Transcription of a talk given at the Local History Room, Goolwa, 14/9/2005

Recording & transcription by G.W. (Frodo) Krochmal

Rudy: I've had a fair bit to do with it in my time, working for Council as Rates Officer, working out which blocks are which, and which were sub-divided when. But the more I started digging into it, the more I realised that there was an awful lot I don't know, so I went to, referred to, my two trusty resources, Peter Waddington, who used to be in the Lands Titles Office - he did all the searches for Peter Plummer and a portion of the Currency Creek Special Survey - and he's retired!  I knew that but I can't find him. So I thought - “Mr. Pretty knows a lot more about it” - he's in hospital!  So the good thing is, I can tell you anything I like, and you can't pick me up on it.

(Laughter)

            I'll work on the assumption that you do know a little bit about the system of Special Surveys, and how Currency Creek came into being, and so on? Well, the land where we're standing became a British Colony in 1788. This was New South Wales. Needless to say, the Colony of South Australia was created in 1836 – well, it wasn't – South Australia was never a Colony. It was a Province of Great Britain, and it was created as such in a totally different manner to any of the other Australian settlements, which were colonies, because it was primarily driven by people who wanted to make money, and people who wanted to establish the same sort of social order that they had in England, the wealthy people at the top, and the workers working for them, and so on. There were a number of people, famous names such as George Fyfe Angus and the two brothers Morphett and so on, who had quite a bit of influence in the Parliament in England, and got them to assent to this Act to create the Province of South Australia, by taking a part out of the Colony of New South Wales. That was done in 1834, and by the time they'd worked out all the legislation to set up Government and so on and so forth, and actually get out here, it was 1836, and of course, you probably know that first they went to Kangaroo Island, because they'd seen some nice holiday snaps of Kangaroo Island, and it looked like a good place to go – that's all they knew about it. Of course, they got there and it was no good, so they decided to find a better place. Now, it has been suggested that Currency Creek was laid out as it is because it was going to be the capital of South Australia – that's also not correct, I'm afraid. Currency Creek wasn't laid out – they started the Survey in 1839, and  lodged it in 1840, whereas Adelaide had already been established some three years before that, and proclaimed the capital. The Encounter Bay area was one of the areas that was suggested as a capital for the state before Adelaide was chosen, and Port Lincoln was also suggested, and, as I said, before that Kangaroo Island  ?  was going to be the capital. So, although they did talk about having the capital down here, and John Hindmarsh of course was very much behind that idea, because he selected quite a bit of land in this area, the town wasn't laid out because of that.

            The early development of the state – are you familiar with the Special Survey System they set up?   The South Australian Company promoted settlement in South Australia to try to get as many settlers out here as quickly as possible – with their money, of course – that was the whole purpose of it, it wasn't going to be sold off cheaply – in fact, it wasn't allowed to be below twelve shillings an acre, which was still quite a significant amount of money then. And, of course, being semi-Government, by the time people started arriving in droves, they really weren't organised, and they didn't have the infrastructure in place to survey up the land as quickly as people wanted it. So a few of the prominent citizens of the Province requested the South Australian Company to allow the system of Special Surveys, where they could select a chunk of 4,000 acres - anywhere they liked, basically, in the state – and expedite the survey of that. Of course, it was also entirely by the way that they could buy this land  - at that stage it had gone up to a pound an acre – and stood to make a great deal of money out of it, because they basically picked the eyes out of the state, picked out the nicest bits of land. For that reason, I think people quickly realised that certain wealthy people were profiteering out of it, and they were picking the eyes out of it so that the rest of the settlers that came would be left with the stretches of dry land between the rivers and so on, so the Special Survey system only operated for about 18 months, and then the Governor and the South Australian Company stopped it. Currency Creek was one of those Special Surveys that got through. It was Special Survey Number 17, if my notes serve me correctly. The G.R.O. Plan Number is 21 of 1854 – it wasn't a G.R.O. Plan, it was a Special Survey.

Audience: 2188, is that it?

Rudy: No, that's the Section number.  We must keep in mind, the Special Survey was done before the County of Hindmarsh or the Hundred of Goolwa or the Hundred of Nangkita even existed – they weren't proclaimed until the 1850s, so basically they picked a piece of likely-looking land in the wilderness, it had no land-marks on it at all, it had no names, no Section, it was just Currency Creek, because it was named after the boat Currency Lass, which sailed up into Currency Creek. That's the only land-mark they had, was - “We want that piece of land on the Currency creek”, so they got the survey done fairly quickly, because there was money to be made. The surveyor was Phillip Lamont Snell Chauncy. I know that because he wrote his name in the    ?      When I saw that, I thought “That's interesting”, because – I don't know if any of you are familiar with Chauncy's Line? There was a road proposed to connect  the new town of Adelaide to Victoria, and Chauncy was hired to survey a likely alignment for a road through Mount Barker, straight down to Wellington, and then on from there... All that led me to nought, because that was actually William Snell Chauncey, not Phillip Lamont Snell Chauncy, and I presume they weren't even relatives, because this Chauncy has no 'e' in it, and the other one did. Chauncy's Line was a blind alley for me!

            So what they did – the Currency Creek Special Survey was not quite the same as a lot of the other Special Surveys. Theoretically, they were all laid out in blocks of 80 acres, and whoever had the money to buy the 4000 acres, which at that stage was 80 pounds, or money combined with  -   (rumbles with notes) –  the person who applied to the Government to have the Currency Creek Special Survey done was one Robert Cock. He was quite busy in the early days of the colony. He did some exploration. When I did my research on Robert Cock, he apparently decided where to locate the town of Cowell and a few other settlements in the new Province. In this particular instance, he was the person that put up the  3,680 pounds, as well as four preliminary land-holders, that had already bought at 80 pounds each, which made the 4,000 pounds. Now, it wasn't his money – the Currency Creek Survey was a consortium of people in London, and that was one of the other main problems with the Special Survey system – it was supposed to open the country up quickly, so the settlers could get in there and start settling, and farming and all those things that they wanted to do, but in reality, what actually happened was that people with money to invest and speculate with, basically investing it with promises of high returns and most of the investors in Currency Creek were in London, in England, and they had no intention of coming out, it was a   ?  exercise. That's one of the things that's come out, too – because Currency Creek didn't go ahead, due to various other historical things which I'll touch on in a moment, a lot of the people never took up their land grants, partly because they decided not to come out here, but, to a large extent, because they had no intention of coming out – they wanted to acquire these pieces of land because they were told that, in very short time, they would become far more valuable once this great city of Currency Creek was established. Of course, the connection of all this with Goolwa – the first part of Goolwa that was laid out is called  'Town on the Goolwa', and that was part of the Currency Creek Special Survey.  This was the area of land that they chose, 15,000 acres, and then 4,960 acres – I'm not sure why that was – according to all the documentation, it was supposed to be 4,000 acres –   [brandishes map]   the green bits were obviously what they decided they wanted – that was obviously the good land, up along the creeks, and down along the banks of where Currency Creek widens out into the   ?    The red areas were the areas that were much more closely divided, into the half-acre blocks where towns would be. So the main town is Currency Creek, and then it had, reaching (?) down into its port, the 'Town on the Goolwa'. That's the portion of Goolwa between Brooking Street and Washington Street and back as far as what was Goolwa Terrace, now Bynes Road. That was surveyed in 1839 -1840. The land-grants were, by-and-large, all taken up – the investors got their pieces of paper, saying they owned 40 acres in the rural – and I haven't been able to find out exactly how many blocks in the town and how many blocks down here at Goolwa. The intention of the blocks in Goolwa was because it was to be a port, and at that stage, everyone was already proposing that the river trade would be a great thing, we'd be the New Orleans of Australia, and so on. Those blocks were long skinny blocks, 30 feet wide, and 220 feet long – whatever works out to half an acre – but very long skinny blocks because this was warehouses, along the lines of what they did in Liverpool and places like that. They had very narrow frontages, and very long, long properties, so that they could have a lot of them in the street, and all of them have substantial storage area. When the river trade didn't really materialise – it did start, but before too long, some other bright spark decided to put railways in from Adelaide up to Morgan, and from Echuca down to Melbourne, and so on, and that drew most of the trade away from the river – away from this end of the river, anyway – and the whole  lot fell in a bit of a heap. I don't know how many people got their fingers burnt, with not getting the return on their money for those blocks they had, but I know that, in Peter Plummer's time – Peter Plummer occupied probably half the town, as part of his farm, and it was his life's work, and I think his father's life's-work as well, to get all these old land grants that had been taken up in 1840 and 1841, and convert them into title, because he occupied the land, and the original grantees had long since disappeared. The same people that had the land grants – obviously, they had a piece of rural land, they had land in the town of Currency Creek, and they had land in Town on the Goolwa – the rural land was still wanted, because that was dealt with, and passed on to new owners, and so on, and the land at Goolwa obviously was wanted, because very few of those blocks were old land grants that hadn't been resolved, not like the Currency Creek township proper.

Audience: To be clear, when you bought a rural block, you got a block in Goolwa as well, didn't you?

Rudy: Each land grant consisted of 40 acres in rural, in the green area, so that you could support yourself with your farm, I suppose, and I haven't been able to determine exactly how many – and I'm sure that Mr. Pretty could have told me this – how many blocks you got in Currency Creek township, and how many blocks you got  down in the port of Goolwa.

Audience: You got one or the other, surely – not both?

Rudy: No, no, each land grant consisted of three components, so you could have your farm here, where your share-farmers do their work, you could have your townhouse here, and you could have your warehouse down in Goolwa.

Audience: On Liverpool Street? Which I take it is named because of Liverpool?

Rudy: Yes. The warehouse blocks ran from the river-front, which is Liverpool Road, back to what at that stage was Leadenhall Street, which is now part of Fenchurch Street, and behind that were more half-acre blocks. They weren't for warehousing, I presume that's where your manager lived. I haven't been able to find, I suppose they would have to have had some form of prospectus, whether they would call it that or not, for those people who wanted to invest. I had hoped to find just where those people came from. Now, all the streets that were laid out in the town of Currency Creek were apparently all named after people who were involved in setting it up – not necessarily the people that bought land grants, but people who went on in setting up the Consortium. Many of those names are unusual. They are English names, but there are Cadovy, Lilwall, not common names. The only place I've been able to find those names combined is on a genealogical web-site about the Shetland Islands. So whether they came from there...

Audience: I'm from the Shetland Islands, and I never knew that.

Rudy: Is Yell one of the Shetland Islands?

Audience: Yes.

Rudy: Well, these people were from Yell. Now, whether it's the same people, or whether speculation is leading me up the wrong path, but those names do occur in Yell, and, as I say, they are relatively uncommon names. But whether those people had long since migrated to London and then got involved at some stage down there, I don't know.

Audience: Now, these blocks were all sold at the Jerusalem Coffee House, is that right?

Rudy: That's another story I've heard. That was tied in with the story that they were largely of the London Jewish community. If you look at the plan, there's Ravenshaw, Yenkin (?), Liddiards, Fleming, Ants (?) - but so many other names are more common, for instance Broadhurst, Brook, Barclay. Some of the names are well-known in respect of other areas of South Australia. Some of the people that were involved in this early on, stayed on and were involved in Adelaide, so some of the street-names here (Currency Creek) correspond with street names in Adelaide.

Audience: Rather than the other way around, which is why people thought this was to be the capital!

Rudy: Adelaide was first, but those people, just because they'd already been involved in the setting up of Adelaide, there was no reason why they couldn't make some more money out here.    Anyway, that's speculation – I haven't been able to find anything to back up that theory about the Jerusalem Coffee House. Might be in the records.

Frodo: Might be. Because I'm sure that some of our older documents, in the W.A. Pretty Collection, some of the transfers of land do mention the Jerusalem Coffee House.

Audience: There was a man in the State Archives that did some research into the early land transfers – have you been there?

Rudy: Yes. There's actually quite a bit of stuff on the Internet – the Uni's got quite a bit of resource material on it, and there's been books written on it.  There's a book called “How Adelaide Was Sold”. Unfortunately, this library doesn't have it, but the State Library does. It would be something fairly treasured, I would say – you probably would have to read it there.

            That is basically the first part of Goolwa. All that carry-on was all about just that first little bit from Brooking Street to Washington Street. There's still a few questions that bug me about that – with Currency Creek Township, they named all the streets straight away, they obviously wanted to have their name in lights and so on. Now, the street names in Town on the Goolwa – Dowland, Osborne, Johnston, Clark – they're later, they're people who were here in the 1850s. So that's another question – why would they sub-divide both at the same time, put all their names on the Currency Creek ones, and not name the ones down on the river?

Audience: Would they have been renamed at some stage?

Rudy: There's nothing on any plans. You look at the early plan of Currency Creek, all the street names are there. I haven't been able to find any plans at all for Town on the Goolwa with any other names in them. There were two squares there, Graham Square and DeCastro Square, and they were involved early, but not, say, Grey Square – Grey Square was after the Governor, and DeCastro – I'm not sure what his involvement was, but it wasn't De Costa, as people have tried to tell me. That was two totally different people, like Chauncy and Chauncey.

            The rest of the town – as you can imagine, it was just added to and added to. But in the original Survey Plan, these two-and-a-half Sections here – [shows map] – which are Sections 2203, 2202 and half of 2201, they were the blocks that went out with the land grants.   This piece here is just labelled 'Government Reserve'. When they got around to putting section numbers on all the plots of land, that became 2204, and that ceased to be a Government Reserve, and became a Government Town, the 'Town of Goolwa', which is where we are now, and that's the land, Brooking Street to half-way between Goyder and Newacott – there was no road on that boundary; and as far that way as Gardiner Street, and down to the river. That was all laid out in quarter-acre blocks, which were square – which is fairly unusual, to have the square blocks, but that's how they did it. A great many of them have been re-sub-divided since, because...I don't know, people don't like the idea of square blocks, they want a narrow frontage and a long side.

            So that was this section here, that was Government town. They just got their Government Surveyors to survey it. They were military men under the direction of the Army, presumably, because they were sappers etc. Anyway, that's where their names come from – Corporal Brooking, Gardiner, Farquhar – all of these streets in this section of the town were either people involved in the survey party or officials in the Government of the time, like Hays Street. A lot of people think that Hays Street was named after Alexander Hays – he was a friend of the Hutchinsons – because that street continues on into the Hutchinson sub-division, but in fact it was named after Bennett Hay, who was the Colonial Surveyor, I believe.  [ William Bennett Hays, Government Engineer, according to R. Linn, 'A Land Abounding', p. 63]

Audience: Alexander Hay, as in Mount Breckan, is a bit later anyway, isn't he?

Rudy: Yes. Not much later, because the portion to the south of that, so from the old 'Town of Goolwa' south then to what is now Kingdon Place, that was Section 2205 in the Hundred Plan, and that was the Hutchinson family, who were over at Hindmarsh Valley. They were fairly wealthy landowners, and while they weren't involved in the early days, I suppose they were wiser – they invested once there was some certainty that the town was going ahead.

            So the early part of the town – pre-1900 – was laid out in six stages. With those early plans, G.R.O. Plans, which is General Registry Office Plans, fortunately, when they were deposited and registered at the General Registry Office, the owner actually signed it, to say he consented to that subdivision, so at least we know who owned the land at the time. These aren't G.R.O. Plans – that's the 'Town on the Goolwa' and 'Town of Goolwa' – but once you get a little further out – John Watson was the owner of this parcel of land, which was the balance of Section 2201, all of 2200 and all of 2199. That was laid out as 'North Goolwa' – of course, now it's officially 'Goolwa North' – but Goolwa North includes all of this, beyond that – [gesticulates at map, unfortunately non-audial]   Watson's land was only from Washington Street  to what is now Bricknell Road, and the piece on the end, that we know right out to Lapham's Point, that was far more recent, that was Daniels' land, that was subdivided in the 1950s, and nothing to do with the early days of Goolwa.

            This portion of land above Gardiner Street was subdivided fairly early on, it was 1858, and that belonged to Doctor Charles Davies. Obviously, Davies Street is part of that subdivision – they were all very modest, they all put their names on the streets.        

[rustles map]  

            So this Section was 1840, 1853 was the Government Town, and the next one to go was 1854, John Watson's  - that's down to Kingdon Place, and that's generally known as Little Scotland, and includes all that area with the little tiny blocks – I think they envisaged a row of cottages similar to what the workers had back in Cockenzie, or in Scotland, anyway. That also included a number of large blocks, which were to the west of Coddington Street and Collingwood Street, which is now where Woolworths is, and also a large part of that went under the oval when they took that land for the oval. That land that is occupied by the oval was still a lot of small blocks up until relatively recently, the 1950s.

            The area to the north - which isn't North Goolwa, it's Corio – was opened up in 1857, and that belonged to Richard Colley, another name that is long associated with the Adelaide area, Colley Reserve down there.  That was laid out in much larger blocks, whether he envisaged it as being small-scale market gardens or whatever, I don't know – maybe he just liked owning lots of land. That is still a rural living area, even up to now.

Audience: Do you think the Gold Rush and the extra wealth might have had something to do with the big blocks?

Rudy: Well, I was surprised, the Gold Escorts were really only for a very short time, I think it was only 18 months. Whether they really had much influence on Goolwa, I don't know. Certainly, the gold rushes had a big influence on the early development of South Australia in a negative sense, because everyone went to Victoria.

Frodo: And there was some very interesting inflation on worker's wages at the time, too.

Rudy: The only way to keep workers was to compete with the gold fields.

Frodo: Mr. Pretty's got figures there, where in one year the prices go up dramatically, and then they just keep drooping, so that in the 1860s, they were getting paid what they were in the 1840s, but there's been a huge spike [around 1853-4]

Rudy: That's all the early part of Goolwa, is Bricknell Road down to Kingdon Place, and then as far as what is now called North Road, was Currency Creek Road North, which was too confusing. So that's the old part of the town. These other Extensions – as I say, beyond Bricknell Road, and south of Kingdon Place, are relatively recent, 1950s; South Lakes was late in the 1950s – in fact, all of Goolwa Beach and that area was late 1950s, early '60s.

Audience: The 'William' streets were named after King William, were they? There's a few of them around the place.

Rudy: No. There's only one in Goolwa, one in Port Elliot, one in Middleton, one in Strathalbyn – there's Williams everywhere. This particular William Street is in the Hutchinson subdivision. All the other streets in the Hutchinson subdivision are family names – Orlando Street is in there, Augusta, Baronet  wasn't a name, of course, there was a Baronet in the family, so Baronet – and the owner of the land at the time it was subdivided, in 1856, was William Hutchinson, so I don't think he named it after the king.

Audience: The king had been dead for twenty years by then.

Rudy: When did King William die?

Audience: 1837

Rudy: So he only just scraped in, because the Act to create the Province of South Australia is 1834.  By the time they actually got here, and started setting it up, he was gone and Queen Victoria was the sovereign. That's why you have Victoria Square in Currency Creek.

Dawn: According to one of our records from Mr. Pretty, the Queen owned some of the land.

Rudy: Quite possible. If it was a sure-thing investment, there was no reason why Her Majesty wouldn't get involved.

Frodo: Like a good Hanover.

Rudy: Yes. Well, of course Hindmarsh was a Knight of the Hanoverian Court [?], and  so was Gawler, so they were all well-connected.

Audience: Was Fenchurch Street New York Road at that stage?

Rudy:  ?   It was, I think  in the correct order, Leadenhall Street in the first part, then, when it bends at Mark Lane, it became Fenchurch Street, and then, in the new subdivision , beyond Washington Street, it was New York Road. I'm not sure what the connection there is with the Americas, but a lot of the roads in that subdivision – New Orleans Road, Boston Street, New Jersey Court, they're all American-based names – and of course, New York Road.

Audience: And then you go a little north, to Quebec [Street].

Rudy: Yes, as well -it's still America, just not the United States. But the owner of that land was John Watson. I haven't been able to find out whether that was the same John Watson that owned a lot of the land around Port Elliot.

Audience: Like Watson's Gap.

Rudy: That was the Reverend John Watson. That didn't stop him from investing,of course.

Audience: Too early to have been the second Prime Minister, of course.

Rudy: The second Prime Minister wasn't a Reverend John Watson, was he?

Audience: No.

Rudy: What else can I tell you? In my work with the Council, I've had to know the difference between the Town of Goolwa, Town on the Goolwa, Upper Goolwa, Corio and so on. Of course, there is East Goolwa, but that's again a much later subdivision, that's 1952.

Audience: That's on the Island, is it?

Rudy: Yes. Well, if you go east...

Audience: Is the rest of the Island one subdivision, beyond that? So that's got a whole heap, itself?

Rudy: There was no close subdivision there – the whole island was 80-acre blocks, apart from on the coast, of course, where the shape of the coast-line made them a bit larger or smaller. But they were all square blocks, and if they were a complete square, they were 80 acres. It was all farm land, there wasn't any urban-type developments planned, except the settlement of Baudin, but that was much later. I don't think it was ever a town as such, a surveyed town, just a group of houses. I'll have to check back to see how long ago Baudin was established – if it goes back well into the 1800s, it's quite likely that the land-owner might have set up a little area of houses for his farm-workers. In that case, it wasn't really a subdivision.

Audience: I take it in those days, there'd be no limit to the number of houses you could put on your x-number of acres, unlike today?

Rudy: Who would you have to ask? Not the Council. Those people that took up the land in the Special Survey, 1839-1840, that's 13 years before the Council was proclaimed.

            I did find a couple of web-sites that I would recommend to you, because there's lots of interesting stuff in there, but I'm not going to plagiarise them and tell you things that you can look up on the web.  They say Goolwa was originally known as 'Port Pullen' – I can't see that being right. Pullen, to my knowledge, is that area just inside the Murray Mouth, and that's still called Port Pullen now. But whether they used that term for the whole lower reach of the river, and then got more specific when they created the town, I don't know. According to this, early records spelt it as 'Goolawa', with an extra 'a' in there, or 'Goolawarra-corre'  [?],. It was obviously taken from the Aboriginal, written down, so we can spell it the way we like, I suppose, just as it sounds. There's also debate over the long-held and much-promulgated theory that Goolwa means 'elbow', so there's a suggestion here that Goolwa actually means 'brackish', as in down this end was brackish water, and further up was fresh water. Unfortunately, I don't think any of the local Aborigines would have knowledge of the language back then. There's quite a lot of information on this particular web-site – www.southaustralianhistory.com.au - anything to do with Goolwa, but particularly the plight of Aborigines - “A few days since, one, in a drunken fashion, bit off his lubra's eyebrow, laying it bare to the bone.” That's because white fella gave him fire-water. Although the name sounds very official, that is somebody's private web-site, on which they have volumes of information. It's actually called Flinders Ranges Research, nothing to do with the Flinders Ranges, they've got information on the whole State. There's no credits there, there's just names. That's where I'm drawing some of this information from.

Jill Patmore, Chief Librarian: As far as the Library goes, the only ones on our web-site  are ones that have been credited, and are legitimate. I'm not criticising that, but I'm just saying that anyone can write anything, really.

Rudy: I'm just suggesting that it's a resource for interesting reading. There's a lot of conflicting accounts and anecdotes, and so on, and you really have to decide for yourself which ones are substantiated.

Audience: Is there an e-mail address on that web-site, so you could write that person a letter saying – 'tell us where you got your sources from', at least?

Rudy: I haven't go it here, but there would be on there.  The other one is from the National Archives. They've got actual copies, scans, of the original documents, the South Australia Act, 1834, an English Act saying - “Yes, we will have a Province of South Australia”.  I was pleasantly surprised by the amount of early documentation you can look at, on the Net, and zoom in and read the corrections they made, and alterations and all that sort of stuff. Even Governor Hindmarsh's Proclamation at Glenelg has got alterations and additions.

Audience: Where did you find the Shetland connection?

Rudy: Well, working on the presumption of what I'd been told about the street-names, the people that were involved in setting up the consortium up at Currency Creek, I thought - “I'll see if I can trace the origins of names”. I picked those  that were less common, like Cadoragan   (?)  and  Lewerwall (?), and that's the only connection that came up on the internet – there's genealogical sites relating to  ?

Audience: I had two relatives that were on the map there. One was from Cambridge, the other was from Cornwall.

Rudy: Maybe it's just the names I picked out were, because there's a lot of more common names there, Browns and so on, but if you put those into the search-engine, you'd get so much back, you wouldn't know what to do with it. I thought that some of the more distinctive names would hopefully lead me to a connection.

Audience: The names on there were won by the Scottish Lairds, and they were given, as gifts, and that was one. The other part was Denmark, owned Shetland.

Audience: I have a curly question – how did they do surveys in the 1840s, given they had no equipment?

Rudy: With a chain. A Chain is 66 feet, or 22 yards, and they just dragged it through the scrub, and hoped to Hell that they had it pulled tight. That's why so many of the old titles for land in Town on the Goolwa and so on, it says the land is two roods, orthereabout, and there's no measurements, you just hoped that they were accurate. A rood is a quarter of an acre.   Certainly, the early surveys, there were lots of inaccuracies – in fact one of our staff, I think it is, has a piece of land in the subdivision of Corio, and there's a discrepancy of something like one-and-a-half acres, out of a five-acre block! Now that's a discrepancy!

Audience: That's 30 per cent. That's huge! But, of course, we've all heard of disputes over fence-lines and things over the years, that were all to do with that.

Rudy: That's more to do with an actual discrepancy in surveys, whereas the size of all the blocks doesn't add up to the total, so someone dipped out. That particular one, the error is so noticeable that one of the roads has got a bend in it, because that's the only way it would fit.

Audience: Would it be possible to trace when our house was built, in Brooking Street. Would the rates say when a house was built on that. Mr. Plummer owned the blocks that we're on.

Rudy: Well, they might have given you an indication. A lot of the early rates were charged on Annual Value. Annual Value is a way of working out that a property is worth x amount in terms of rent annually. It used to be about 5 per cent of the capital value. But, unfortunately, in this particular area, there's no records going back any earlier than 1934. There was a fire at some stage, and those early records  were lost.

Jill: We found that out the other day, when we were looking at the seals.

Rudy: The seals were different – they weren't lost in the fire. I've seen them. I've seen one of the Corporation of the Town. I'll have to think about where I saw that.

Audience: Do you know anything about how the streets were divided up for the new rail-line, because a lot of the streets are chopped in half, aren't they?

Rudy: The only rail-line that was incorporated into the original lay-out of the town is the line that goes from the wharf, straight up Cutting Road, past the back here, and leaves the subdivision sort of where you go across Foster Place.

Audience: Which survey was that?

Rudy: Town of Goolwa, 1853.

Audience: Just before the train actually came through.

Rudy: Yes. The railway was actually almost complete in 1853. The official opening date was in 1854, but I believe they were using it as far as Basham's, and coming in the rest of the way on drays.    They abandoned the line from Middleton to Currency Creek, and built one from Goolwa to Currency Creek. Of course, at that stage this line through the middle of town here was still looping  (?)  its way around the railway line. It came into town the same place it does now, but instead of curving away to the east and crossing Vercoe Terrace, it came through what is now the school-yard, and crossed through the boat-yard on the corner of Gardiner Street, and where the fire-station is, and curved around Moore Street and actually joined on to this railway line at the Foster Place crossing. So it actually went through the pine forest, the area bounded by Partridge and Farquhar Streets and Gardiner and Moore. If you look at the Housing Trust units in Partridge Street, where the Coolara  (?) Court sign is, you'll notice that's set way back from the road, instead of being a normal square corner – that's because the railway line curved in through there, and when they abandoned that railway line, they didn't bother about shifting the road boundary back out again. When they decided that having the railway going square onto the wharf was not so practical, they ran a big loop right around through the town, they had to cut through Town on the Goolwa – all those blocks in Chrystal Street lost the backs off their blocks – then it went right down past the wharf, and came up through Little Scotland, so a lot of those blocks and roads – Baroness Street, Augusta Street, right round to William Street.

Audience: When was that?

Rudy: 1870s.  Being Government, they did things one way, and then changed their minds and did them another way – when the line got as far as Strathalbyn  (from Adelaide) , they decided to link it through to a South Coast line, they didn't take it straight to Goolwa – they took it straight to Middleton. You got to Middleton, and you had to back up to get to Goolwa. They left that for a few years, then they realised that that was stupid, so they abandoned that line, and ran the line down from Goolwa. Maybe, at that stage, they thought that Goolwa was not going to happen, and they didn't want to go straight to Victor, and save 50 yards of railway line. There are some aerial photographs showing that area behind Middleton – you can still quite clearly see where the line went – there's actual mounds and trees along the old (?) embankments (?). Does that answer your question ?(about the streets being divided for the rail-line)   You were thinking particularly of Little Scotland?

Audience: Yes, through Hutchinson's lot.

Rudy: The interesting thing was, from Council's point of view, the maps, the plans of the town, still show all those roads as existing, even though the railway line crossed them. So that where you crossed the railway line was still road, even though the railway crossed there. But the Department of Transport, in their wisdom, decided that the Railways Act actually over-rode the Local Government Act, so that if the Railways Commissioner had fenced the land and closed it with his railway, it ceased to be public road. They did that retro-actively, like - “Forget all those maps. They're wrong. Don't worry about it, that's railway.”

Audience: There's an awful lot of land alongside the railway, which puzzles me a bit.

Rudy: You're thinking of along the back of Baronet Street?

Audience: There's a few spots along the railway line

Rudy: Where the railway line seems unnecessarily wide? The area that I'm thinking of, which is probably one of the most glaring examples of that, is where there was a road, and then they ran a loop of railway sort of that cut into the blocks next to it, and absorbed some of the road as well, but you've virtually got the normal width of a railway reserve, and then the width of a road next to it. The blocks that back on to that piece of road, they can't use it, because it's isolated from the rest of the road system.

Audience: Somebody got some money out of losing the land, I'd think.

Rudy: Well, I daresay they would have compensated the landowners. There's blocks there that are only 200 square metres – what were they thinking - what do you do with them?

Jill : You said the street names in Little Scotland were mainly named after people. But Sidmouth is a place, which is in Devon. People from Cockenzie would have settled there. But, why?   

Rudy: I was always told that all the road names in Hutchinson subdivision were either family names or titles or so on. Now, whether one of the family married someone with the surname Sidmouth, who might have come from that part of the world...  It's Sidmouth Court, I think. I don't know if you're familiar with Sidmouth Street, but it's a little narrow street, about 20 feet wide, and then suddenly it widens out into a square.

Jill: It seems there must have been people called Sidmouth there.

Rudy: I presume Sidmouth would be located on the mouth of the Sid river.

                                    (this, interestingly, evokes laughter)

            Well, Bournemouth is at the Bourne River, and Plymouth – that's how they named the towns. Whether people had that as their surname, and therefore there's a connection through that...

Audience: There's some pokey little alleys along there, too, with houses right on the end of them – the only way in is through this little alley.

Rudy: I think there's only one like that – if you have a look at the plan, you'll see that, at frequent intervals, there were walkways through there.

Audience: Cart-lanes.  (?)

Rudy: They are legally. A lot of them have been closed in with the adjoining blocks. These walkways were only four feet. The one along the back of the first row of blocks is wider – that's ten feet, and that's the one – the railway comes through here, and blocks off Parker Street, and I think, at that block there, the only access is through that ten-foot-wide laneway. That was Mrs. Howard's property.

Audience: Is there a name on that ten-foot access?

Rudy: No, it wasn't named.

Audience: I think there's a name on it now.

Rudy: Yes, they may have. It used to just have a sign saying  “to 15 Admiral Terrace”, or whatever it was.  The other names here were Broughton  (?) Place – I don't know where the 'Broughton' came from – that's become part of KingdonPlace. Certainly, Augusta was the wife of one of the Hutchinsons. They must have been Governors – I don't know what they were Governors of.

Audience: Wasn't Augusta the wife of the Governor?

Rudy: No, that's Lady Augusta Young,  Sir Edward Fox-Young's wife.

            I don't know about Wildman Street. These streets over here – Kitts  (?) was some minor official in whatever the Lands Titles Office was called then, and Hays was the Colonial Engineer. I don't know whether Wildman was a Hutchinson family name.

Audience: What was on the oval before the oval?

Rudy: It was just vacant land, blocks that belonged to Hutchinson's, but had never been developed. And that's all I know, and a bit more.

(There is actually further discussion on Chauncy's Line, and the two Snell-Chauncys, or one Chauncey, and further research Rudy plans to do, plus discussion of names and their variants. Also- )

Rudy: I find the deeper I get into it (the research), the more interesting it becomes, because you're trying to figure out how they made the connections back then, what their motives were – actually Robert Cock was – when I spoke to people in the old section of the Lands Titles Office, they described him as a 'mover and shaker'. He was involved in a lot of developments and consortia. When I started researching him a bit further, he was also a man with some conscience, as well, because at that time, of course, there was very differing views on the natives, with some considering them to be vermin, and others thought that they'd been robbed of their land. Cock actually insisted on paying rent on land that he was occupying, to the Aborigines who owned the land. I don't know who ended up getting the money, but his motives were noble enough.

(There follows discussion of whether the original Hutchinson was a Scotsman, which Rudy believes he was, and, to a question as to whether the family were titled, or just had money - )

            There was obviously a Baronet in there somewhere, because there's a Baronet Street – and Admiral Terrace. Admiral Terrace wasn't part of the subdivision  – that was an existing  Government road, but, because they subdivided the land abutting it, that somehow got a name as well.  I'm not sure whether there was just the one family of Hutchinsons – because their descendants, they're Hutchinsons and Hutchisons – and they are related. I'm not going to venture an opinion on that until I finish the research.

            You do find interesting snippets that turn out to be wrong – the allocation of land in Adelaide was supposedly done by lottery, and who should be the lucky number one, but Colonel William Light?

Audience: It was fixed?

Rudy: Well, yes. Talking to the guys at the Old Systems, up at the Lands Titles Office, they said - “No, no. Because Light actually didn't have very much money at all himself, only had one or two Land Orders, they gave him first pick – not Adelaide City, but when they started subdividing the land around it.”  He chose Southwark, not because there was a brewery there – that was later.

Audience: Rudy, you mentioned the aerial photograph. Where is that?

Rudy: They keep moving them around. There is an oblique aerial photograph, virtually taken from above Middleton, looking towards Goolwa, and you can quite clearly see the railway connection, from the Middleton railway crossing, up to the Currency Creek/Adelaide Road railway crossing. In fact, there are still a couple of bits of land which belong to the Crown, because it's the old tramway corridor – they're only ten metres wide. That was back in the horse-drawn days, of course. Presumably they weren't too worried about the horse-drawn tram flying off the rails and demolishing the houses.

Audience: A lot of the streets show that, too, that it was horse-drawn times – you can't turn a car in them. William Street and the streets along there are like that, they're very narrow.

Rudy: As I say, they laid out that subdivision virtually on the basis of what they were used to back in Scotland.    I hadn't thought about it, but when you go down Cadell Street and into Goolwa Terrace, past the Old Police Station, it curves around in a big curve– that was because there was no way you could turn a train of bullock drays in a street – or even a paddock – they actually had to go right around.

(There is discussion about the Torrens Land System, and when it actually began.)

            Under the old system, the General Registry Office documentation and title, you had a Land Grant that said Mr. Fred had bought 50 acres, and there'd be another document saying you had bought the land from Mr. Nerk, and then there'd be another document, saying  you had bought the land  (indecipherable). If they had continued with that system till now, when you went in to do your banking, get a loan, to prove that you owned land, you'd have a suitcase full of documents, at least one for every transfer.   With the Certificate of Title, as we know it, the Torrens Title System, it's just endorsed on your copy, and of course the official one.

Audience: And when you buy a house now, you get one piece of paper.

Rudy: Yes, but they've gone back to this system of just giving you a new certificate each time, so all it's got on it is your name.

(There is discussion of the historical importance of the old documents, and the importance of owners keeping same, and dissatisfaction with the attitude of the Lands Titles Office, which do not preserve same.)

            A lot of the old certificates, of course, have long since been cancelled, and they're still here in books.    They do have a schedule. Every type of document has an expiry date. Some types of documents have to be kept forever. Things like receipts from when you've paid your Council rates.  We get people coming to us, and saying  - “I'm trying to claim this land by Adverse Possession, I need to prove who's paid rates.” I say - “You should have kept your receipts.”

Audience: By the way, I take it when you were talking, earlier on, about how various people had bought blocks who had bought blocks of land in England, hadn't claimed it, that those that did claim it, that was by the law of Adverse Possession?

Rudy: Yes. The Land Grant was issued to whoever put their money up, in England, and then they realised it wasn't going to happen, and no-one wanted it, and they forgot all about it, and the neighbour or local farmer, whoever, who had just used that land as if it was theirs – under South Australian law, if you do that for 30 years and pay the rates, then you can apply for the title of the land.

Audience: 15 years, if it's Crown Land, I believe.

Rudy: You have to prove you're entitled to the land. Too bad for the previous owner.

 

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