Early settlers were not content with the prospect of a small colony in the south, and believing the north held great riches pushed for further development. In 1865 the colony's Surveyor-General drew what is now an historic line upon a map, setting a limit on which settlers should venture on the basis of insufficient rainfall.

The Surveyor-General in question was George Goyder. He had been sent on a mission north to discover which of the pastoral runs should be provided with drought relief. It was arising from this trip that he came up with a line across the map, above which the land was really only suitable for pastoral farming, whilst below the line, the land could be put to use to grow crops.

Amazingly enough, despite the length of time that has elapsed since then and the primitive maps with which he would have to work, Goyder's line is not far off the 10'' line of rainfall, therefore making it reasonably accurate.

But settlers took little heed of Goydor's warning, and the press waged a campaign against him. The Surveyor-General's line was abolished in 1874. The early 1870s had seen plentiful rain, and as a result strong crops had flourished. But the bounty was short lived; by the early 1880s more than 200,000 acres of land was abandoned by once hopeful settlers. Still, somehow, the State continued to develop.

But it was not just into the northern areas of South Australia that many were interested in expanding. The Northern Territory was seen as an area which could be well worth exploiting, and in 1863 it was annexed by South Australia. Some people got terribly excited by the prospect of discovering mineral wealth or fertile agricultural plains.

Ultimately, their hopes were dashed, although it was not until 1911 that South Australia handed all responsibility for the Territory over to the Federal Government. It had been a financially draining exercise, which had never even come slightly close to living up to the high expectations which had been set for it.

The River Murray is the State's longest permanent river, and it attracted settlers and provided an ideal means of transportation. Paddle steamers hastened settlement and development. The problems of limited water supply to the surrounding land was solved in 1887, when the Canadian irrigation experts, George and William Chaffey, founded the first of the Chaffey Irrigation Colonies at Renmark.

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