History of Australian Land Settlement

S.H. Roberts

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN:
  9781138976085
• eBook ISBN:
  9781136267208
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia del mundo

First published in 1969. The original History of Australian Land Settlement, 1788-1920 was published in Melbourne in 1924, when the writer was a young lecturer in British History in the University of Melbourne. As the years and decades went by, more and more work was done to fill in research gaps and there were of necessity many re interpretations. This particularly applied to the initial squatting period and to the then-unknown stage between the gold discoveries and federation. This is a copy of the original version.

PART I

THE PERIOD OF EXPERIMENTS

1788-1831

‘For tales were told of inland seas

Like sullen oceans, salt and dead,

And sandy deserts, white and wan,

Where never trod the foot of man,

Nor bird went winging overhead,

To wake the silence with its breath—

A land of loneliness and death.’

A. B. PATERSON.

‘C’était aussi une haute pensée, due au perfectionnement de l’économie politique; c’était une grande revolution dans le système routinier de la colonisation européenne, que cette fondation à la fois, sans projet de cultiver la canne à sucre, le coton, les épices, ou l’indigo, et sans espoir de mines d’or à exploiter.’—Blosseville, on the 1788 Settlement (1831).

1

The Initial Stage (1788-1809)

IN 1787, the logic of a few facts and considerations of strict economy determined that Botany Bay should be settled. The facts were that there were 100,000 convicts in England and that, of these, 40,000 were awaiting transportation. The factor of economy came in with the consideration that a convict in the hulks cost £26/15/11 a year, while he could be transported 10,000 miles for less than £20. Hence, as a Committee of the House of Commons reported in 1779, it was advisable ‘to establish a colony of convicted felons in any distant part of the Globe’.¹ But where? America was closed, and Africa had meant extermination for the convicts. That left only the South, to which attention had been directed a short time before by a French writer, de Brosses (1756).² He had emphasized the islands directly north of Australia, so that, when news came of Cook’s discoveries on the East Coast, the topic was by no means undeveloped. Cook merely buttressed and gave hope to a trend which had been emerging, the upshot being a resolution to send convicts to the new lands of the South.³

But it must be realized that there was no notion of a colony as a society. Pitt and Sydney, the responsible statesmen, merely wished to solve a troublesome problem in the cheapest manner, while the public were either uninterested or cynical.⁴ Accordingly, little provision was made for anything beyond the actual transportation. It was assumed that ‘so large an extent of country under such latitudes must be capable of producing sufficient to subsist millions of people’. More regard was paid to muskets than to seed-wheat, to military precedence than to food supplies. There was no land policy, no selection of men who understood farming, no provision for time-expired men, no arrangement for intercourse with India. Such things did not matter, so long as the ‘infamous assemblage’ was removed from England.

Governor Phillip, therefore, found himself in a unique and troublesome position. He had 700 convicts and 200 soldiers set down on an unsatisfactory site⁵ (January 1788), with provisions for two years and a miscellaneous collection of Rio plants and Cape stock. The officers were quarrelsome, the convicts useless, the land disappointing; for, instead of the long grassy stretches of which Banks had spoken, there was a thin strip of ‘very indifferent’ country hemmed in by an impassable mountain barrier, beyond which were supposed to be either dreary wastes of ‘desert plains’ or ‘vallies choked up with mangrove swamps’, the whole with scarcely a spot ‘not absolutely untenantable by man’.

Figs 7
NEW SOUTH WALES: EXPANSION TO THE HAWKESBURY

But Phillip overcame the pessimism of the situation, and, developing a point of view that was truly imperial, laid the foundations of a policy which not even mutiny and continued maladministration in later years could eradicate. Realizing that it was not wise to rely too greatly on outside sources, he tried to provide an adequate food supply within the colony. A suitable site was found when reconnoitring parties reached the mouth of the Hawkesbury and pushed through the black-butt forests to the upper reaches of the Parramatta.⁶

A Government farm was established at Rose Hill, but at this point difficulties emerged. The convicts, who had no incentive to work, were food-stealers, not food-producers. Hence the Rose Hill establishment for years returned little more than the amount of grain sown.⁷ Starvation became more and more imminent, especially when the convicts kept on arriving, and when the store ship was lost.

Since only twenty acres had been sown by the end of 1788,⁸ Phillip turned to free settlers.⁹ His first idea in this connection was to set up something of a feudal system with the rich overlord, lesser freemen, and convict servants. Thus, when he wrote in 1790 that settlers were ‘absolutely necessary’, he meant ‘landed proprietors’ who could ‘bring with them people to clear and cultivate the lands, and provisions to support those they bring with them’. Ordinary settlers were not to be desired, because they ‘want that spur to industry’ which is provided by the possession of capital, and because they may ‘become a burthen to the settlement, for they cannot be left to starve’. Phillip’s plan for settling the Nepean with large farmers ‘placed at some distance from each other’ in many ways forecasted the essentials of the Wakefield plan, for there was to be a tacit understanding that the owners were to bring yeomen from England in return for their lands.¹⁰

However, the scheme proved impractical, and Phillip was hampered by his instructions. His first commission had not mentioned lands and his second (22 April, 1787) dealt only with emancipated convicts.¹¹ Not for over two years (20 August, 1789) was it provided that ‘every reasonable encouragement’ should be given to marines and free settlers and, even then, it had to be ‘without subjecting the public to expense’.¹² But Phillip deliberately disobeyed these instructions, for, he said, ‘had I adhered to that determination, I must have given up all thoughts of procuring any settlers from the detachment’. He therefore gave Government aid for a longer period and to a greater extent than his instructions allowed and, by doing so, fostered practical settlement.

His first settler, an expiree named Ruse, entered on his thirty acres at Parramatta in November 1789, nearly two years after the landing. Within fifteen months Ruse was enabled to decline further support from the Government¹³ and his establishment, Experiment Farm, justified Phillip in the undertaking of further attempts. Three more persons, the first freemen, were soon settled on the creek leading to Parramatta, the chief being Phillip Schaffer, at The Vineyard.

By this time, Grenville, the Secretary of State, was watching the agricultural experiments with interest, for the question of the disposal of time-expired convicts had arisen. Ninety per cent of the first detachment were short-term men, and Grenville insisted on their becoming settlers. ‘It should be distinctly understood that no steps are likely to be taken by the Government for facilitating their return’, said a despatch of 1791.¹⁴ On the efforts of Ruse and Schaffer, therefore, depended the success or failure of the whole experiment. If they failed, the problem of the hundreds of expirees would be insoluble; if they succeeded, the system of transportation would be able to run smoothly beyond the initial stages. This was the significance or a Cornish farm boy and a German soldier of fortune in the history of Australia. Their success enabled what a French writer (de Blosse-ville) called ‘a great revolution in the routine system of European colonization’¹⁵ to continue.

The consequence was that, within two years after Ruse, there were 87 settlers, half expirees and half seamen or marines. Of these, fifty were on Norfolk Island, but the bulk of cultivation was on the Parramatta groups. At this stage, only one acre in every eighteen was under crop, but, within another year, that is, by the time of Phillip’s departure (October 1792), the cultivated area had increased twenty-fold, covering 1700 acres.¹⁶ In these few figures is summed up the work of Phillip. He had founded the settlement and quelched the difficulties of origin.

But the difficulties incidental to the expansion of that settlement were just emerging. First, the settlers had abused the assistance offered by the Crown¹⁷ and few were bona-fide. Secondly, there was the question of officer settlers and the extent of their grants. Not until an ensign of the New South Wales Corps actually wanted to settle was the problem raised (1792), and unfortunately Phillip was prevented from carrying his carefully-regulated system of grants one step further to deal with this new contingency.

These two vital questions fell to Phillip’s successor, Grose, who administered during two of the most crucial years of the colony. (December 1792-December 1794). But these years saw an anarchical policy rather than consolidation. Grose, timid and ‘fearful of acting so much from my own discretion’,¹⁸ allotted his grants by favouritism rather than any scale. Emancipists in certain cases received more than free settlers, while an ordinary marine was favoured more than the highest officer. Grose, complaining that he was ‘much plagued with the people who become settlers’,¹⁹ gave land to all kinds of illicit persons, with no other title than a slip bearing the words, ‘A.B. has my permission to settle.’²⁰ In less than three years, Grose and Paterson granted 15,639 acres, and yet the number of actual settlers diminished.²¹

When Governor Hunter assumed control in 1795, therefore, the outlook was bad. Much of the land had been so reduced in value that the expenditure of seed was no longer justified. Government clearing of land was a thing of the past, and to so low an ebb had matters come, that ‘to ensure bread to the settlement’ was once more a vital matter.²²

Hunter adopted the idea of State aid to settlers. To make the lot of the farmer as certain as possible, he fixed prices, promised to buy all wheat,²³ and opposed the previous policy of attempting ‘to cultivate land enough for the maintenance of all the convicts’. But the only return for this transgression of his orders was the very ‘general indolence’ which he had tried to prevent.

The Governor was forced to direct civil officers ‘to pay a sudden and unexpected visit to all the different districts’, for the industry of the settlers varied direc...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Maps and Graphs
• Foreword
• Introduction
• Preface
• Part I The Period of Experiments (1788-1831)
• Part II The Period of Wakefield
• Part III The Period of Squatting (1831-1855)
• Part IV The Period of the Emergence of Agriculture (1855-1884)
• Part V The Period of Closer Settlement (1884-1920)
• Appendices
• Bibliography
• Index