Aerial view of the Bumbunga strawberry patch (1979 photograph)

The Province of Bumbunga was created on 29th March, 1976, when former English circus monkey trainer and uranium prospector-turned farmer Alex Brackstone declared his 4 hectare property near Snowtown, South Australia, to be independent of the Commonwealth of Australia, and himself to be its Governor.

The previous November the Australian federal social democratic government of Prime Minister Gough Whitlam had been dismissed under controversial circumstances by Governor General Sir John Kerr, acting as the official representative of Queen Elizabeth II in Australia.

Detecting what he determined was an alarming drift towards republican sentiment arising from this set of circumstances, Brackstone created  Bumbunga as a means of ensuring that despite what might happen elsewhere, his tiny piece of Australia would remain forever British. 

Governor Alex Brackstone (1979 photograph)

The Governor soon set about implementing an ambitious plan to attract tourism to his remote corner of the Australian continent. A gigantic strawberry patch in the shape of the British Isles (notably excluding Northern Ireland) was planted, with the intention that wedding ceremonies would be conducted thereon for homesick British brides. Unfortunately plans to import soil from the UK to be sprinkled on the relevant "counties" during these  ceremonies fell foul of the Australian Customs Service, and the whole enterprise failed shortly thereafter when the 50,000 strawberry plants succumbed to the ravages of drought.

Brackstone then turned to the more profitable and less climate-dependent enterprise of philately, issuing 15 sets of stamps on British royalist themes in the 1980-87 period. 

In 1983 the Governor effectively subdivided the Province, by building a cairn and allocating a plot of his territory to the newborn Prince William, son of HRH Charles, Prince of Wales and HRH Princess Diana. 

The 1986 royal wedding of HRH Prince Andrew, the Duke of York to Sarah Ferguson was frowned upon by Brackstone – he viewed Ferguson was an “inappropriate” match for the English Queen’s second son - and this, along with changes in the Australian taxation system negatively affecting philatelic investments, was a catalyst for the sun finally setting on the little empire of Bumbunga.

Things do not appear to have gone well for Brackstone subsequently. He disappeared from public view for more than a decade but resurfaced in 1999 when dragged (literally, according to newspaper reports) into court on illegal firearms charges. Attempts to reach him via his family as late as October 2001 were met with responses that can best be described as evasive, and it is believed that he currently lives in the United Kingdom.  

From a broader historical perspective it seems that Governor Brackstone need not have gone to all the trouble; a referendum in October 1999 - nearly a quarter of a century after Bumbunga's secession -  confirmed Queen Elizabeth II as Australia's Head of State.