THE scandalous tale of South Australia’s founding father, Edward Gibbon Wakefield, is full of rich irony for our “convict-free” settlement.

This year the National Museum of Australia in Canberra has been able to add substance to the extraordinary story. It has acquired and displayed the original arrest warrant that sent Wakefield to prison for what today would be regarded as a horrendous crime.

The substance of the warrant, issued on May 17, 1826, was this: “that one Edward Gibbon Wakefield on the seventh day of March now last past at Liverpool in the said County of Lancaster did feloniously take and carry away against her will Ellen Turner maid of the age of fifteen years or thereabouts Heir apparant of the said William Turner and afterwards on the eight day of the said month of March married the said Ellen Turner contrary to her will.”

The story behind the arrest, and Wakefield’s subsequent two-year stretch in Newgate Prison, London, does not cast South Australia’s founding father in a good light. The National Museum’s curator of people and environment, Catriona Donnelly, is struck by the irony of Wakefield’s experience.

“When I emigrated to Australia I spent a few years in Adelaide and there was a sense that Adelaide was a very different settlement from the convict settlements of Sydney and Van Diemen’s Land,” she said.

“Yet the idea that helped drive this settlement came from a convict himself, though not one who was transported to Australia. Obviously he was a very intelligent man who used his time in Newgate prison well, and was concerned about the prospects of his fellow prisoners.”

At the time of his crime, Wakefield had just turned 30. Gibbon, as he was known, was one of nine children. He was educated at Westminster School, Edinburgh High School and admitted to Gray’s Inn in 1813. Instead, in 1814, he took the job as secretary to the British envoy in Turin, Italy.

In 1816 he returned to London and eloped with Eliza Pattle, a ward of Chancery with a substantial income. The marriage was later officially sanctioned, and Gibbon and Eliza, living in Turin, had two children before Eliza died, shortly after giving birth, in 1820.

At the time marriage brought the estate of the wife to the husband, and so Gibbon had benefited very substantially and was left a widower of means. An image at the time shows a powdered and rouged cherubic-looking gentleman, and this might have played a part in his appeal to young women.

Gibbon, perhaps finding his fortune from Eliza not sufficient, set out to repeat his elopement escapade, this time with the 15-year-old Ellen Turner, an only child and heiress to an even larger fortune. Her father William was the owner of calico printing and spinning mills and was also the High Sheriff of Cheshire.

The elopement took the form of an abduction, with Gibbon, helped by his servant Edward Thevenot and his brother William, according to the arrest warrant, taking Ellen out of school and making a dash for Gretna Green, where they married the following day.

This form of heiress mining was by no means uncommon, and Ellen Turner’s family was in hot pursuit, up to Gretna Green in Scotland, and then to Calais in France, where Gibbon and Ellen had fled.

The Turners were a formidable opposition, and they caught up with the newlyweds and induced Ellen to return to her parents. The abduction was in March, the arrest warrant was issued in May, and Gibbon and William were both sentenced to three years. The Turners convinced Parliament to overturn the marriage, despite Gibbon’s counter-appeals.

Later, aged 17, Ellen would re-marry, to a Cheshire local, Thomas Legh. She died in childbirth, aged 19.

Gibbon became fascinated by his fellow inmates at Newgate, and began to question the purpose of incarceration and the eventual fate of the prisoners, through transport to the colonies or otherwise. He wrote pamphlets examining the legal and prison system.

In June, 1829, he wrote an anonymous pamphlet, Sketch of a Proposal for Colonizing Australasia. He followed it up with other articles that year, including A Letter from Sydney, the Principal Town of Australasia.

His main argument was that the colonies had made the mistake of handing out free land which was taken up by all and sundry and immediately caused a drastic shortage of labour. His design was for land to be surveyed, settled, and sold at a good price, establishing an agrarian economy of land-holders of substance who would provide a demand for labourers emigrating to the colony from Great Britain. These ideas were taken up by colonialists and applied in South Australia and in New Zealand. In SA they were highly successful, not only creating a viable, convict-free colony, but establishing a society where principles of political freedom and religious non-discrimination were firmly embedded in its laws.

His utopian vision of an agrarian economy as the foundation of the colony was so powerful it is now underlying the application for the agrarian landscapes surrounding Adelaide in the Southern Vales, Hills and Barossa Valley to be listed as a World Heritage site.

He helped draft the 1834 South Australia Act, but because he disapproved of the price set for land in SA, arguing it was too low, he distanced himself from the project, and never came here. He later emigrated to Canada, and then New Zealand, where he died in 1862.

The National Museum of Australia is showing the original warrant in the Landmarks Gallery, which looks at the history of settlement in Sydney, Melbourne, Hobart and Adelaide.

Donnelly said the provenance of the arrest warrant was unknown, but it had been bought by the museum in 2012 from the estate of the late Bob Edwards AO.

Edwards, originally from SA, was himself a curator, and director of Arts Exhibitions Australia, the nation’s leading blockbuster visual arts presenter.