The Letters Patent establishing the Province of South Australia formally titled;
- Letters Patent under the Great Seal of the United Kingdom erecting and establishing the Province of South Australia and fixing the boundaries thereof
was the document presented to the King to formally seek the approval to establish the province of South Australia. The Letters were dated 19 February 1836.
The provision to establish the settlement in South Australia, was set out in the South Australia Act, 1834. The Act had omitted specific directions with regards to how the province or provinces of South Australia were to be founded. These Letters Patent formulated by the Colonisation Commissioners were to address this. They specified that the province of South Australia was to be established with these boundaries:
- On the North the twenty sixth Degree of South Latitude On the South the Southern Ocean—On the West the one hundred and thirty second Degree of East Longitude— And on the East the one hundred and forty first Degree of East Longitude including therein all and every the Bays and Gulfs thereof together with the Island called Kangaroo Island and all and every the Islands adjacent to the said last mentioned Island or to that part of the main Land of the said Province.
Included within the Letters Patent was a recognition of the rights of the Aboriginal Natives to live within the lands of the South Australian province.
"Provided Always that nothing in those our Letters Patent contained shall affect or be construed to affect the rights of any Aboriginal Natives of the said Province to the actual occupation or enjoyment in their own Persons or in the Persons of their Descendants of any Lands therein now actually occupied or enjoyed by such Natives"
This differed from the statements of the South Australia Act, 1834, which described the lands as 'waste' and 'uninhabited'.
These Letters Patent were adopted, and soon after this in February 1836 the Order in Council which enacted the establishment of the South Australia province was passed.
Famous quotes containing the words south, province, australia, patent, letters and/or establishing:
“To lib and die in Dixie!
Away, away, away down South in Dixie!”
—Daniel Decatur Emmett (1815–1904)
“Female Virtues are of a Domestick turn. The Family is the proper Province for Private Women to Shine in. If they must be showing their Zeal for the Publick, let it not be against those who are perhaps of the same Family, or at least of the same Religion or Nation, but against those who are the open, professed, undoubted Enemies of their Faith, Liberty, and Country.”
—Joseph Addison (1672–1719)
“I like Australia less and less. The hateful newness, the democratic conceit, every man a little pope of perfection.”
—D.H. (David Herbert)
“There is a patent office at the seat of government of the universe, whose managers are as much interested in the dispersion of seeds as anybody at Washington can be, and their operations are infinitely more extensive and regular.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“...he sent letters to all the royal provinces, to every province in its own script and to every people in its own language, declaring that every man should be master in his own house.”
—Bible: Hebrew, Esther 1:22.
King Ahasuerus, after his Queen Vashti refused to come at the king’s command.
“The queers of the sixties, like those since, have connived with their repression under a veneer of respectability. Good mannered city queens in suits and pinstripes, so busy establishing themselves, were useless at changing anything.”
—Derek Jarman (b. 1942)