Edward Wilson of The Argus, riding overland to Adelaide about 1848, was
amazed to see from Willunga onward fenced and cultivated farms, with
decent homesteads and machinery up to date. The Ridley stripper enabled
our people to reap and thresh the corn when hands were all too few for
the sickle. He said he felt as if the garden of Paradise must have been
in King William street and that the earliest difference in the world--that
between Cain and Abel--was about the advantages of the 80-acre
system. Australia generally had already to realize the fact that the
pastoral industry was not enough for its development, and South
Australia had seemed to solve the problem through the doctrinaire
founders, of family immigration, small estates, and the development of
agnculture, horticulture, and viticulture. We owed a great deal in the
latter branches to our German settlers--sent out originally by Mr. G.
F. Angas, whose interest was aroused by their suffering persecution for
religious dissent--who saw that Australia had a better climate than
that of the Fatherland. We owed much to Mr. George Stevenson, who was
an enthusiastic gardener and fruitgrower, and lectured on these
subjects, but the contrast between the environs of Adelaide and those
of Sydney and Melbourne were striking, and Mr. Wilson never lost an
opportunity of calling on the Victorian Legislature and the Victorian
public to develop their own wonderful resources. When you take gold out
of the ground there is less gold to win. When you grow golden grain or
ruddy grapes this year you may expect as much and as good next year. My
brother David went with the thousands to buy their fortunes at the
diggings, but my brother John stuck to the Bank of South Australia. My
brother-in-law's subscribers and his printers had gone off and left him
woefully embarrassed. He went to Melbourne. My friend John Taylor left
his sheep in the wilderness and came to Adelaide to the aid of The
Register. He had been engaged to Sophia Stephens, who died, and her
father John Stephens also died soon after; and Mr. Taylor shouldered