Simpson Newland came to Australia as a child when his father took up land near Encounter Bay, South Australia. With his brother-in-law he acquired a station property in New South Wales on the Darling River and on the Paroo River near the Queensland border. In 1876 he returned to live in Adelaide. In 1881 he was elected to the South Australian House of Assembly as a member for Encounter Bay, and he was treasurer in the Downer ministry 1885-1886.
He wrote and gave lectures on his experiences in early South Australia and on Aborigines he had known in South Australia and on the Darling. He argued for the future of the Murray River as a channel of trade, and for a ship canal to link the Murray at Goolwa with the sea at Victor Harbour. He chaired a commission of enquiry investigating the extension of a railway from Marree north of Adelaide to Pine Creek south of Darwin, a plan which was passed by the Jenkins government in 1902 but failed to eventuate when the Territory was transferred to the Commonwealth Government in 1907.
Newland deplored the destruction of the environment by the settlers. He served as president of the Royal Geographical Society of Australasia's South Australian branch for several years, and was president of the South Australian Zoological and Acclimatisation Society 1906-1923.
Newland's frequently-reprinted novel Paving the Way, based on his own experiences in the early days of South Australian settlement, is considered a major document of colonial history. He valued the education he had acquired as a child from the Ramindjeri people of Encounter Bay, and in his second novel, Blood Tracks of the Bush, he courageously and accurately portrayed mass murders of Indigenous people by settlers and by the police.
Newland's memoirs were published posthumously.
