DONALD Langmead was deep in the research phase of his PhD thesis in the early 1980s. The University of South Australia architecture lecturer was grinding his way through the sort of stolid minutes and committee reports that are the building blocks of academic publishing, when he made an unsettling discovery. The contents of a series of documents from the 19th century laid bare as myth a cornerstone of the official history of South Australia. The acclaimed deeds of a founding hero were a falsehood. Worse, they were largely the achievements of another man. Reference books, academic journals, historic records and the stories of modern place-making had been based on assumption and not fact. Langmead, the son of a Port Adelaide council worker, was well aware of the jealousies and furies of an academic establishment scorned. “It can’t be true,” he told himself, half hoping to be wrong.

Langmead approached his doctorate supervisor at Flinders University, Donald Leslie Johnson, a vastly experienced researcher and author, with an international reputation as a scholar and expert in architectural and urban history. Johnson, an American, unburdened by folklore or preconception, reviewed Langmead’s methodology and outcomes. He concurred with his charge’s findings. Johnson told Langmead to continue with his research and complete his thesis. At the same time, Johnson began his own research into the source of the Adelaide plan.

When Langmead presented his PhD dissertation in late 1983, he concluded that Adelaide, the jewel in the crown of the new British colony of South Australia, had not been designed by the legendary Colonel William Light. The site of Adelaide had not been found by Light. The survey of Adelaide had only been managed by Light. William Light was officially the founder because he had the authority to ratify the site. Due process aside, he had little impact on the establishment of Adelaide at all. The true founder was George Strickland Kingston, a civil engineer and architect, previously disregarded as a plodding maker of uninspired buildings. The hotheaded Irishman, a Freemason and republican, had been anathema to the privileged establishment whose stories formed the first recorded history of Adelaide. For more than a century he suffered what Donald Johnson later called an “uncritical prejudice” against him by historians and writers. Until Don Langmead’s innocent discovery.

Langmead and Johnson set out their research and conclusions in the book City of Adelaide Plan: Fiction and Fact published in 1986, which, pointedly, was South Australia’s Sesquicentenary Year – the 150th anniversary of its founding. More than establishing that Adelaide was not Light’s vision, the book demonstrated there was no single vision for Adelaide at all. The new town was an amalgam of influences from history, tracing as far back as Ancient Greece. When it was designed in London as a functional colonial template by Kingston, Light was still serving as a mercenary in Egypt for the armed forces of Pasha Mohammed Ali, months away from being aware of upcoming opportunity in Terra Australis. Adelaide was being sold off the Kingston plan before its founders had set sail for South Australia, and before anyone had decided where in the new colony it would be located.

Documented fact it may have been, but in 1986 it was an unwelcome cat among the pigeons that were the self-appointed guardians of the realm of place-making and its history in South Australia. Drawn together by indignation and academic brotherhood, they huffed and puffed. Light diarist David Elder dismissed the findings out of hand, and the Deputy Surveyor General of the time, J.R. Porter, ridiculed the findings as “wild assumptions”. Yet further from home, in more objective climes, the book’s scholarship and importance were recognised – in the Melbourne journal Historic Environment and, a world away, in the English journal Town Planning Review, where University of Birmingham professor Gorden Cherry acknowledged and accepted the compelling evidence of the documents. In Adelaide, there was no rebuttal of the facts, but no acceptance either. Langmead and Johnson were out in the cold. Eight years later, the dogged Langmead published a biography of Kingston entitled Accidental Architect: The Life and Times of George Strickland Kingston in which he fleshed out Kingston’s authorship of Adelaide. The book attracted one review, in The Adelaide Review of December 1994 by Stephen Hamnett, planning academic and historian. Hamnett did not dispute the facts and scholarship of the book but, equally, did not pursue the logical ramifications for popular history inherent in its conclusions. He focused on Kingston the journeyman architect, whose buildings were already regarded as frumpy and fair game by most critics. To this day there has been no academic or informed public denial of the Langmead-Johnson position. The reaction has echoed Langmead’s initial exclamation: “No. It can’t be true”.

Doubters prepared to consider the body of evidence, however, have generally changed their position. But they form an ambiguous body of private acceptance and public denial. It seems there are three plausible reasons for this, only one of them exclusively Adelaidean in character.

Firstly, William Light was a hero of his time, and was deified as such by distinguished Australian academic/historian Geoffrey Dutton in his book Colonel William Light: Founder of a City. Light’s exotic background as the illegitimate son of the buccaneering founder and governor of Penang, Francis Light, and his girlfriend Martinha Rozells, provided the context for an adventurous life at the great frontiers of the early 19th-century world. Soldier, sailor, traveller and painter, William Light served with the Duke of Wellington in the British infantry; he was wounded and cited for bravery while fighting as a mercenary in Spain. Multi-lingual, and artistic like his father, Light also had a certain notoriety for his domestic arrangements, working his way controversially through two wives and then thumbing his nose at social convention by taking with him a mistress, Maria Gandy, for the duration of his short life in Adelaide.

When he set sail for South Australia in 1836 he was suffering from asthma and tuberculosis. Ultimately cut adrift by London and ostracised by Adelaide society, dependent on opiates and suffering from a depression bordering on paranoia (a characteristic of advanced TB), he died in his Thebarton shack in 1839, in poverty and, as always, deep in debt. It was, as academic historian Peter Howell wrote, “... the very stuff of which legends are made”. Where fact begins to be consumed by fiction.

The choice of Light as Surveyor General was a political, not professional, appointment. He had three times been knocked back for bigger prizes in Adelaide – as the first Governor; as first Resident Commissioner; and then as First Surveyor. The position of Surveyor General was a sop, fourth prize when only three were originally at stake; it was a reward for Light’s service in the Napoleonic Wars. Light’s subsequent demeanor was of a man forced to labor below his true station in life; he referred to Kingston as a “vulgar, overbearing upstart”. The position of Surveyor General didn’t call for professional qualifications or skill, it was concerned with authority and the management of others to get the job done. A military background provided the required form. William Light was not a visionary, and he wasn’t a planner, designer or surveyor of cities. He was the hero of an Emily Bronte novel who became a myth. The ghost of histories past, he haunts the city that created him, refusing to go away.

The second reason for the lack of recognition of both Kingston’s feats and Don Langmead’s scholarship is the nature of the beast that is academic publishing: a hotbed of ego, competition and outright jealousy of the highest order. Reputation, credibility and resources achieved by years of careful positioning is put on the line every time a hypothesis is held up as fact or a book is declared the definitive account of a life or a body of work. The worst crimes of academic publishing are to not methodically address all known sources of information and documented accounts on a subject, and to ignore information that conflicts with the premise of the author’s research. Of the countless historians and researchers who have pored over the official documents and accounts of the founding and early years of South Australia, only two before Don Langmead – Grenfell Price (1924) and Professor Michael Williams (1974) – had either published doubt over the authorship of the “parkland town plan” or surmised on its true origins. No-one has picked up the baton. There is a huge academic investment in this status quo, a lot of face to be lost. The mammoth task of identifying, recalling and rewriting thousands of books, guides and popular sources of information would be a humbling experience, an admission of guilt for what Langmead describes unapologetically as “flawed, unthorough and unprofessional” scholarship.

Across the academic divide from Langmead and Johnson are five historians with an interest in the Light/Kingston story, and a preference for things as they are. Not surprisingly, all are linked by Adelaide. Stephen Hamnett, Alan Hutchings and Raymond Bunker are contemporaries and colleagues: they have worked together and researched and edited together, at the University of South Australia and in publishing ventures. Hamnett and Bunker co-edited Urban Australia planning issues and policies (1987); Hamnett was a co-editor with Robert Freestone of The Australian Metropolis: a planning history (2001) which won a Planning Institute of Australia award for scholarship; Freestone had reviewed Fiction and Fact in 1986 and was “not convinced”.

Hutchings and Bunker co-edited With Conscious Purpose: a history of town planning in South Australia (1986). It was reviewed favourably by Elder in the Journal of the Historical Society of SA - as part of the same review that canned Fiction and Fact. Bunker was an advisor to the state government on the MFP proposal; Hutchings was state planner under premier Don Dunstan and director of the plan for the proposed satellite city of Monarto; Hamnett has chaired major government and professional authorities and forums. Bunker acknowledged the Langmead/Johnson research in two published papers but chooses to focus on the multiplicity of likely sources for the plan. Hutchings rejects the legitimacy of Kingston, calling him incompetent and “a crook” during a discussion at the 2003 National Planning Conference in Adelaide.

The establishment team is completed by the deceased Geoffrey Dutton and fellow South Australian David Elder. Dutton glorified Light as infallible, a grand visionary and general; Kingston was a coarse and intellectually challenged “field soldier” who did as he was told. Dutton was the quintessential descendant of the wealthy and privileged dynasties of the new colony of South Australia. Born and privately tutored as a child on the historic family property of Anlaby in the Mid-North, Dutton followed a well-worn path: Geelong Grammar, St Mark’s College at the University of Adelaide, RAAF, Oxford University, a “finishing school” of European travel and study tours, University of Adelaide again, and onwards and upwards to academic and literary fame in Australia and beyond. Light as Renaissance Man was ingrained in Dutton’s South Australian psyche well before he wrote Founder of a City in 1960. As a scholar of international repute, however, it doesn’t explain how he could have missed the same accounts, in the same documents, that Langmead uncovered 23 years later. Or did he? When Langmead went to the State Library of South Australia in the course of his research, he discovered that Dutton had put an embargo on access to the Light Papers he had researched for the 1984 revision of Founder of a City. It was the first time to the knowledge of Langmead and Johnson that such a power had been invoked in the university systems of their international experience outside of immediate family or personal documents. Fortunately, a sympathetic archivist “accidentally” left the documents where Langmead could access them for the duration of his research. The rest, as it is said, is history. Dutton revised his book three times, the last time in 1991 – five years after Fiction and Fact entered the academic consciousness – assisted by Elder. There was no acknowledgement of the Langmead findings. And no clue to why Geoffrey Dutton, eminent scholar and authority on Australian history, tried to prevent access to his research. In 1984, Elder published William Light’s Brief Journal and Australian Diaries, a mainly retrospective take on history by Light after most of his diaries, plans and sketches were lost in a fire at his surveyor shack on January 22, 1838. The Elder book adds nothing to the authorship issue and, because of its shaky origins, is not considered to have academic veracity.

The third explanation for the public silence over such revelations is Adelaide itself. The founding fathers early on created a popular history of its origins: a utopian ideal given physical form by an inspired planner. Adelaide was settled by principled free men, not criminals. It was special. It was unique. Successive generations of the comfortable cliques that have controlled the good ship Adelaide have acted as guardians of this legacy, shaping it to their own ends. There has been a convenient interpretation that there is nothing that can be done to make Adelaide better, a reason to settle comfortably in a pre-ordained present than face an uncertain future, and especially to do nothing that compromises the primacy of Light’s vision of the perfect city. Should you come across any evidence to the contrary, close your eyes and it will go away.

History doesn’t go away. It is the foundation of a society’s identity, value system and sense of place; of belonging. A society built on perpetuated myths and untruths can’t evolve in a meaningful way. It can’t grow up, and it can’t be taken seriously. In 2001, it was proposed at a forum involving the South Australia Civic Trust and the Australian branch of the International Council on Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS) that Adelaide be nominated to UNESCO as a World Heritage City because of its physical and cultural attributes, especially its “unique” layout. Donald Johnson, still irked by the wall of silence blocking acknowledgement of Langmead’s history-changing work, was dismayed. Adelaide, he says, “is not a secret society, but it is a society of secrets”, and it couldn’t be elevated to the pantheon of cities of world significance when the story of its birth and design was obscured by a fog of fiction. Johnson decided to write a paper that would be the final word on the Light/Kingston affair, focusing only on the documents recording the activity and events from August 1834, when Kingston joined the South Australia Association, to March 17, 1837, the day the survey of Adelaide into its 1000 town-acre blocks was completed. The result is The Kingston/Light plan of Adelaide and founding the city which will be published in the November issue of the Journal of the Historical Society of South Australia. It is unequivocal in both its findings and scholarly rigor, with almost 50 per cent of the paper taken up by referencing. It finishes with:

… historian Professor Peter Howell’s summary remark is apt.

Historians are constantly discovering data which undermines assumptions made by the journalists and other chroniclers who generally lead the way in attempting to explain a community to itself. Moreover, while the truth can be embarrassing to officialdom, it generally proves to be more interesting than the stories propagated by the myth-makers.

Professor Donald Langmead’s biographical research on Kingston is hereby augmented, clarified and confirmed.
William Light carried the burden of being the son of a larger-than-life father he never knew. The child of the founder and eventual governor of Penang, he was brought up by his sister before being sent to school in England, aged six. He joined the British navy at 14. Close to death a world away, he craved only that he be remembered as the founder of Adelaide and be buried with an epaulet from his military uniform. A formative establishment was only too happy to rediscover the hero in the problem child, to put a romantic spin on the demise of a figurehead. Light simply signed off on the site for the new town. The planning, design, choice of location and layout of the capital of a brave new world was the work of George Kingston.