John Hindmarsh: War, Proclamation and Recall in South Australia's "Free" Colony
From powder boy at the Nile to the recalled first Governor of South Australia, John Hindmarsh's life ran along the hard edges of the British Empire.
Born into the lower deck of the Royal Navy, Hindmarsh grew up under cannon fire. He survived the great fleet battles against Revolutionary France, earned his commission the hard way, and carried quarterdeck habits into a world that was about to change around him. Peace left him stranded on half-pay, lobbying for work while trying to feed a growing family.
When London finally offered him a prize - the governorship of a bold new "free" colony on the southern coast of Australia - he treated it as overdue justice. Sailing on HMS Buffalo, he read the famous Proclamation on the beach at Holdfast Bay and assumed that his authority would be as clear as it had been at sea.
It wasn't. In a canvas town on Kaurna country, Hindmarsh collided with Wakefield's land scheme, James Hurtle Fisher's Commission, a noisy colonial press, and settlers who did not think like sailors. His naval discipline, suspicion of criticism and narrow view of duty turned a constitutional experiment into a political fistfight. Within two years London quietly recalled him.
This book follows Hindmarsh from Chatham to the Nile, from the Adelaide plain to a rocky British outpost on Heligoland, and finally to retirement on the English coast. It sets his story against Kaurna dispossession and the founding myths of a "better" colony, showing how one middling officer left a permanent mark on a city that barely remembers him.
John Hindmarsh: War, Proclamation and Recall in South Australia's "Free" Colony is Book Three in Shadows on the Map: Australian Lives, a series of sharp, readable biographies of the men who helped draw Australia's earliest borders - and the people who paid for those lines on the ground.
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