Proclamation Day

Adelaide: the city of churches, a beaut spot, and one friends of mine hail from.  Well, to salute them and their compatriots, I recall that today is Proclamation Day – on the 28th of December 1836, Governor Hindmarsh at the Old Gum Tree, Glenelg (see image above), read the proclamation of the British Province of South Australia.  It was to be a model colony, for free settlers only, unlike the other Australian colonies...  

Some think they can distinguish a South Australian accent, but in reality all there is to it is a small collection of local words and a minute difference in pronouncing one vowel before "l".  To a non-Australian, the difference would be negligible.  South Australia was meant to be different, too, in that it was to have been a home away from Home for Dissenters, even above Anglicans; but happily the Irish and other Roman Catholics found their way in anyway.

If England had come back to the Faith, say, if Philip and Mary had had a child, or if the Armada had succeeded, then the patron saints of South Australia would have been the Holy Innocents, and Childermas accounted there, not a day of bad, but of good omen.