South Australian Company
The South Australian Company was a London- based corporation founded to colonize southern Australia. It was planned to create a new colony in South Australia. The company was formed on October 9, 1835 and dissolved on March 17, 1949; management went to the Elders Trustee .
Founding partners of the South Australian Company were George Fife Angas , Thomas Smith and Henry Kingscote and after a short time the company had about 300 shareholders, among them John Rundle , Charles Hindley , Raikes Currie , John Pirie and Henry Waymouth , whose names are now on street signs are located in Adelaide .
In January 1836 four ships from England left for Australia on behalf of the Company . The newcomers built the first European settlement in Kingscote on Kangaroo Island in South Australia in July 1836 . It turned out that this place was too small and unsuitable for this, so the settlement was relocated to the mainland near today's Adelaide six months later. The company built the infrastructure for the new colony and this sold or leased land to the immigrants who wanted to settle there.
The South Australian Company had owned a silver mine since 1841. Later they had copper-bearing mines on Rapid Bay, Kapunda near Barossa Valley , Burra (Kooringa) and Kanmantoo. The company was extremely successful in South Australia, because whoever bought 32 hectares of farmland received 4,000 square meters of land in the city. Not only did she do business with land, she also ran sheep breeding, selling wool, whaling, and building ships. It also participated in the economic boom from 1845 through copper mining and the gold rush in Victoria in 1851 and 1852. During the economic boom, it earned mainly from the high rents that it demanded from tenants who could sell their agricultural products at high prices .
In its early years , the company was led by Samuel Stephens (1836 to 1837), David McLaren (1837 to 1841) and William Giles (1841 to 1861).
