CITY pays tribute to the man that gave us the best designed city in the world”, was the headline on the City of Adelaide media release announcing the public celebration of the 218th birthday of Colonel William Light. It was a portent that history was about to get another rewrite. “Light is without a doubt Adelaide’s most important person historically and his vision and achievements need to be recognised, applauded and commemorated by all South Australians,” Lord Mayor Michael Harbison thundered in print. The April 22, 2004 event, in a marquee next to Light’s grave in Light Square, was a jolly affair, with actors playing Light, his mistress Maria Gandy, and Edward Gibbon Wakefield among others. A robust Light, freed from tuberculosis by immortality, pontificated on his satisfaction at seeing his vision in full flower, though he was concerned at the violation of his precious parklands. There were toasts in ratepayer-funded port; it was a love-in for the true believers. And a celebration of fiction as fact.

The glaring omission from the guest list was the true founder of Adelaide, George Kingston. If present he certainly wouldn’t have been vain enough to claim total authorship of the city the way it was attributed to Light. Kingston was a pragmatist with little time for pretence. He would have said the city plan was a grab-bag of military, social and colonial guidelines. He would have taken the audience back to Ancient Greece to show where it began.

The familiar grid town layout – used as early as 2500BC by the Egyptians – was first developed as a co-ordinated system of buildings and precincts by the Hellenist Greeks, most notably in the city of Miletus (from 479BC), home of the father of town planning, Hippodamus. It was perfected as a vehicle for orderly settlement and social control by the masters of organisation, the Romans of 100BC to 500AD. Both civilizations were urban cultures, their new cities designed for colonial and military purposes. The fall of the Roman Empire saw Europe revert to an agrarian society, its cities growing haphazardly and irregularly, generally around the church, the physical and spiritual heart of Middle Ages society. After 1100, the grid reappears in the new towns – the bastides – of France and England, fortified communities designed to counter each other’s ceaseless raids.

The Renaissance of the 16th century rediscovered the writings of the early Roman architect Vitruvius who set out the principles not just of architectural form and proportion, but of the functional elements of cities – layout, spaces and orientation. Vitruvius did not address aesthetics so much, but the artists and scholars who were the drivers of Renaissance expression manipulated his work to create a new paradigm in the treatment of public spaces and amenity, while maintaining political and military prerequisites. At the heart of this rebirth of classical thinking was the concept of the perfect city, best illustrated by artist, military engineer and architect Pietro Cataneo who, from 1554 to 1567, synthesised the work of Vitruvius into his Ideal City plan – the plan Kingston was to use for Adelaide some 300 years later.

Cataneo’s model and its variations classified the relationship between order, geometry, architecture and town planning. Among others, the great Italian architects and theorists Palladio and Scamozzi plagiarised it for their own influential treatises. It influenced the new cities of the Spanish colonisers of the New World to the 1870s, and British political theorists and expansionists applied its logic to the colonisation of North America. Among the first clear incarnations of the Cataneo model was the founding of Philadelphia (1687), followed by Charleston (1672), Savannah (1733), New Ebenezer (1747) and New Haven (1748). In 1717, the Renaissance plan in its purest form was used by Robert Montgomery to design a city in Georgia called the Margravate of Azilia that, because it didn’t attract investors in England, was never built. A century later it was overlaid on South Australia.

The Cataneo plan was a perfect model for 18th/19th-century British colonial urban planning policy, for which there were eight guiding principles. Of most significance for Adelaide was that towns were to be pre-planned and placed on sites, with a grid layout of wide streets for surveillance and control. The towns were to be divided into wide rectangular plots to minimise fire and health risks, and they were to be surrounded by a quarter-mile-wide (400m) green belt, a “cordon sanitare”, as a barrier to the surrounding bush or jungle (a quarter-mile said to be the furthest distance a mosquito could fly) which was also to be used for livestock and sport.

William Penn’s Philadelphia was followed by Oglethorpe’s Savannah. Oglethorpe influenced Granville Sharp, a British anti-slavery campaigner and utopian who promoted the benefits of the grid and greenbelt in his attempts to establish model towns for freed slaves. In the first town-planning theory published in respect to Australia, On Laying Out Plans of Towns, by retired British military officer T.J. Maslen, published in London in 1827, the concept of the greenbelt and the parkland town was paramount.

The reformist theories of Penn, Oglethorpe and Sharp were shared by the men who provided the societal principles and impetus for the colonisation of South Australia – Robert Owen, Edward Gibbon Wakefield and Robert Gouger. Owen, a friend of Maslen, was a socialist utopian mill owner who tried to develop a model community in the American state of Indiana in 1825. Wakefield had a predilection for underage heiresses and ran off with two in a row in an attempt to fund his ambitions. While languishing in London’s Newgate Prison between 1828 and 1831 as punishment, he became interested in prison reform and social issues, and his writings were published in the London press, some of them co-authored by Gouger.

Wakefield promoted a scheme to colonise South Australia based on the best capitalist motive: profit. The wealthy would buy property before the colony was settled, with initial returns used to subsidise the passage of the honest and sober laborers and tradesmen who would work for their landowning masters and, in turn, buy their own share of the new colony with their saved wages at highly inflated prices. Owen’s dreams in Indiana came to naught but he remained an influential social reformer. Wakefield took his ideas to Canada and New Zealand, and had an influence on both. Gouger became the first Colonial Secretary in Adelaide and helped apply the Wakefield theory in the new colony. He was a friend of both Owen and Maslen.

Of more interest to the Colonial Office and, subsequently, George Kingston, than the ideals of reformers were the proven mechanisms of successful and profitable colonisation: the Cataneo grid plan that could be drawn into lots and presented to investors for sale before anyone had to set foot on a boat bound for the promised land. At this point, the portion of the research of professors Donald Langmead and Donald Johnson that comes solely from official documents of 1834 to 1837 is distilled to bare details, in chronological order, to show how Kingston, not Light, became the founder of Adelaide.
1834 – August: South Australian Act passed, authorising establishment of colony. Requires sale of land before surveyors appointed. SA Association formed. Kingston joins as volunteer office worker with eye on securing place in official colonisation authority.

1835 – May 3: SA Colonisation Commission formed to plan expedition. June: Kingston sequentially appointed Assistant Surveyor, Deputy Surveyor, Chairman of Associations Building Sub-Committee and Sub-Committee for Settling Arrangements for the Future Expedition. Put in charge of temporary and permanent buildings for new colony, and preparing plan for the “principal town” on a “permanent basis”. September: Preliminary plan prepared for first buyers. October 12: Town plan presented to Building Sub-Committee. November 12: Kingston report details duties of Survey Department and how town/rural land will be laid out. December: Kingston told to prepare strategies for coastal survey of SA, with view to finding “proper site for the town”. Presents town plan and survey strategy to Commission. Purchases made off plan in London between September and December.

1836 – Mid-January: Light sails into Portsmouth from Cairo after serving as mercenary in Egypt. Becomes aware of SA expedition. February 4: Appointed Surveyor General after rejected as Governor and Resident Commissioner. March 9: Receives “Letter of Instructions”, comprising the directives of Kingston and his office, and other provisos. Instruction No 16 was “make yourself acquainted” with how colonial towns established in North America, indicating source of Kingston plan. Political machinations, including concerns over the role of Governor Hindmarsh, see Light given sole responsibility for choosing location of town. Expedition sets sail for SA (March 24: Kingston on Cygnet. May 1: Light on Rapid). First colonisers on Kangaroo Island in July, Holdfast Bay in November. November 24: While Light

investigating Port Lincoln as town site, Kingston writes to him from exploration camp inland from Holdfast Bay where he is convinced site will be found. Light rejects Port Lincoln, and Kangaroo Island’s Nepean Bay, is resigned to present-day Glenelg as the only option. December 15: Light receives Kingston letter, reconsiders. December 17: Light meets Kingston who says “no other spot” could match what he has found on the plains, near river. December 24: Kingston takes Light to camp five miles inland but two miles short of site. Light, ill and exhausted but impressed, goes no further. Returns to ship and rests. December 28: Light returns to Kingston camp, backs Kingston choice without setting foot on it. Informs Hindmarsh. December 30: Hindmarsh visits camp, demands town be located four miles closer to port. Light agrees. Kingston convinces Light not to give in. Light changes mind again. Next day uses authority of appointment to ratify location.

1837 – January 3: Light walks site for first time. January 11: Kingston “undertook to survey the town”, as reported to London by Assistant Surveyor Boyle Travers Finniss. No mention of Light. Finniss diary entry describes Kingston starting survey of town that “was originally designed in England”. Finniss says 437 of the 1000 one-acre town lots of the town “as originally designed” were sold in England “preparatory” to sailing. March 17: Kingston completes survey.
William Light was a soldier with no education, and a painter and draftsman of moderate ability. In his three years in South Australia he was chronically ill, easily tired, and not keen on field work, in deference to his health and officer status. He spent much of the time resting or, as anticipated, quarrelling with Hindmarsh and his office. As Light himself reported to the Resident Commissioner, James Fisher, on April 15, the survey of Adelaide was carried out by qualified civil engineer Kingston and his assistants, including military engineer Finniss.

Light’s major contribution to the founding of Adelaide was to rubber-stamp Kingston’s choice of site – after twice changing his mind and initially yielding to the domineering Hindmarsh. The true founder was the versatile George Kingston who, typically, was to move on to new challenges and create an imposing and acknowledged presence in South Australian history. By 1847 he had quit architecture to pursue interests in mining and politics, his pugnacity and reformist zeal lighting up the Legislative Council, and then the first House of Assembly, till his retirement in 1880. His elder son, Charles Cameron Kingston, a lawyer, followed his father into politics to become one of the three founding fathers of the Federation of Australia in 1901. Tragically, the direct male line ended with the death of Charles in 1908, leaving the 20th century uncontested to the myth-makers and the legend of William Light.

And Adelaide? We weren’t special or unique. We were stamped from a colonial template which itself was the bastard child of intellectuals, rulers and administrators down through the centuries. Our true father was a hard-working Irishman who once said “it’s easier to follow a beaten path than to make a new one”. When we can celebrate his honest efforts we will be ready to move from the past to the future.

Check the facts

IT is not possible here to provide more than a summary of the origins of Adelaide and the people involved. For those who want the complete story, it is contained in the following sources and the exhaustive references they provide. See for yourself.

Raymond Bunker, Many hands make Light work, National Planning Congress, Adelaide, 2003
Geoffrey Dutton and David Elder, Colonel William Light: Founder of a City, Melbourne University Press, 1991
David Elder, William Light’s Brief Journal and Australian Diaries, Wakefield Press, Adelaide, 1984
David Elder, Art of William Light, Corporation of the City of Adelaide, Adelaide, 1987
Stephen Hamnett book review, The Adelaide Review, December 1994, p35
Donald Leslie Johnson, The Kingston/Light plan of Adelaide and founding the city, Journal of the Historical Society of South Australia, No 32, Adelaide, to be published November 2004
Donald Leslie Johnson and Donald Langmead, The Adelaide City Plan: Fiction and Fact, Wakefield Press, Adelaide, 1986
Spiro Kostof, A History of Architecture: Settings and Rituals, Oxford University Press, New York, 1995
Spiro Kostof, The City Shaped: Urban Patterns and Meanings Through History, Thames & Hudson, London, 1999
Spiro Kostof, The City Assembled: The Elements of Urban Reform Through History, Thames & Hudson, London, 1999
Donald Langmead, Accidental Architect: the life and times of George Strickland Kingston, Crossing Press, Sydney, 1994
John Parker, Colonial cities: planning in the Third World, News in Planning – Issue 1424, June 22, 2001, Royal Town Planning Institute, UK, www.rtpi.org.uk/
John W. Reps, Urban Planning, 1794-1918: An International Anthology of Articles, Conference Papers, and Reports, Selected, edited, and provided with headnotes by John W. Reps, Professor Emeritus, Cornell University, US, www.library.cornell.edu/Reps/DOCS/
Alex Tzonis and Liane Lefaivre, Lines of Vision Lines of Fire: The Role of Analogy and Image Cognition in Designing the Renaissance Bastion, 2004, www.bk.tudelft.nl/dks/publications/online%20publications/1994-DasBauwerk.htm
The Flinders History of South Australia, Wakefield Press, Adelaide, 1986
The Wakefield Companion to South Australian History, Wakefield Press, Adelaide, 2001