Sunday,11th June 1837

Gilles came to me all in a tizzy this week. So upset, it seems, that he had sobered up from the shock.

He informed me that, as Treasurer, he had been borrowing money hand over fist from the Montefiore family (of whom Jacob Montefiore serves as one of our esteemed Colonial Commissioners) and as a result the Colony is in hock to the tune of several thousand pounds.

I have to say this came as no great surprise to me. All the talk by Wakefield - the old lecher -  and his acolytes about the colony being self funding through the sale of land always seemed to me to be rose-coloured bollocks. And I never supposed for a moment that getting old Mr Moneybags Gilles drunk and touching him for a few shekels was ever the only way the colony was funded. So to hear that we had been pawning the silverware to keep the place running was hardly a revelation.

However, Gilles didn't seem to think that this was the main problem at hand. When we named all the streets the other week we had forgotten to name anything after Montefiore. Every other man jack of the Commission seems to have their name set for posterity to recall, with a street or a park or a river or some such - good God! - we gave LeFevre an entire peninsula - admittedly a small one - Morphett kept sniggering like a dirty minded schoolboy saying "LeFevre's got a small peninsula" which, after the fifth brandy, seemed funny I suppose.

But Montefiore - nothing. Either we did name something after him and lost the slip of paper with his name on it, or we were just too squiffy to remember it. And if Pascoe Grenfell has a street named after him for doing nothing more than donating an acre of land for Charlie Howard to set up a church on, then not remembering the man that's keeping the whole shebang running with his family's cash (and giving us a favourable interest rate as well according to Gilles) could be seen as a slap in the face.

The problem, Gilles pointed out, was that there seemed to be nothing left to name. We had already done everything we could think of to give us enough namable bits and pieces and there really seemed to be nothing left for Montefiore to hang his name on.

And then I remembered a story that's doing the rounds about Light at the moment. According to the story, when they were doing the city survey, Light stood on a hill overlooking Adelaide, gathered his party around him, pointed out over the site and said "Boys - this is the place for a city,"

There's some disagreement about which hill it actually was - some people say it was the big hill across the river, opposite the church land and some people say it was down by the stock yards outside Light's hut.

And it appears that Durward Kingston, the unspeakable little tit, was going around the town before he selflessly set sail for England so that the rest of us wouldn't have to put up with him saying that in fact he was the one who stood on the hilltop and said "Truly I say unto you, this is the place for a city."(Kingston seemed to think it was the most important thing said on a mountain top since "Consider the lilies.")

I asked Light about it and he tells me that what actually happened was this. He did stand outside his hut with his survey party, all basking in the morning sunshine, mugs of tea in hand and he did say: "What a grand morning! This is the place for a city!"

Later that day, when they were on the big hill above the river Copycat Kingston pointed and said "THIS is the place for a city!" Light, seeing that Durward was facing Northwest, towards the Port, turned him around, pointed in the right direction and said "No Kingston you fool! The place for a city is over here."

However, whatever happened, the point is that we haven't named the hill yet! Well, we have, but we called it "That Big Hill over the River".  Montefiore Hill. It has a good ring to it.

Of course Gilles got all sniffy about it almost straight away. Would people accept, he said, a name that was, as he put it, "so obviously foreign"? And of course, by "foreign" he was dancing around the word "Jewish".

Well, this is just rank, narrow minded prejudice.And  there are two things that never fail to raise my ire - petty-minded bigotry and the French.

Given the choice between the certainties of  well run Jewish banking and faith in Christian Charity I know what I'd choose as a basis for funding the colony.

So I have decided that yes, I will be naming that big hill across the river after Jacob Montefiore and if any of our small minded, miserable galoots of colonists don't like having a Jewish hill then they can come and see me and kiss my Gentile, Naval arse.