were elected to Parliament, becoming the first endorsed Labor members in Australia. In the 1890s Australia was affected by a severe economic depression. Financial institutions in Melbourne and banks in Sydney closed. The national fertility rate fell and immigration was reduced to a trickle. The value of South Australia's exports nearly halved. Drought and poor harvests from 1884 compounded the problems with some families leaving for Western Australia. Adelaide was not as badly hit as the larger gold-rush cities of Sydney and Melbourne, and silver and lead discoveries at Broken Hill provided some relief. Self-governing colony (1856) South Australia became a self-governing colony in October 1856 with the ratification of a new constitution by the British parliament via the Constitution Act 1856. A bicameral parliament was elected on 9 March 1857, by which time 109,917 people lived in the province. South Australia's 1856 constitution was among the most democratic in the world – more so than the other Australian colonies, the United Kingdom and most European countries at that time. It provided for: Adult male suffrage (including indigenous men); Secret ballot voting; one man, one vote; no property qualifications for Members of its House of Assembly and a relatively low property qualification for Members of its Legislative Council. Propertied women in the colony of South Australia were granted the vote in 1861. In the Constitutional Amendment Act 1894, all women became eligible to vote for the Parliament of South Australia when they won the same voting rights as men, and they did so in South Australia's 1895 elections. The Constitutional Amendment (Adult Suffrage) Act 1894 was also the first legislation in the world permitting women also to stand for election to political office and, in 1897, Catherine Helen Spence became the first female political candidate for political office, unsuccessfully standing for election as a delegate to the Federal Convention on Australian Federation. By the 1890s, several new factors were drawing the Australian colonies towards political union and South Australians voted by referendum to join the Commonwealth of Australia. Governance of Aboriginal people 19th century Protectors of Aborigines had been appointed from as early as 1836 in South Australia (with Matthew Moorhouse as the first gazetted appointment as Chief Protector in 1939), with the Governor proclaiming that Aboriginal people were "to be considered as much under the safeguard of the law as the Colonists themselves, and equally entitled to the Privileges