aboriginal population was probably already in decline at the end of the 18th century. They had little resistance to introduced diseases such as smallpox that were transmitted down the Murray River system in advance of the arrival of European settlers on the southern coast. European exploration of southern Australia was slow and intermittent. In 1627 the Dutch East India Company vessel Guilden Zeepaard, captained by Francois Thyssen, conveyed Pieter Nuyts as far east as Fowler's Bay in the Great Australian Bight. His reports were unfavourable, and two centuries passed before further information reached Europe. The entire coast was finally charted by Matthew Flinders in the Investigator in early 1802, a little before a similar expedition led by the French navigator Nicolas Baudin in the Le Gographe. The two expeditions met at Encounter Bay. Sealing parties, operating out of eastern Australian centres, frequented the southeastern coast from 1803 onward and made intermittent settlements on Kangaroo Island. George Sutherland reported on the island in 1819 and greatly exaggerated its potential for settlement. European knowledge of the interior of South Australia was negligible until 182930, when Charles Sturt navigated the full length of the Murray River system to its disappointing outlet into the Southern Ocean. Sturt located substantial habitable land in the southern reaches of the territory, and his reports were the practical prerequisite for developing British plans for a new colony. The great inland regions of South Australia were not traversed for many years, and the challenge of a south-north crossing was not met until the expedition of John McDouall Stuart in 1862. The territory was not fully explored until the 1890s. The colonists learned what the Aborigines had known for thousands of yearsthat the interior was extremely inhospitable to most forms of permanent settlement. European settlement South Australia became the chosen location for an experimental form of colonization conceived out of the ideas and the entrepreneurial enthusiasm of Edward Gibbon Wakefield. He had developed a theory of systematic colonization in 1829 that advocated a careful synchronization between the sale of land at a fixed price and the introduction of capital and labour. It was intended also to make emigration a more certain and respectable enterprise for ordinary British folk and to free Australian colonization from the stain of convictism. The proposals for the new colony emerged through a series of controversial negotiations with the British government. The government generally curbed, though it did not eradicate, the original plan's aspirations toward civil and religious liberties. The projectors were wrongly suspected of republicanism. South Australia was to be no ordinary colony but rather a province of the mother country. The Wakefieldian experiment began with the official settlement on Dec. 28, 1836, soon after the arrival of the first colonists at Glenelg and Kangaroo Island. Colonel William Light was responsible for the much-admired plan for the city of Adelaide, which was sited a few miles inland from the first landing on the shores of the Gulf of St. Vincent. There were complicated arrangements governing the new colony, including regulations about the finance and control of immigration funds and the uses of revenues. The propaganda efforts of the first promotersa mixture of commercial, theoretical, and utopian ideas that gave prominence to religious and political freedomsattracted large numbers of immigrants and led to rapid expansion during the first five years of the colony's foundation. But the administrative arrangements were ambiguous about the precise powers of the governors and the emigration commissioners and encouraged severe factional bickering. Instability and overexpansion produced a disastrous financial crisis in 184142 that threatened the very future of the experiment. The British government intervened, and the fledgling colony was placed under direct control of the Colonial Office. Governor George Grey imposed severe economic austerity. There was a collapse of confidence, and immigration and investment ceased. Nevertheless, within three years the colony returned to a pattern of growth, which eventually led to solid expansion. Settlers moved outward from Adelaide, and their production of wheat and wool soon exceeded local requirements and provided the basis for export earnings.