South Australia was officially settled in 1836. By 1850 there had been a considerable expansion from the site of the capital, Adelaide.

The pioneer agricultural industries were based in the fertile soils of the Adelaide Plains, the Southern Vales, the loams of the Gawler River region and the basins and valleys of the eastern Mount Lofty Ranges.

The land settlement policies appropriate to the foundation of the colony gradually altered as local needs and circumstances dictated activities. By 1855 pastoral leases were opening up vast tracts of the South East, and the wedge of land settlement extended north into the southern Flinders Ranges and the Eyre and Yorke Peninsulas.

Mining booms on Yorke Peninsula and in the Mid North also drove the development of country towns and extended settlement away from Adelaide.

Agricultural and pastoral expansion northwards continued despite the warnings of Surveyor-General George W. Goyder in the mid 1860s: his prognostication of a line north of which farmers might be considered eligible for assistance was soon interpreted as the limit beyond which arable agriculture should not proceed. Goyder’s Line, still holds true. In the haste to establish more settlements and to encourage agriculture ahead of pastoralism, not all took heed of his advice and preferred the unproven maxim of ‘rain follows the plough’.

However, the numerous abandoned towns and homesteads, and the planned but not built towns from the southern Flinders Ranges northwards are testimony to the wisdom of Goyder and the foolhardiness of quite a few landholders.

Michael Williams’ The Making of the South Australian Landscape and D.W. Meinig’s On the Margins of the Good Earth are good starting points for the story of land settlement in South Australia.

Organisation of the agricultural pastoral industries
P.F. Donovan, In the Interest of the Country: a history of the Pastoral Board of South Australia, 1893–1993