Angas Family
Oxford Companion to Australian Literature:
Top
Angas Family
A notable pioneering family of SA, was headed by George Fife Angas (1789-1879), who was born at Newcastle-on-Tyne. He was instrumental in the establishment of the colony of SA by providing, through the South Australian Company, several vessels to transport settlers, especially German Lutheran families, to the colony from 1836 onwards. In 1851 he came to SA and settled at Angaston, the township site selected by his agent, Charles Flaxman, in the Barossa Valley. Thereafter he served the new colony industriously, being the Barossa's representative in the Legislative Council from 1851 until his retirement from public life in 1866. George Fife Angas is the subject of a biography by Edwin Hodder (1891). He is prominently treated in Hodder's The History of South Australia from Its Foundation to the Year of Its Jubilee (1893) and in A. Grenfell Price's Founders & Pioneers of South Australia (1929). George Fife Angas's fourth child and eldest son was George French Angas (1822-86). Born at Newcastle-on-Tyne, George French showed an early interest in natural history; at the age of twenty he published A Ramble in Malta and Sicily in the Autumn of 1841 (1842). He arrived in Australia in 1844 and toured extensively until 1846 both here and in NZ, recording his journeys in watercolour drawings. In 1847 he published South Australia Illustrated and The New Zealanders Illustrated, together with the illustrated two-volume account of his travels, Savage Life and Scenes in Australia and New Zealand. On a second trip to Australia in 1851 he visited the gold diggings at Bathurst, publishing in that year Six Views of the Gold Field of Ophir and Views of the Gold Fields of Australia. His later publications included Australia, A Popular Account (1865). George Fife Angas's fifth child, John Howard Angas (1823-1904), was, like his father, a renowned pastoralist, politician and philanthropist. The family's influence has continued to be exerted in SA pastoral and commercial interests to the present time.
| American Association of Australian Literary Studies, Almanacs, Alma Mater | |
| Angry Penguins, Angus & Robertson, Annals of Australian Literature |
Oxford Companion to Australian History:
Top
Angas Family
was a founding dynasty of SA. Indeed, the title of an early biography of George Fife Angas (1789–1879) by Edwin Hodder (1891) cast him as the ‘father and founder of South Australia’. A successful English businessman, George Angas did not live in SA until 1851. Prior to that, his involvement had been as a founding member of the South Australian Company, which he used to fulfil his vision of ‘a place for refuge for pious dissenters of Great Britain’. He arranged for groups of settlers to sail to the colony, including persecuted German Lutherans and supported the struggling colony before a British parliamentary committee in 1841. (Douglas Pike's Paradise of Dissent (1957)) gives a detailed account of this period. When he did migrate, following his second son, John Howard (1823–1904), he settled at Angaston, the town named after him. He served as a member of the colony's Legislative Assembly until 1866 and remained an active philanthropist until his death. His eldest son, George French (1822–86), rejected business for art. His travels around Australia resulted in Savage Life and Scenes in Australia and New Zealand (1847), Views of the Gold Regions of Australia (1851), and Australia, a Popular Account (1855). He was secretary to the Australian Museum 1853–60, and later he returned permanently to England. John Tregenza has written his biography (1980).
