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THE founding and funding of South Australia has been, literally, whitewashed. George Fife Angas the principal philanthropist, investor and visionary of the SA colonial experiment was only able to fund his South Australian Company because of money he made from slavery.
The Montefiore, Mills and Stirling families and many other prominent colonialists were slavers. Money made from the persecution of their black slaves on the sugar and mahogany plantations of Jamaica and Honduras helped create SA. It’s ironic that our free settler state was funded by slavery.
We’ve always felt so superior to the convict states since convicts were slave labour. We’re founded on slaves so we are holier than whom?
All this is revealed by Australia’s most underrated and oft-plagiarised historian, Humphrey McQueen, in a recent essay published by our excellent Wakefield Press in the book Foundational...