Matthew Moorhouse, a medical practitioner, arrived in South Australia from Staffordshire, England, in June 1839 to take up appointment as the colony’s first permanent protector of Aboriginals.
Could the problem of infant mortality be dealt with by giving expert advice to mothers? The Mothers’ and Babies’ Health Association certainly thought so.
The National Council of Women of South Australia argued for pensions for widows with children, raising the marriage age for girls from 12 and other reforms.
The historic toll house at the base of the South Eastern Freeway was constructed in 1841 as a means for funding road construction from Adelaide to Mount Barker. As the only toll road in the colony of South Australia, this system generated significant public hostility and did not even come close to covering construction and maintenance expenses. The building’s use as a toll house was therefore stopped in 1847 to great public relief.
The one viable alternative to importing live stock by sea was the droving of stock overland from New South Wales, the work of overlanders. Their motive was simple: high profit.
‘South Australia’, wrote the early twentieth-century author of The Cyclopedia of South Australia, ‘owes its existence to a movement which had its origins in philanthropy’.