At about this time of the year in 1837, the second year of settlement in South Australia, various Adelaide luminaries and newly emerged leaders set up what they called a Nomenclature Committee. The task of this group was to assign suitable names to youthful Adelaide's major streets and squares in order to bring not only a territorial logic to the carefully planned city, but also an appropriate dignity which would be endowed by reference to achievements, history and aspiration.
The members of the committee were Governor Hindmarsh (pictured), Judge Jeffcot, Robert Gouger, James Hurtle Fisher, John Morphett, Edward Stephens, T. Bewes Strangways, Thomas Gilbert, John Brown, Osmond Gilles and John Barton Hack.
Of this august crew, Hack was the least obviously distinguished yet most visibly dynamic; a go-getter of amazing energy; a visionary when it came to pioneering ventures; and a daring, risk-taking business man. In the years following, he would run the gamut from spectacularly successful land deals and farming to ever less lucrative enterprises like whaling, gold digging and carting. He ended his working life tied to a desk as an accountant for the railways.
It is possible his fellow important citizens had a whiff of something feckless in Hack; possible too that Hack didn't pay enough attention or assign sufficient importance to the task of naming because he was so busily focused on the opportunities unfolding in the colony's deceptively promising infancy.
Whatever the inner truths of the committee's deliberations, its actual work reveals a good deal about what must have gone on around that dignified table. Hindmarsh's name lives on in two avenues, two roads, two esplanades, a crescent, a place and one of the city's five major squares. Jeffcott is memorialised in Jeffcott Street, which becomes Jeffcott Road, a central artery of North Adelaide.
Hurtle has an avenue, three streets and another of the five squares. Lest Morphett be forgotten, there are 14 Morphett Roads, and Morphett Street is a main artery in the western half of the city. Osmond has Mount Osmond and Glen Osmond road, both en route to the city from the hills. And so on.
Hack, it would appear, was either unable or unwilling to impress himself upon his peers to quite the extent that they impressed themselves on him and on the map. Hack might have sensed some worrying signs had he not been proceeding at breakneck speed to