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 had omitted to provide for a postmaster, a sheriff, or a gaoler for letters, debtors, or criminals; the surveys were seriously in arrear; the head of the staff and all his attendants had resigned; the late resident commissioner and accountant-general, the colonial treasurer, and several other officers were found insubordinate, irregular in their accounts, and grossly inefficient; it was necessary to supersede two of them peremptorily almost immediately; all officials were dissatisfied with low salaries in the face of the high prices of provisions, house rent, &c.; Governor Gawler himself, with Mrs. Gawler, his children, private secretary, and servants, was compelled to occupy a small hut, and expend 1,800 a year whilst receiving a salary of 800. With this imperfect machinery, and an empty treasury, a population of some four or five thousand souls, partly encamped on the site of the city of Adelaide, and partly dispersed in pastoral pursuits over a tract of country one hundred miles long by forty miles broad, instead of being, according to the theories of the commissioners, concentrated on ten square miles, engaged in reproducing English agriculture, had to be governed, customs dues and debts had to be levied, criminals imprisoned, and aborigines repressed.

As to the prospects of the colony, and character of pursuits of the colonists, the inspector of the Australasian Bank at Sydney wrote to his Directors in October, 1818, about the time Governor Gawler landed:

The new governor, full of colonising enthusiasm and innocent of colonial or commercial experience, was dazzled and deceived by the building activity which had excited the serious apprehensions of the experienced bank manager. He found a. large body of educated,