Page 27 - 1977 NAB CalendarMaritime Life in early Australia Part One

THE NEW PORT, ADELAIDE, SOUTH AUSTRALIA

DECEMBER

The New Port, Adelaide, is depicted here in its first years of operation. It is Company, which undertook the new development. The Company constructed a
obvious from early immigrants’ accounts of the old port, aptly named Port road across the swamps to the New Port in 1839, and opened the wharf, named
Misery, that these new facilities presented a dramatic improvement on the old. after the Company’s manager, David McLaren, in 1841. The lithograph shows the
Ships were forced to anchor a mile downstream from the old port, and extent of the port’s development by about 1842. The six-ton crane is operating
passengers were “carried on shore on the sailors’ backs, and their baggage on McLaren Wharf, and the South Australian Company’s warehouses dominate
thrown promiscuously on the muddy beach”. After negotiating mosquito- the area behind it. The beginnings of the settlement of Port Adelaide can be seen
infested mangrove swamps at the landing point, the passengers were faced on the right.
with a six mile journey to Adelaide. These new facilities soon proved inadequate to handle South Australia’s
Governor Gawler decided that a new port should be constructed at a point expanding trade, and the port was extended several times before the end of the
where ships could anchor, and chose a site about a mile downstream from the century. Today, No. 2 Wharf, Inner Harbour, occupies the area where the
old port. The site formed part of a section owned by the South Australian McLaren Wharf stood, and the tiny settlement has become the City of Port
Adelaide.Little is known about the lithographer, J. Hitchen, whose work was
published by J. C. Hailes of London
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