Boyle Travers Finniss joins the catalogue of Adelaide street names from the comparatively lowly position of Assistant Surveyor to Colonel William Light, the Surveyor General in the new colony.
Because the layout of the city of Adelaide was the handiwork of the Colonel and his team, the naming of Finniss Street was entirely logical. After all, it was the accomplishments of the surveying team being described. Furthermore, since Colonel Light was on the Street Naming Committee, it is easy to imagine him promoting at least some of his own men, especially as they had only just completed the task at hand. As we know, Light himself was named early in proceedings and accorded the honour of having Light Square so named. It follows naturally, therefore, that the two officers immediately under his command should also be honoured, but perhaps not until the bulk of the naming decisions had been made for the day.
Both Finniss and George Strickland Kingston were conceivably among the last in the list of sixty streets and two squares decided and this may account for their position on the extremities of the North Adelaide section of the map of Adelaide. Neither Kingston nor Finniss were present at the meeting. They were two of only three men named in the new colony who were not on the Committee. The third, Charles Mann, the Advocate General, was John Brown’s brother-in-law. Both Kingston and Mann were members of the ‘philosophically radical clique’. So given the dominance of such views on the Committee, their inclusion became a forgone conclusion. Finniss was not of the same mind, which makes him a unique recipient of the accolade and strengthens the likelihood that Colonel Light put his name forward.
It is known that Light and Finniss were especially close. When Light resigned as Surveyor General on a matter of principle – and what might be described as highly refined subterfuge from Kingston – Finniss and the majority of Light’s surveying staff walked with him, leaving Kingston standing on the Adelaide plan like the emperor with no clothes.
Finniss, Light, Lieutenant Field and others then set up a private surveying company known as Light, Finniss & Co. They undertook work for speculators and investors at Port Adelaide, Gawler and elsewhere in the new colony. In this capacity Finniss is credited with the responsibility for surveying the township of Gawler.
In many respects Boyle Travers Finniss is a less complicated figure than most of the others in this book and the reasons for this are several. He was in the greater scheme of things a junior appointment to the colony who came very late to the project. He was not one of the young radical ideologues who had been hovering around the Adelphi for years in expectation of a formal position in Edward Gibbon Wakefield’s grand experiment.
Finniss didn’t appear on the scene until October or November 1835, and there is some evidence to show that he was immediately alienated by those who were known as the ‘old colonists’. When Finniss – the young, aspiring Assistant Surveyor General – put in for the deputy surveyor position, it was seen to be an aggressive move against Kingston, who had convinced his freemason friends on the Statistical Committee that the job was rightly his. Thereafter Finniss was viewed with a little detachment by some of the radicals, although they acknowledged that as far as surveying went he was highly competent and equally industrious.
In late 1835 Finniss married Anne Frances Rogerson. He decided to apply for the post of Deputy Surveyor General in the proposed colony to consolidate worthwhile employment. He came with strong references as a surveyor and had the support of his superiors in Colonel William Staveley, Deputy Quartermaster General, and Lieutenant General Sir Wiloughby Gordon, under whom he served in Mauritius. Finniss’ undoubted expertise in topographical measurement and engineering made him an obvious choice. Unfortunately, when the South Australian appointments were finally announced, Kingston, not Finniss, was preferred for the Deputy Surveyor Generalship, despite Kingston’s inadequate qualifications. There was more than a hint of nepotism in Hill’s decision on these two appointments!
Finniss was not of the same political persuasion as most of the young appointees from the Adelphi and unlike most of the others was trenchantly opposed to a slavish adherence to the Wakefield principles. In his book on the constitutional history of South Australia (1886), which he wrote after a long and rich tapestry of public life in the province, Finniss describes the colonial experiment as ‘a vicious system of colonization called the Wakefield system’.
This criticism goes right to the greatest weakness of the Wakefield plan in that it did not provide for the sequestration of any monies which might be needed to build roads, canals, railway lines and bridges. In his opinion there was always a need for a strong, well-funded public sector with which to build the necessary infrastructure in any colonial venture.
Boyle Travers Finniss was born at sea, somewhere off the Cape of Good Hope, on 17 August 1807. His parents were en route to Bombay aboard the East Indiaman Warby; his father being the paymaster of the First Battalion of the 56th Regiment which in turn was supporting the East India Company. Finniss was christened in Bombay on 8 January 1809. He had a long and powerful career in the new colony.
Finniss was one of eight children, four of whom were stepchildren, as his mother, Susanna, unfortunately died prematurely at Madras in India on 23 April 1815. His father, Captain John Finniss, married a second time and throughout Boyle’s formative years was attached to the British East India Company. Boyle was the oldest boy and both he and his older sister, Eliza, were estranged from their parents at an early age, left with relatives in England to finish their schooling. Captain Finniss determined that Boyle should have a classical education and a proper grounding for life.
Boyle successively attended two schools in Rochester where it is said that like most other boys, he occasionally got into trouble. As a 10-year-old, Boyle was sent to Greenwich, in London, to attend the school of Dr Charles Burney, who provided young, aspiring gentlemen with a classical education incorporating both Latin and Greek. Ironically, this is a common thread for almost all of those endowed with a street name in Adelaide, and it is a matter for wonder to reflect on just how many of these men and the lone woman in Maria Barton Hack made it into print with their own work in later life. Finniss was no exception in this and after a few fetid expressions of Byronic ardour during his teenage years he eventually evolved into a scholarly historian. His Constitutional history of South Australia remains an important endowment to our understanding of the events within the colony of South Australia right up to the end of his long life.
In 1822 Finniss entered the Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst. He was 15 years old and headed the list for his intake because of his higher level competence in Latin. Among a wide range of subjects including Latin, French, mathematics, physics and astronomy, he also took mechanics, contour sketching, trigonometric surveying and military drawing. These were no doubt a great advantage to him when he left the army seeking employment as a senior surveyor in South Australia.
At 18 Finniss graduated from Sandhurst with a commission. After a fleeting appointment as an ensign in the 88th Foot, otherwise known as the Connaught Rangers in Ireland, his appointment was cancelled and he was transferred to the 56th Regiment under the patronage of Sir Lowry Cole, the then Governor of Mauritius. Here he rose to the status of Lieutenant and at his own request sought a transfer to the 82nd Regiment, otherwise known as the Prince of Wales Volunteers, some of whom were stationed in Mauritius. Eventually, he was promoted to Lieutenant and able to then join his father in Mauritius, where, as a member of the Staff of Colonel Staveley, he plunged into his work with a steady hand and a keen eye. He took charge of the regimental topographical survey work throughout the island, drawing up the plans and supervising the construction of the bridge over the River Poste. His illustrated work, maps and sketches were of such a high standard that Governor Sir Charles Colville sent his map of the island of Mauritius back to London to be used as a teaching instrument.
Finniss comes across as a dutiful but competent employee who didn’t suffer fools gladly. He was a steady, conservative, though not particularly brilliant young man who could complete a task as required without too much fuss. He knew the meaning of hard work. His opinion of Kingston was coloured even before they arrived in the colony and was only exacerbated when he realised how lazy and incompetent the Deputy Surveyor General was, especially when he had to redo some of Kingston’s perfunctory and error-laden work on the eastern side of King William Street. As a young officer in the colony, Finniss didn’t hesitate to express a point of view, which in other circumstances a senior officer might construe as insubordination.
At the point the streets were named in May 1837 Finniss and his wife had one daughter, Fanny Lipson Finniss, who was born on 1 January 1837 in a reed hut built by Aboriginals at Rapid Bay. The Indigenous inhabitants were especially friendly to Colonel Light and his team and accompanied the new arrivals over much of the good land in the vicinity, especially up the Yankalilla, Wanwanilla and Incalilla creeks near Lady Bay.
Boyle and Anne Finniss went on to have seven children in total; three girls and four boys– their eldest, Fanny, the first-known Anglo Saxon girl to be born in the colony (although some might dispute this). Unfortunately, one son, Henry John Finniss, died in infancy in 1846, and another, Boyle Travers Jnr, was drowned in the Murray River on 18 December 1853. He was only 14.
It might be said that Finniss’ life was punctuated by disappointment and sadness. He lost his mother when he was a child, became estranged from his father during his schooldays and, after marrying Anne Rogerson, struggled to keep the family in a manner similar to the ‘officer class’ status into which he was born. Unfortunately, he also lost Anne on 3 January 1858 after a long illness. She was only 38 years old. As if this were not enough, his eldest daughter Fanny died in Norwood on 3 May 1865. She in turn left a grieving widower and six young children. Finniss did marry again, but not until 1878 at the age of 70. He took Sophia Florence Maud Lynch as his wife and she delivered him with a daughter they named Coraly. His devastation when she too died of croupal diphtheria at the age of 5 was diabolical and he was inconsolable.
In some ways, life for Boyle Travers Finniss was steady but unremarkable, even though he will always be remembered as the first Premier of South Australia. In the first blush and euphoria of settlement, a very young Boyle Finniss and his wife launched themselves headlong into the community. In addition to joining Light to form a private survey company, Boyle was also a small shareholder in the Harbour Survey Company. His private activities included a trusteeship of the newly formed South Australian Club, membership of the South Australian Church Society and attendance at Holy Trinity on North Terrace. He did not, however, attempt to join the Lodge to which Kingston and the radical clique belonged, preferring instead to later join the Freemason’s Lodge of Truth in 1859, where he aligned with some of Adelaide’s evolving establishment.
From the outset Finniss had an attraction for government employment of one sort or another, probably out of a need to find secure employment to sustain his family. Unfortunately, however, he was not always the first choice for many of the positions for which he applied. He didn’t appear to be interested in building a private business or in speculation, but always offered himself up for positions in administration he thought he could handle.
After Colonel Light resigned as Surveyor General, Kingston held the position ever so briefly before realising it was beyond him. He too resigned. After Colonel Light died, Governor Gawler appointed Captain Charles Sturt as Acting Surveyor General until such time as the position could be formalised by the Colonial Office. Finniss was offered the post of Deputy Surveyor General at the insistence of Governor Gawler, but he, like Stuart’s appointment, was let go when Governor Grey was appointed and adopted more restrained fiscal practices.
Not long afterwards, Finniss was appointed Police Commissioner and Police Magistrate, but only after Major O’Halloran had refused both positions on the pretext that they amounted to two full-time roles which he was not prepared to undertake. Finniss took up the challenge.
In 1847 he stood in for Captain Sturt as Registrar General and Treasurer while Sturt led his expedition into Australia’s interior. This was followed by a temporary appointment as Colonial Secretary after the incumbent Mr Mundy resigned from active duty. Finniss offered himself up for Mundy’s position on a permanent basis, only to find that Captain Sturt was eventually given the position instead. However, having generally been the ‘bridesmaid and never the bride’, in 1850 Finniss was made Registrar General and Colonial Treasurer, and in 1852, still climbing ever higher in public office, he was finally appointed Colonial Secretary in his own right.
His timing was impeccable because after fifteen years of colonial administration, the British Government was about to concede that there should be a new constitution in South Australia, which would effectively provide two government chambers in the colony: a Legislative Council, consisting of nominated members and two additional who were ex officio; and a Legislative Assembly, consisting of 36 elected members and two ex officio, who were to be the Colonial Secretary and the Advocate General. This was Finniss’ pathway to the first premiership which, because of the inherent instability in the first attempts at representative government, only lasted for 120 days or so.
Finniss’ legacy as Premier included both an investigation into a permanent water supply for Adelaide and the passage of legislation to introduce a railway line between Adelaide and Port Adelaide.
After his short tenure as Premier, Finniss served as Treasurer in a Hanson ministry, despite the long held antipathy between the two, which apparently stemmed from their brief time together back in London during the last days before sailing to Australia in 1836. He then represented the City of Adelaide and Mount Barker in successive parliaments, retired from the House of Assembly in 1862 and vainly attempted a comeback in the Legislative Council.
He was subsequently appointed Government Resident in the Northern Territory by Premier Henry Ayers, charged with surveying a potential site for a capital in the Territory. He was ultimately recalled from this appointment for incurring too much government expenditure on the mudflats of the Adelaide River, where it spills into Adam Bay. Thereafter Finniss became a member of the Forest Board in 1875 and Auditor General in 1876, before retiring from public life to write his book.
The Honourable Boyle Travers Finniss died at his Kensington Park home, in Marryatville, on 24 December 1893. He was the last of the original appointments of the South Australian Commission to do so.
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