SA 175th Jubilee

SA 150th anniversary postcard

Many wonderful ideas came from the audience at the Public Meeting for the City of Adelaide held at Semaphore, South Australia, on 20 November, 2007.

In particular, one audience idea gained strong interest from the attending crowd. This was to develop a City of Adelaide Seaport village as a 175th Jubilee project to commemorate the birthday of the state of South Australia in 2011.

As 2011 also marks the 100th birthday celebrations of the Royal Australian Navy, the maritime synergies would provide leverage to attract visitors to South Australia.

The aim would be to have the official opening of the seaport museum in 2011.

Irene Mitcher watches as her husband Mike signs the petition to save the City of Adelaide at the Semaphore Public Meeting in November 2007

Potential Timeline of Events

The following is a potential timeline of events that could be used to promote South Australia's 175th Jubilee celebrations using the clipper ship City of Adelaide:

• 2008/09 – transport the City of Adelaide from Scotland to South Australia attracting world-wide attention as the sister ship of the Cutty Sark providing tremendous opportunities for television coverage as well as a home-coming event staged in Port Adelaide. At this same time, promote to the wordlwide community that the City of Adelaide is going to be developed into an attraction at Port Adelaide with the grand-opening in 2011 as part of the 175th Jubilee celebrations.
• 2011 – early in the year, the grand-opening of the City of Adelaide Seaport village (based on Mystic Seaport in the USA and akin to the Sovereign Hill at Ballarat and, instead of being based on Gold Mining trades, based on Port, Shipping and Shipbuilding trades. In association with the RAN’s 100th birthday celebrations, or in addition to them, develop a tall ships event celebrating the opening of the City of Adelaide Seaport village and the state’s 175th Jubilee.
• 2014 – 7th May celebrate the 150th birthday of the launch of the clipper ship City of Adelaide with another tall ships event to attract world-wide attention. Follow this up with another event marking the first arrival of the City of Adelaide in Port Adelaide on 7th November (1864).
• 2015 – 2036 – celebrate the 150th anniversary of the annual arrivals of the City of Adelaide in Port Adelaide (1864-1886). (She arrived on different dates each year.) Perhaps a major dinner onboard the clipper each year with Victoriana dress as a theme inviting the Victoriana Society of South Australia and/or the Fort Glanville Historical Society; or some form of Sip-and-Sail event; or a culinary event with menus/dishes/recipes from 1836 to 1886. Each dinner could focus on descendants of that voyage or on recent modern-day migrants.
• 2015 – 2037 – celebrate the 150th anniversary of the annual departure of the City of Adelaide from Port Augusta and Port Adelaide. (She departed on different dates each year with wool and copper.) For the clipper’s connections with Port Augusta and the outback please see: Clippers in the Outback.
• 2019 – celebrate the 150th birthday of the 'sister ship' clipper ship Cutty Sark to hook into the worldwide publicity that will no doubt be associated with that event. (Potentially also hook into the grand opening of the restored Cutty Sark some years prior to that.)
• 2033/34 – mark the 25th anniversary of the arrival of the City of Adelaide back in Adelaide (in 2008/09) to help promote the forthcoming South Australian Bicentennial celebrations.
• 2036 – as part of South Australia’s Bicentennial celebrations, celebrate the 150th anniversary of the arrival of the last voyage of the City of Adelaide to South Australia.
• 2039 onwards – 'rinse and repeat'.

Rationale

Commemorative envelope for South Australia's 150th Jubilee celebrations in 1986

The rationale for the City of Adelaide becoming a South Australian 175th Jubilee Project are wide and varied. Here are a few:

• Port Adelaide has great tourist potential. It is steeped in maritime history and much of its 19th century charm survives today. Yet the Port does not have a national profile and is not on international tourist itineraries. The Port needs a major drawcard which potential visitors can associate it with. Creating major ‘must see’ heritage sites has been achieved overseas by relocating historic ships to locations of visitor potential to increase their profile. They bring size, substance, and an international identity around which a heritage site can be promoted. We could not ask for a better opportunity than our very own namesake, a world heritage clipper ship and older sister to the Cutty Sark, to increase South Australia’s profile.
• The City of Adelaide and an associated Seaport village offer tangible long term assets. Thus they also afford a strategic focus towards South Australia's 200th Jubilee as well as a focus for the 175th Jubilee. Thus, the City of Adelaide could strategically act as a flag-ship linking to the state's bicentennial.
• Migration: the City of Adelaide is the most important surviving migrant sailing ship in the world, and she exclusively brought migrants to South Australia. In a joint ANU letter to the Scottish Maritime Museum pleading the case for the clipper, Professor Geoffrey Bolton, AO (Murdoch University), Professor David Carment (Northern Territory University) and Dr. Tom Griffiths (Australian National University) described the City of Adelaide: "As the only surviving sailing ship built to give regular passenger and cargo service between Europe and Australia, she represents a whole foundation era of Australian social and economic history. It is difficult to imagine a more vital icon of the making of modern Australia and of the relationship between Britain and the Australian colonies."
• Environment: clipper ships were the most advanced sailing ships before the advent of fossil fuel (coal) burning steam ships saw the demise of sail. Clippers were the pinnacle of sailing ship design. The carriage of the 2,500 tonne City of Adelaide half way around the globe by wind energy alone can be used for messages about the potential for alternative green energy sources.
• Technology: the City of Adelaide provides linkages to various aspects of technology:
  • Clipper ships were the pinnacle of sailing ship design and thus provides linkages with building Air Warfare Destroyers in Adelaide which are pinnacles of ship design in the modern technological context.
  • Until 1872, clipper ships were the only means of communicating with Europe when Todd's overland telegraph line was laid from Adelaide to the north coast of Australia and for the first time wire communications with Europe via Java could be achieved. Adelaides General Post Office opened that year and Adelaide became first Australian capital linked to Imperial London with completion of the Overland Telegraph.
• The Royal Australian Navy’s 100th birthday celebrations will no doubt be bigger than the huge celebration and Fleet Review in 1986. There are obvious and excellent maritime linkages to offer synergies with the City of Adelaide but also South Australia's Defence and Shipbuilding industies.

Businesses: The City of Adelaide imported goods for SA companies to build with and then later carried those companies’ exports overseas. Many of these companies like Bank SA, ANZ Bank, The Advertiser, Holdens, Elders, Bickfords, and ES Wigg and Sons still survive today.

• State regional linkages: The City of Adelaide provides linkages and hooks to every South Australian town that has ever transported wheat, wool or copper or any other good by sea for export overseas. In particular the City of Adelaide links to Port Augusta and the copper mining and wool regions is immense. Hundreds of Cornish and German migrants came to SA on her and populated various regions such as the Copper Triangle, Flinders Ranges, Hahndorf and Barrossa Valley. Maritime heritage also links to the heritage paddle-steamers on the River Murray and Goolwa.
• The City of Adelaide can tell many stories such as the changing workplaces from the days of sailing ships being slipped on the South Australia Company’s slip in the 1840s at Fletcher’s Slip in Port Adelaide, to building Submarines and Air Warfare Destroyers at Osborne; changes in wool shipment technologies, crewing of ships, and mining changes; environment, science, technology are covered by pinnacle of sailing ship design etc.; she has major connections to the mining industry through bringing out Cornish miners and connections to the Flinders Ranges/outback mines through her owners.
• The City of Adelaide voyaged annually to South Australia for nearly a quarter century (1864-1886) bringing migrants and goods necessary for the colony’s survival, and on the return voyages she would carry South Australian copper, wool and other goods. On the outward voyages she carried English, Irish, Scottish and German immigrants to Port Adelaide in large numbers. Today a quarter million South Australians are descendants of the City of Adelaide passengers – for substantiation please see: Calculations.
• The Coat of Arms of our capital city Adelaide includes a sailing ship representing how important sailing ships were for our colony’s development and survival. Thus 175th Jubilee celebrations including the clipper as Flagship would be most apt and fitting. She is after all the very last of the very ships represented on our Coat of Arms to survive today.
• An opportunity to build on the state’s traditional historical brandings – such as its German, Cornish, and mining heritage – by linking directly with them. It will broaden the historical messages about South Australia. The City of Adelaide offers a tremendous opportunity for telling the State’s story. Here is a small taste:
  • Matilda Methuen arrived at Port Adelaide on the maiden voyage of the City of Adelaide. She had travelled to South Australia expressly to marry Peter Waite. Exactly two weeks after arriving, on the 21st November 1864, the couple were married at the Woodville home of their fellow Scotsman, pastoralist Robert Barr Smith. The Waite’s left South Australia with such institutions as Urrbrae House and the Waite Institute.
  • Mr Thomas Cox Bray and Mrs Sarah Bray were making a nostalgic trip back to Adelaide with their two daughters Sarah Ann 20 and Blanche Louisa 16, to visit their younger son John Cox Bray. Once a humble South Australian shoemaker family, they were now able to enjoy the first class saloon on the brand new City of Adelaide during its maiden voyage. Sarah Ann kept a diary during the voyage and this is therefore the earliest of the diaries kept by a passenger on the City of Adelaide. Their son, later to become, The Honourable Sir John Cox Bray, KCMG, JP, was the first native-born Premier of South Australia. He was also the first South Australian-born man to serve as Speaker, and Agent-General for the State.
  • George Woodroffe Goyder (Goyder's Line of rainfall) sent his wife Frances, their nine children - aged from 1 to 14 - and Frances’ younger sister on a holiday trip on the City of Adelaide back to their family in England because his wife’s health was not strong. At that time the South Australian government decided to send Goyder to found a settlement in the Northern Territory (which was then part of SA). In April 1870, six weeks before the family was due to leave on the return trip, Goyder’s wife died in Bristol. It was his sister-in-law who had to bring the nine young Goyder children back to their father. Again they were passengers in the first-class saloon of the City of Adelaide, and they were landed safely at Port Adelaide in August 1870.
  • One of the youngest crew members of the City of Adelaide on her 1864 maiden voyage was 18 years old Walter Forwood. Finding himself stranded in London, he managed to sign on with Captain David Bruce in August to work his passage home. Active in civic affairs in later life, Walter Forwood was to become a member of the Adelaide City Council for sixteen years, eight of them as a councilor, eight as an alderman, and ten as chairman of the works and highways committee. He became President of both the South Australian Chamber of Commerce and the Associated Chambers of Manufacturers of Australia, a member of the Federated Employers' Council, and a councillor of the Royal Agricultural Society.
  • From the diary of 21 year old Scottish migrant James Anderson McLauchlan: Thursday 18th 1874 ...a Birth and a Death both in the same hour... bereaved parents were Irish, the child about 9 months old, was their first born, died about half past one...At 11 the bell tolled for its burial, the body having been sewed up in sailcloth and loaded at the feet was placed upon a board projecting over the ship's side and held by a man at one end in a slanting position. It was then covered over by the Union Jack. The Captain read over the impressive Sea Burial service in the middle of which at a given signal it was consigned to the deep. A feeling of awe spread over us all as we heard the dull plunge.... [burial at] Lat. 21o58' N. Long. 23o5'W...
  • In the 1860s, the decline of copper and tin mining in Cornwall left many miners unemployed. Like so many other Cornishmen, William Nancarrow and his family became Government-assisted migrants and upooted to Moonta where the newly-opened copper mines were booming and work was plentiful.

Name for a 175th Jubilee? Did you know?

Back in 1986, South Australia celebrated its Sesquicentennial anniversary - 150th birthday. So what name is given for a 175th birthday or anniversary?

Some well known anniversary names include:

• Semicentennial - 50 years - broken down as semi- (half of/from) centennial (100 years).
• Centennial - 100 years.
• Quasquicentennial - 125 years - broken down as quasqui- (and a quarter) centennial (100 years). Quasqui is a contraction from quadrans "a quarter" plus the clitic conjunction -que "and".
• Sesquicentennial - 150 years - broken down as sesqui- (one and a half) centennial (100 years).
  • In Latin, fractions are expressed as part of the following integer. For example, if we wanted to express 2-½ in Latin it would be expressed as "half-three". The term relates to being halfway [from the second] to the third integer.
  • In Latin this is "sestertius" which is a contraction of sesqui (halfway) tertius (third).
  • It seems that in Latin this rule did not apply litterally for 1-½. Whereas "secundus" is Latin for "second", or "bis" for "twice" these terms are not used such as in sesqui-secundus. Instead just sesqui (or ses) is used by itself. This may be because it relates to a ratio of one - thus it means "and a half" compared to "one".

Whereas semi-centennial means a half century, sesquicentennial means one and a half centuries.

• Bicentennial - 200 years - broken down as bi- (two) x centennial (100 years).

So the name for a 175th anniversary? Latin terms for a 175th anniversary are not in wide spread use. Some terms that have been used in modern times include the following definitions:

• Demisemiseptcentennial - broken down as demi- (half) x semi- (half) x sept- (7) centennial (100 years) = 175 years.
• Quartoseptcentennial - broken down as quarto- (¼) x sept- (7) centennial (100 years) = 175 years.
• Terquasquicentennial has been used as a word for an anniversary of 175 years. The originator intended it to mean "[one] and three quarters" but it incorrectly adds the root elements rather than multiplying them. Instead it literally refers to an anniversary of 375 years as follows: ter- (3) x quasqui- (1¼) x centennial (100 years). This is backed up by the practice in Latin of referring to three quarters as being a whole less a quarter. Notwithstanding that it is wrong, terquasquicentennial is one of the most frequently used terms for 175 years.
• Septaquintaquinquecentennial has also been used as a word for an anniversary of 175 years. It appears that the originator was trying to create the number 175 but instead it literally refers to an anniversary of 35,000 years as follows: septaquinta- (70) x quinque- (5) x centennial (100 years).

Roman fractions were based on a duodecimal system. From 1/12 to 8/12 they were described as multiples of twelfths (uncia "twelfth"; the source of the English words inch and ounce) and from 9/12 to 11/12 they were described as multiple-twelfths less than the next whole unit - i.e. a whole unit less 3/12, 2/12 or 1/12 respectively. There were also special terms for quarter (quadrans), half (semis), and three-quarters (dodrans). Dodrans is a Latin contraction of de-quadrans which means "a whole unit less a quarter" (de means "from"; quadrans means "quarter". "Dodrans" and the duodecimal fraction system are described further on Wikipedia.

An example of this application of fractions is the number 250. To express 2-½ in Latin it would be expressed as "half-three". The term relates to being halfway [from the second] to the third integer. In Latin this is "Sestertius" which is a contraction of semis (halfway) tertius (third) - hence Sestercentennial = 250.

Thus for 175 years, the term is a quarter century less than the next whole (bi)century or 175 = (-25 + 200). The personal preference of the author of this webpage for a 175th anniversary is:

• Dodransbicentennial (Dodrabicentennial) or Dequasbicentennial for 175 years.
  • Some might argue that the above two terms mean ¾ x 200 years = 150 years. However, as identified above, Latin practice was to describe fractions of the next whole part. Thus a quarter century less than the next whole century or 175 = (-25 + 200).
  • Another suggested term (received on this site's former Forum) is "Dosquicentennial" which has been used in modern times (in Missouri, USA). The proposal here is that could become a modern contraction of "de-quadrans". However, it does seem inappropriate to combine the terms que and de when dealing with such Roman fractions. In any case, if such a conjunction was appropriate then it would perhaps more likely have been "Dosquibicentennial" (but the result is little shorter anyway).
• As an extension to these thoughts, perhaps "dodranscentennial" or "dequascentennial" without the "bi" are probably the appropriate term(s) for a 75 year anniversary.
• All of the terms in this final section are original toughts and have not been referenced from elsewhere. They are developed from the element words in Latin and are hoped are reasonable derivations.

So the name for a 175th anniversary? For now it is really up to the preference of the reader. One day one of these terms may make its way into popular usage, become accepted, and find a place in a dictionary.

Notes

"Anniversary" comes from the Latin "anniversarius" which is from the words for year and to turn, meaning (re)turning yearly.

References

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