Land uses in Australia, late 18th century – mid 19th century

Dr Dmytro Ostapenkodmytro.ostapenko@deakin.ede.au

Presentation outline

• Australia: the nature of the continent • The first Australians: Indigenous land uses• European settlement in Australia, 1788-1820• The pastoral age, 1820-1850• The golden age, 1850-1860

Rainfall and evaporation of the continents

Continent Average annual rainfall (mm)

% lost as evaporation

Africa 660 76

North America 660 60South America 1350 64

Asia 610 64

Europe 580 60

Australia 460 87

Davidson, European Farming in Australia, p. 7

Felling the tall timber in Gippsland from M Cannon, Life in the Country: Australia in the Victorian Age, Currey O'Neil Ross, South Yarra, Vic., 1978, p. 86

The painting of unknown artist, Government agricultural establishment Castle Hill, c. 1806, accessed at http://www.sl.nsw.gov.au/images/exhibitions/2006/ontherun/lg/3.jpg,

Physical environment

• Mild climate• Low rainfall/high evaporation• River system contains little water• Forests along the coastal wetter areas

• Land resources are enormous in terms of Australia’s population

Indigenous land uses• Relied almost entirely on food gathering, hunting

and fishing for their subsistence• Semi-nomadic way of life• Generally sufficient food supplies• Land was collectively ‘owned’• Incompatibility of the Aboriginal and European

land uses

European settlement and land use in Australia in 1788 – 1820

• Social and political factors of settlement • Failure of state farming • Granting land to ex-convicts promoted small-

scale private farming • In 1821, there were 1665 owners of land (64 %

of all granted in preceding years), 1245 of whom had holdings below 99 acres.

James Atkinson, An Account of the State of Agriculture and Grazing in New South Wales, 1826

• If a foreigner who had travelled through England, were afterwards to visit New South Wales, he would scarcely be able to persuade himself that the inhabitants where derived from the same stock; he could hardly believe that the people, who, in their mother country, cultivate their lands with such preserving industry and intelligence, should here became so extremely slothful and negligent; yet such is the case – the state of agriculture being rude and miserable in the extreme.

Robert Ross, Lieutenant Governor (1788)

“ I do not scruple to pronounce that in the whole world there is not a worse country than what we have yet seen of this. All that is contiguous to us is so very barren and forbidding that it may with truth be said, here Nature is reversed”

Official Land Policy in the 1820s-40s• Influenced by Wakefield's theory of systematic colonisation –the

state as highest regulating authority had to maintain a perfect balance between land, labour and capital in Australia

• This balance would foster the development of farming in Australia

• 1831 – abolition of grant system to commence land sales

• 1829 – establishment of the Swan River colony

• 1834 - British Parliament passed the South Australia Colonisation Act

• Between 1831 and 1850, 175350 free migrants came to Australia, 65 percent of whom were assisted ones

Expansion of pastoral industry and European settlement in 1820-1850

• Discovery of fertile plains further inland “We had at length discovered a country ready for the immediate reception of civilized man…Unencumbered by too much wood, it yet possessed enough for all purposes; its soil was exuberant, and its climate temperate … it was traversed by mighty rivers, and watered by streams innumerable. Of this Eden I was the first European to explore its mountains and streams … and, by my survey, to develop those natural advantages, certain to become, at no distant date, of last importance to a new people. “

Major Thomas Mitchell, the Survey-General of New South Wales (1836)

• Large areas could be occupied at little cost by graziers, despite the attempt of the government to prevent uncontrolled spread of settlement

• High wool prices make wool production profitable

• Almost all of the capital required consisted of livestock, a form of capital which reproduced and increased itself

• In 1821 in NSW - 100,000 sheep. By 1850 – 12 million in NSW.

Political tensions between the colonial authorities and the squatters

• Official attempts to restrain settlement: 1829 - ‘limits of location’

• Demands for security of land tenure

• Compromise between the government and the squatters: The Order-in-Council of 1847

John Hood, Australia and the East, being a journal narrative of a voyage to New South Wales, 1841

• In the levels around Richmond [agricultural district in the vicinity of Sydney], I saw ... real agriculture. Ploughs with two horses, instead of half a score of bullocks, and ridges manured for wheat as in Old England; the rich, deep black soil ... reminded me of the best land to be seen at home

The golden age, 1850-1860: Agricultural change in Victoria in the 1850s

1851 1861

Number of crop-farmers

1,000 (estimate) 13,000

Cultivated area (acres)

52,000 420,000

Wealth of farmers (from probate records)

D Ostapenko, ‘Growing Potential: Land-Cultivators of the Colony of Victoria in the late 1830s-1860’, PhD thesis, La Trobe University, 2011

Dream of an Australian yeomanry

A yeoman - a person who owns and cultivates a small farm; specifically : one belonging to a class of English freeholders below the gentry

Call to unlock the land – free selection

Land Acts of 1860s-70s aimed to undermine the monopoly of the squatters and promote the establishment of yeomanry in Australia

Christmas card from M Cannon, Life in the Country, p. 126

Summary

Land Uses Public Perceptions

1788-1820 Small subsistence farming Unwelcome, hostile, uncivilised land

1820-1850 Expansion of commercial sheep farming

Sheep walk; land in which it was relatively easy for the small man to live

1850-1860 Gold mining, small-scale profit-making cropping

Land of opportunities, vision of an Australian yeomanry.