THIS IS A story about a new, breakaway state that was proposed in 1861, taking 18 million acres from Victoria and nine million from South Australia. It was to be called Princeland.

This story is supposed to be a part of a publication with distinctly South Australian themes, but we are going to have to dissolve a few borders here. I heard talk about Princeland a couple of decades ago, and the idea appealed to me. The way the utopian or commercial wants of one hundred and fifty years ago dovetailed with my own Arcadian feels of an Australia once so brimming with intrigue and energy that an idea like that could have gotten any legs. Well, the legs didn’t really carry the idea into any kind of reality. Things were still pretty much in a state of flux in the colonies back then, Victoria having only just separated from New South Wales in 1851. The proposal for the breakaway state pimped a population of sixty thousand people.