AUSTRALIA—New South Wales—Botany Bay. These are the names under which, within the memory of men of middle age, a great island-continent at the antipodes has been explored, settled, and advanced from the condition of a mere gaol, or sink, on which our surplus felonry was poured—a sheep-walk tended by nomadic burglars—to be the wealthiest offset of the British crown—a land of promise for the adventurous—a home of peace and independence for the industrious—an El Dorado and an Arcadia combined, where the hardest and and the easiest best-paid employments are to be found; where every striving man who rears a race of industrious children may sit under the shadow of his own vine and his own fig-tree—not without work, but with little care—living on his own land, looking down the valleys to his herds, and towards the hills to his flocks, amid the humming of bees which know no winter.

Under the genial variations of the climate of Australia all the productions of southern and temperate latitudes flourish—the palm and the oak, the potato and the yam, the orange and the apple, wheat and Indian corn. Over her boundless pastures millions of sheep wander—sheep of "noble race," whose feet, according to the Spanish proverb, "turn all the earth they touch to gold;" cattle by tens of thousands, that may compare with the best of Durham, or Hereford, or Devon; and horses as swift and untiring as ever bounded over the stony deserts of Arabia. In her mountain ridges and river beds gold is gathered in greater profusion than Cortes or Pizarro—dreamed gathered without shedding one drop of blood. Peaceful seas surround—safe harbours give access to—this goodly land, which may be traversed inland for hundreds of miles on foot or horseback. No ravenous ​wild beasts threaten or affright the timid. The aborigines are few, and quick to learn submission.

The hard work of colonisation has been done; the road has been smoothed, and made ready; yet is there ample verge and room enough for millions to follow in the track of the thousands who have conquered and subdued the earth, and planted and reared, not only corn and cattle, but an English race, imbued with English traditions, taught by English literature, enjoying English institutions, and practising English love of order and obedience to law while cherishing the firmest attachment to liberty.

With these elements of social and political prosperity, only needing for full development a tide of population which this country can well spare, it cannot be doubted that a very few years will transform what our fathers considered the meanest, into the greatest of Britain's dependencies; and that, at a period when Continental Europe seems retrograding into deeper than medieval darkness and despotism; side by side in friendly rivalry with the great American republic, we shall realise the threat of the baffled statesman (when the rising liberties of Spain were crushed under the armies of the soon-to-be-exiled Bourbon), and "call a new world into existence to redress the balance of the old"^[1]—a new field for the employment of able-bodied industry, which, overflowing from the crowded competition of Europe, may there help on the march of unrestricted commerce by digging capital out of the soil, or, at less exercise of strength, produce choice raw material for the triumphs of machinery.

For some fifteen years armies of emigrants have annually proceeded in greater or less numbers to the Australian colonies, yet it is but recently, that the general public have cared to inquire more than how bread was to be earned or how capital invested. Late discoveries have invested these dependencies with new importance in the eyes of all who follow with interest the progress of the Anglo-Saxon race. The time seems propitious for attempting not only to describe the features, the resources, and the prospects of these colonies, but to trace the series of political, social, and commercial events by which an insignificant penal settlement in the most distant quarter of the globe, supported at great cost by the parent state, has given birth to a cluster of prosperous self-supporting colonies, largely contributing, directly find indirectly, to the imperial revenues, by the production of wool and gold, by the consumption of British manufactures, and by the employment of any amount of labour that can be landed on their shores.

​The name "Australia," now universally adopted to designate the whole island-continent, was suggested by the gallant, unfortunate, and ill-requited Flinders, in his "Account of a Voyage of Discovery to Terra Australis," a work from which almost all writers on Australian geography have copied their outlines of the progress of discovery, previous to the voyage of Captain Cook.

The Dutch, who first explored the whole northern coast, called it New Holland in their own language. Captain Cook, after sailing round the south-eastern coast, gave it the name of New South Wales, from a supposed resemblance to that part of Great Britain, and by that name the whole island was known in English works until other settlements were formed. But colloquially, until very recently, Botany Bay, the first landing-place of Captain Cook, was vulgarly and popularly the designation given to Australia, although no settlement was ever formed there; and it remains to this day a swampy suburb, about an hour's ride from Sydney, from which part of the water for the supply of that city is obtained, and where idlers resort, to drink, smoke, and play quoits.

Port Phillip, the name first given to the great bay on which are the ports of Geelong and Melbourne,^[2] after Captain Phillip, first governor of New South Wales, has been applied to the whole province; and although, by the act of Parliament which created it a separate colony, the name of Victoria has been affixed to this region, it will be long before the old inhabitants will remember or consent to give any other name than Port Phillip to the district which Sir Thomas Mitchell endeavoured, not without reason, to designate as Australia Felix.

The act of Parliament that created the third colony fixed upon it the vague name of South Australia.

Official and parliamentary documents have superseded the original name of Swan River by Western Australia. Van Diemen's Land retains its old Dutch name, although also occasionally more conveniently known as Tasmania.

Dutch, Spanish, and English have succeeded in affixing nominal marks of their discoveries on Australia, which is almost the last country peopled by an European race; but the French, in spite of efforts of great pains and cost, have been generally superseded, although at one time they had appropriated all the discoveries of Matthew Flinders. The earliest authentic records of the discovery of any part of Australia are Spanish. The traces supposed to be found by some ​geographers in ancient charts of "Jave le Grand," and in a map attached to certain editions of Marco Polo's travels, are too obscure to deserve serious consideration.

That Chinese navigators knew of the existence of Northern Australia at a very remote period, is more than probable, looking at the unchanging habits of that people. They have formed a settlement on the Island of Timor, distant only 250 miles from Cape York, and are in the habit of resorting to the coast near the abandoned settlement of Port Essington, to collect a Chinese dainty, the trepang or sea slug.

Between 1520 and 1600 the Spaniards, in the course of their voyages from their South American possessions, discovered several islands of the Australian group; and in 1605 Pedro Fernandez de Quiros and Luis Vaez de Torres made a voyage of discovery in two ships. After finding land, which they named Terra del Esperito Santo, now known as the New Hebrides, the ships parted company in a gale of wind. Torres, the second in command, coasted along New Guinea, and sailed through the dangerous straits which are still the dread of the mariner in stormy seasons, and still bear his name. He passed two months in this difficult navigation, mistaking the portions of the coast of Australia which he sighted for islands. Of this voyage he transmitted a full account in a letter to the King of Spain; but, in accordance with the jealous policy of the age, the record was suppressed, and the existence of Torres Straits remained unknown until they were re-discovered by Captain Cook in 1770.

During our war with Spain we captured Manilla by storm, and in the archives of that city Mr. Alexander Dalrymple, the historiographer of the British Admiralty, discovered a copy of the letter to the King of Spain, which had been deposited there by Torres. Dalrymple, with that right feeling which should inspire all men of science, did justice to the discoverer by inscribing on the official maps issued from his department, against the intricate passage between Australia and New Guinea, "Torres Straits."

About the same time that Quiros and Torres were pursuing their investigation, the Dutch, then in the height of their maritime power, were prosecuting voyages of discovery in the Indian and Pacific Oceans. From the instructions prepared for the guidance of Abel Janz Tasman previous to his voyages in 1642 and 1644 (instructions which were signed by the Governor-General Antonio Van Diemen, and four members of the council, at Batavia), in which the previous discoveries of the Dutch in New Guinea and the "Great South Land" were ​recited, it appears that a Dutch yacht, on a voyage of discovery in 1605-6, discovered the "South Land," mistaking it for the west side of New Guinea; that a second expedition, in 1617, met with no success; and that, in 1623, a third, consisting of the yachts Pera and Arnhem, was despatched from Amboyna, by which were discovered "the great islands of Arnhem and Spult," being, in fact, the north of Australia, which still bears the name of Arnhem's Land. Other records show that, up to 1626, the Dutch had, either accidentally or by voyages of exploration, discovered and given names to about half the coast of Australia.

Many of these names are preserved to this day, for we have not a passion for re-naming after the standard of our own language.

The Gulf of Carpentaria is still called after General Peter Carpenter, who explored it. At that period military titles were indifferently applied to commanders at sea as on land; and captains of ships then, as at present in the Russian navy, wore spurs. The names of Arnhem, Tasman, De Witt, Endrachts, and Edel, cover the whole of the coast of Northern Australia as far as Sharks' Bay.

It is curious that none of these explorations led to any permanent settlement; and that in this instance, as in many others in America, at the Cape, and in India England has reaped the fruits of Dutch industry and enterprise. That industrious people have scarcely been more fortunate than the indolent, anti-commercial Spaniard. The Dutch, of all their rich colonial possessions, retain only Java, and the Spaniards Cuba. The two new gold-fields discovered by Dutch and Spaniards, Australia and California, have fallen into the hands of an English-speaking race.

Of Tasman's voyage no account has ever been published. There was found on one of the islands forming the roadstead called Dirk Hartog's roadstead, at the entrance of Shark's Bay, in 1697, and afterwards again in 1801, a pewter plate, attached to a decayed log half sunk in earth, which bore two inscriptions in Dutch, of different dates, of which the following are translations:—

The second inscription was—

In 1642 Tasman discovered and sailed along the coast of the Island of Van Diemen's Land, supposing it to be part of the "South Land."

In successive investigations by Captain Marrion, of the French navy, in 1772; by Captain Tobias, of the British service, in 1773; by Captain Cook, in 1777; and by the French Rear-Admiral D'Entrecasteaux, the coast line to the south and east was further explored; but the insularity of Van Diemen's Land, the harbour of Port Jackson, and the Rivers Hunter, Brisbane, and Yarra, all destined to be the outlets to important districts in future colonies, remained undiscovered.

The many hundred leagues of coast so frequently visited by the Dutch, had afforded no encouragement for the plantation of settlements similar to those which they had founded with such brilliant results in the Indian Seas.

The Commander Carstens, sent by the Dutch East India Company to explore New Holland, describes it as "barren coasts, shallow water, islands thinly peopled by cruel, poor, and brutal natives, and of very little use to the company." Tasman's Land was pronounced to be the abode of "howling evil spirits." In these discouraging reports all mariners, until the time of Captain Cook, agreed; which is not extraordinary, considering that, after the time of Columbus, maritime discoverers sought lands in which either gold was to be had for gathering, or where rich tropical fruits abounded in pleasant arbours.

In New Holland the natives were hostile and miserably poor, in the lowest state of human existence. They built no huts, wore no ornaments of gold or precious stones, cultivated no ground. Their barren, unfruitful coast, afforded no indigenous fruits for barter; neither the yam, the cocoa, nor the pineapple, the lemon, the citron, the gourd, nor indeed any other fruit grateful to European taste.

As the Spaniards were the first, so the British were the last, and (in their first attempts) the least successful, in exploring the coast of Australia.

William Dampier, one of the boldest and most scientific navigators of his age, author of a "Voyage Round the World," from which Defoe drew many hints, visited New Holland three times—on the first occasion with his companions the buccaneers; again as pilot of H. M. S. Roebuck ​when he spent about five weeks in ranging off and on the coast of New South Wales, a length of about 300 leagues; on the third occasion he passed through Torres Straits as pilot to Captain Woodes Rogers, in 1710, when he explored Sharks' Bay, the coasts of New Guinea, New Britain, and New Zealand.

In July, 1769, Captain James Cook, after having observed the transit of Venus at Otaheite (or Tahiti), and cruised for a month among the other Society Islands, sailed southwards in search of the continent Terra Australia Incognita, which geographers for a preceding century had calculated must exist somewhere thereabouts, as a counterpoise to the great tract of land in the northern hemisphere.

In this search he first visited the Islands of New Zealand, which had been previously discovered by Tasman in 1662; he spent six months in investigating them, and ascertained that they consisted of two large islands.

Leaving New Zealand, and sailing westward, he sighted New Holland on the 11th of April, 1770, and on the 27th anchored in the roadstead to which he afterwards gave the name of Botany Bay. On the following day he landed, with Mr. (afterwards Sir Joseph) Banks, President of the Royal Society, Dr. Solander, and a party of seamen. They were all charmed with the bright verdure of the scene, in which all natural objects—the kangaroo bounding through the open forest, the evergreen eucalypti, the grass-trees, the birds—were unlike anything they had ever seen before in the course of their voyages in various quarters of the globe.

After exploring the country for several days, during which a favourable estimate was formed of the capabilities of the district for supporting a colony,^[3] and vainly endeavouring to open a communication with natives, through Tupia, a South-sea Islander, Cook sailed to the northward, passing without visiting the opening into Port Jackson: taking it for a mere boat harbour, he gave it the name of the look-out seamen who announced the indentation in the dark, lofty, basaltic cliffs which open a passage into that noble harbour.

On the 17th of May, Cook anchored in a bay to which he "gave the name of Moreton Bay; and, at a place where the land was not at that time visible, some on board, having observed that the sea looked paler than usual, were of opinion that the bottom of the bay opened ​into a river;" but Cook came to a contrary conclusion; it was not until 1823 that the navigable River Brisbane, which gives access to a fine pastoral country, was discovered.

Leaving Moreton Bay, Cook ran down the coast as far as Cape York, taking possession in the usual form wherever he landed. Afterwards passing between New Guinea and Australia, he proved, as Torres had before him, that they were distinct islands.

Cook landed altogether five times on this coast—first at Botany Bay, on the 28th of April, 1770; secondly on the 22nd of May, when he shot a kind of bustard weighing 17 lbs., and named the landing-place Bustard Bay; the third time on the 30th of May, at a spot which, from the absence of water, he named Thirsty Sound. The fourth time was on the 18th of June, 1770 (seven days after his vessel, the Endeavour, had struck upon a coral rock), at Endeavour River, where they refitted. It was during his stay at Endeavour River that one of his crew came running to the boat declaring that he had seen the devil, "as large as a one-gallon keg, with horns and wings, yet he crept so slowly I might have touched him if I had not been afeared." This "devil" was a grey-headed vampyre. (See Engraving on next page.)

On the 21st of August of the same year, having passed and named a point on the mainland "Cape York," Cook anchored, landed for the fifth time on an island which lies in lat. 10° 30′ S., and having ascertained that he had discovered, by ascending a hill from whence he had a clear view of forty miles, an open passage to the Indian Seas, before re-embarking took possession in the following words:—

"As I am now about to quit the eastern coast of New Holland, which I have coasted from lat. 38° to this place, and which I am confident no European has ever seen before, I once more hoist English colours; and, though I have already taken possession of several parts, I now take possession of the whole of the eastern coast, by the name of New South Wales (from its great similarity to that part of the principality), in the right of my sovereign, George the Third, King of Great Britain."

His men fired three volleys of firearms, which were answered by the same number from the guns of the ship, and by three cheers from the main shrouds, and, then re-embarking, he named the spot Possession Island.

These explorations of Cook completed the circuit of the island commenced and prosecuted from the beginning of the seventeenth century by the Spanish and Dutch, with the exception of the coast ​opposite Van Diemen's Land, which was reserved for the enterprise of Flinders and Bass.

In his exploration of Australia, Cook's usual sagacity and good fortune seem to have failed him, although his contributions to our knowledge of an important navigation were of the most valuable character. He selected Botany Bay, a dangerous harbour, which must remain for many years an undrained swamp. He passed without examination Port Jackson, the site of Sydney; Moreton Bay, with its navigable river; and, concluding that Van Diemen's Land was part of the Island of Australia, and the dividing straits a deep bay, lost the opportunity of investigating the great bay of Port Phillip, on the shores of which the most flourishing colony in the British dominions is now rising. In God's good providence the discovery was reserved for a fitting time.

THE accumulation of criminals in our gaols at the close of the American war became an embarrassing question for the county magistrates and the government. Projects for the renewal of transportation, and its effect on criminals, became a subject of discussion among statesmen and philanthropists.

Banishment, from a very early period, was an ordinary punishment, which permitted the sentenced to proceed to any country he pleased. Thus, in Shakspere's "Richard II.:

Even at the present day it is common, in Guernsey and Jersey, to "banish a criminal to England;" that is to say, to land him at Southampton, and then leave him free to go where he will so long as he does not revisit the Channel Islands.

The first legislative trace of the punishment of transportation is to be found in the 39th of Elizabeth, c. 4, authorising the banishment of rogues and vagabonds. This act James the First converted into an instrument of transportation to America, in a letter written in 1619, addressed to the council of the colony of Virginia, commanding them "to send a hundred dissolute persons to Virginia, that the Knight-Marshal would deliver to them for that purpose." These being the very class of persons against whose introduction the celebrated hero of Virginia, Captain John Smith, had specially protested. In the same year, as a kind of counterpoise to these dissolute persons, the Company sent ninety agreeable girls, young and incorrupt; and again, in 1621, sixty more, "maids of virtuous education, young, and handsome." The first lot of females brought 120 lbs. of tobacco each, and the second, 150 lbs. each.

​The first distinct notice of transportation is to be found in the 18th of Charles II., c. 3, which gives the judges power, at their discretion, to execute, or transport for life, the moss-troopers of Cumberland or Northumberland. The punishment was inflicted very frequently, in an illegal manner, up to the reign of George the First, when its operation was extended and legalised.

Defoe, who always drew the outlines of his stories from actual life, no doubt gives a true picture of the life led by the convicts in the American plantations in his "History of Moll Flanders."

During the reign of James the Second, transportation, or rather reduction to slavery, was a favourite, and to certain parties a profitable, punishment.

Dr. Lingard quotes a petition setting forth that seventy persons, apprehended on account of the Salisbury rising of Penruddock and Grove, had, after a year's imprisonment, been sold at Barbadoes for 1,550 lbs. of sugar a-piece, more or less, according to their working faculties. Among them were divines, officers, and gentlemen, who were represented as "grinding at the mills, attending at the furnaces, and digging in that scorching island, whipped at whipping-posts, and sleeping in sties worse than hogs in England."^[4]

After Argyle's defeat the planters were on the alert to obtain white slaves, and were successful, Some of the common prisoners, and others, who were Highlanders, were by the Privy Council delivered to Mr. George Scott, of Petlockey, and other planters in New Jersey, Jamaica.

After Monmouth's rebellion, Lord Sunderland wrote from "Winser, Sept. 14th, 1685, to Judge Jeffries," to acquaint him from the king that, of such persons as the judge should think qualified for transportation, the following individuals were to be furnished with these numbers:—Sir Philip Howard to have 200 (convicts); Sir Richard White, 200; Sir William Booth, 100; Mr. Kendal, 100; Mr. Nipho, 100; Sir William Stapleton, 100; Sir Christopher Musgrave, 100; a merchant, whose name Lord Sunderland did not know, 100. Thus it was proposed to give away 1,000. The King directed Chief Justice Jeffries to give orders for delivering the said numbers "to the above persons respectively, to be forthwith transported to some of his Majesty's southern plantations, viz., Jamaica, Barbadoes, or any of the Leeward Islands in America, to be kept there for the space of ten years before they have their liberty. In the end, eight hundred and forty-nine of Monmouth's followers, all from the west, were sold."^[5] Macaulay's account of the traffic between the maids of honour and the relatives of ​prisoners will be in the recollection of all our readers, as well as the question of who was the Mr. Penn who acted as broker.

But the following Bristol legend of an incident in the life of Jeffries proves that he did not permit aldermen to follow the example of the maids of honour:—"On his return from Taunton, where his mornings were passed in sentencing to hanging and burning, and his evenings with a congenial soul, Colonel Kirk, in drinking, he stopped at Bristol. Now, the mayor, aldermen, and justices of Bristol had been used to transport convicted criminals to the American plantations, and sell them by way of trade; and finding the commodity turn to good account, they contrived a way to make it more plentiful. Their legal convicts were but few, and the exportation inconsiderable: when, therefore, any petty rogues and pilferers were brought before them in a judicial capacity, they were sure to be terribly threatened with hanging, and they had some diligent officers attending, who could advise the ignorant, intimidated creatures to pray for transportation, as the only way to save their lives; and in general, by some means or other, the advice was followed: then, without any more form, each alderman in turn took one, and sold him for his own benefit; sometimes there even arose warm disputes among them about the next turn. This trade had been carried on unnoticed many years, when it came to the knowledge of the Lord Chief Justice, who, finding upon inquiry that the mayor was equally involved with the rest of his brethren in this outrageous practice, made him descend from the bench where he was sitting, and stand at the bar in his scarlet and furs, and plead like any common criminal."

This system, and the demand for labour, led to frequent cases of kidnapping of the poor and friendless, and of parties who had made themselves obnoxious to powerful and unscrupulous individuals. Thus debtors disencumbered themselves of their creditors, wives of their husbands, and guardians of their wards. Even in vengeance the commercial spirit of Britain was displayed: while the Italian stabbed or poisoned his enemy, the Englishman sold him for a soldier, a sailor, or a slave.

Before the commencement of the American war of independence, the introduction of the more docile and laborious negro had rendered the American planters hostile to the importation of white convicts. The war put a stop to the traffic in white flesh, and crowded our gaols. At the same period the prison labours of Howard commenced. In his vocation he personally examined every place of imprisonment. He found the convicted prisoner, money in his purse, revelling in ​debauchery, while the untried poor man was half starved, lodged on damp stones, exposed, from unglazed windows, to every blast, and crowded promiscuously with the vilest of mankind in deep dungeons, where fever and foul pestilence ever smouldered. Sometimes a black assize swept away prisoners, gaolers, and even judges. The barbarity of the system may be appreciated from the circumstance that Howard considered he had achieved a great triumph, when he at length obtained an order for a daily allowance of a penny loaf and small piece of cheese for each untried prisoner.

Howard was anxious to establish reformatory prisons or penitentiaries, but his humane schemes met with little favour. With the experience we have since had, we cannot imagine that he could have had any success, except in establishing a clean and wholesome system of management.

The country was no more prepared then than it is at present, to permit desperate ruffians to be unloosed to renew their crimes on the expiration of their terms of imprisonment. But no one then contemplated the construction of prisons like Reading, as costly and comfortable palaces, in which the hard-labour test would consist in composing moral essays, and collating texts of Scripture.^[6]

The annual accumulation of roguery was to be got rid of!—That was the problem; and, so long as it was solved, few cared how. Hanging had been stretched to its utmost limits; transportation had been checked by the revolt of a country which decided to employ no slaves who had not at least 25 per cent. of black blood in their veins, and to receive no rogues except those who had escaped unconvicted.

Under these difficult circumstances, a proposition for "shovelling" out our criminals on the shores of the antipodes, recently re-discovered by Cook, was eagerly entertained. There it was presumed, on very insufficient grounds, the place of punishment could be rendered self-supporting; at any rate, the prisoners would cease to be a nuisance to the life and property of this country. Howard opposed the project, but his opposition was fortunately unheeded, although founded on very sufficient grounds.

When we now examine the population, the wealth, the commerce, the sources of annually increasing power and prosperity of the Australian colonies, and the undeniable elements of empire which they enjoy, it is scarcely possible to believe that the first settlement was formed with the overflowings of our gaols and the sweepings of our streets; that, for a long series of years, its very existence was dependent ​on supplies of food, which the famine resulting from a month's delay of a store-ship would have rendered useless, and on grants of money, voted at a time when votes, except on the grand field-days of contending parties, were passed undiscussed in Parliament and unreported in newspapers.

At this day, when care for the health, education, and religious instruction of criminals is carried to an extent which shows, in painful relief, the neglect our peasantry endure, it is with amazement and horror that we look back on the cool, careless indifference with which the ministers of George the Third, in 1797, set about founding a penal settlement at the opposite side of the world.

Captain Cook and his companions had passed a few days on the intended site of the proposed penal colony, and had found a small river, a profusion of curious plants, and an indifferent harbour. They had not seen any plains of pasture fit to feed live stock; they had found no large edible animals, such as deer, or buffaloes, or pigs. They had no means of ascertaining whether the soil was capable of carrying crops for the support of a considerable population; and the nearest land at which live stock and dry stores could be procured was the Cape of Good Hope, a colony in the possession of the Dutch.

As little judgment, as little forethought, as little common humanity, was displayed in selecting the colonists as the colony. The first detachment consisted of the first governor, Captain Arthur Phillip, R.N., with a guard of marines, viz., a major-commandant, twelve subalterns, and twenty-four non-commissioned officers, one hundred and sixty-eight rank and file, with forty women, their wives. These were the unconvicted section of the intended colony. The prisoners were six hundred men, and two hundred and fifty women, the latter being not only the most abandoned of their sex, but many of them aged, infirm, and even idiotic. This fearful disproportion of sexes was maintained, and even increased, until the proportion of men to women was as six to one, and the results became too horrible to be here recorded.

This "goodly company" was embarked in a frigate, the Sirius, an armed tender, three store-ships, and six transports, under the command of Captain Hunter. At the last moment, by an afterthought, one chaplain was sent on board. There was no schoolmaster, no superintendent, or gaolers, or overseers, except marines with muskets loaded in case of revolt. No agriculturist was sent to teach the highwaymen and pickpockets to plough, and delve, and sow. No system of discipline was planned, nothing beyond mere coercion was attempted. Even the supply of mechanics required for erecting the needful houses and ​stores was left a matter of chance, dependent on the trades of the six hundred felons; and, as it turned out, there were not half a dozen carpenters, only one bricklayer, and not one mechanic in the whole settlement capable of erecting a corn-mill.

The "first fleet" sailed on the 13th May, 1787, and, after a voyage of eight months, during which they touched at the Cape de Verd Islands, Rio de Janeiro, and the Cape of Good Hope, being everywhere received with the greatest attention and courtesy, anchored in Botany Bay on the 20th January, 1788.

Within four-and-twenty hours after landing, Governor Phillip ascertained that Botany Bay was quite unsuitable for the site of a colony, that a sufficient quantity of cultivable agricultural land, and of fresh water, were wanting; and that the harbour was unsafe for ships of burden. Without disembarking his charge, he set out with a party of three boats, to explore the coast to the northward, and particularly Broken Bay, an inlet favourably mentioned by Captain Cook, distant about eighteen miles from Botany Bay; but, as he sailed along the barrier of cliffs which line the shore, he decided to examine the narrow cleft which Cook had named Port Jackson.

The day was mild and serene. The expedition sailed along the coast near enough to see, and hear the wild cries of, the astonished natives, who followed them as far as the rugged nature of the land would permit. As they approached Port Jackson, the coast wore such an appearance that Captain Phillip fully expected to find Captain Cook's unfavourable impressions realised; but he was destined to be most agreeably disappointed.

The first tack carried the expedition out of the long heavy swell of the Pacific Ocean into the smooth water of a canal protected by two projecting "heads;" and soon they came within sight of a vast landlocked lake, stretching as far as the eye could reach, dotted with small islands, whose shores sloped, forest-covered, down to the water's edge. Black swans and other rare water-birds fluttered up as the white strangers sailed on, charmed with a scene in which every feature was beautiful, yet strange. They had discovered one of the finest harbours in the world. Coasting round the shores of this great natural basin, Governor Phillip determined to plant his colony on a promontory where a small clear stream trickled into the salt water. After three days spent in exploration, he returned to Botany Bay.

On the morning of the 25th January, as they were working out, the English fleet were astonished by seeing two strange ships of war sailing into the bay. These were the Boussole and Astrolabe, the ​French expedition of discovery under the command of M. de la Pérouse, which had left France in 1785. La Pérouse "had sailed into Botany Bay by Captain Cook's chart, which lay before him on the binnacle. Having heard at Kamtschatka of the intended settlement, he had expected to have found a town built and market established." Thus it was probably but by a few days that the honour of discovering Port Jackson fell to England. The French squadron remained until the 10th March to refresh and refit, and, then departing, were never heard of more, until, in 1826, Mr. Dillon discovered at the Manicola Islands traces of arms and ornaments which proved their mournful fate—shipwrecked, and murdered by savages.

A monument has been erected to the memory of La Pérouse and his crew in Botany Bay.

ON the 26th January the English fleet, having been brought round, anchored in deep water close along the shore of Sydney Cove, so called after Lord Sydney, one of the lords of the Admiralty. A formal disembarkation took place—a detachment of marines and blue jackets leaping from their boats into the shades of a primæval forest. After hoisting British colours "near where the colonnade in Bridge-street now stands," the proclamation and commission constituting the colony were read, a salute of small arms was fired, and the career of the province of New South Wales commenced. The whole party landed amounted to one thousand and thirty souls, who encamped under tents, and under and within hollow trees, "in a country resembling the more woody parts of a deer park in England." Such were the accidents of the foundation, and such the founders, of our colonial empire in Australia.

No sooner had the convict colonists been disembarked, and the erection of the necessary buildings commenced, than the want of a sufficient body of artificers was experienced. The ships furnished sixteen, and the prisoners twelve, carpenters; and by a piece of unexpected good fortune, which caused much rejoicing, "an experienced bricklayer was discovered among the convicts. He was at once placed at the head of a party of labourers, with orders to construct a number of brick huts: in the meantime the governor occupied a tent."

This first example is a fair specimen of the manner in which the penal discipline in the colony was conducted for a long series of years. A useful man was placed in authority, and allowed a variety of indulgences, quite irrespective of his moral qualities. The greatest ruffians became overseers, and occupied places of trust. Men of no use—mere drudges—were treated worse than beasts of burden.

In the month of May the entire live stock of the colony, public and private, consisted of—2 bulls, 5 cows, 1 horse, 3 mares, 3 colts, 29 sheep, 19 goats, 74 pigs, 5 rabbits, 18 turkeys, 29 geese, 35 ducks, ​210 fowls. The cattle were of the Cape breed, humpy on the shoulders, and long-horned—a fact which it afterwards became of consequence to remember. In the ensuing month it is recorded as a public calamity that two bulls and four cows wandered away from the pickpocket herdsman who had them in charge, and were lost in the woods. In the sequel it was shown that the cattle were better colonists than their owners.

The entrance to Port Jackson, as already partly described, is through projecting capes, or two heads, which conceal and shelter the far extent of the harbour. A channel, about two miles in breadth, opens a land-locked harbour, about fifteen miles in length, of irregular form, the shores jagged with inlets, coves, and creeks, which, when the first adventurers landed, were covered to the water's edge with the finest timber. At the western extremity a current of fresh water mingling with the sea tide gave signs of the winding Paramatta River, navigable for vessels of small burden for eighteen miles.

The settlement was planted on the banks of an inlet or "cove," about half a mile in length, and a quarter in breadth, which received a considerable stream of fresh water at the upper end.

The native blacks, who then swarmed along the whole coast from Botany Bay, and far beyond in either direction, came to meet the white strangers naked, armed with the shield, the spear, and the boomerang, which the settlers at first took for a wooden sword.

From the circumstance of the aborigines not being subject to the authority of any sort of government except that of the strongest man, from the imperfection of their arms, and their mental incapacity for combination, their communications and skirmishes with the white intruders do not occupy that place in the history of the colony which is filled by the Bed Indian tribes in the history of North America, or the semi-civilised Peruvians and Mexicans in that of Spanish South America.

On the 7th February, 1788, the king's commission for the government of the "territory of New South Wales and its dependencies" was read. By this instrument the colony was declared "to extend from the northern extremity of the coast called Cape York, in the latitude of 10° 37′, to the southern extremity of South Cape, in the latitude of 43° 39′, including all adjacent islands within those latitudes, and inland to the westward as far as the 135th degree of east longitude." At the same time were read the letters patent issued under the 27th George III., cap. 56, for establishing courts of civil and criminal judicature in the colony. Under these the governor—or, in his absence, ​the lieutenant-governor—was authorised, whenever, and only when, he saw fit, to summon a court of criminal jurisdiction, which was to be a court of record, and to consist of the judge-advocate, and six such officers of the sea or land service as the governor should nominate by presents under hand and seal. This court was empowered to inquire into and punish all crimes of whatever nature; the punishment to be inflicted according to the laws of England, as nearly as might be, considering and allowing for the circumstances and situations of the settlement and its inhabitants; the charge to be reduced to writing; witnesses to be examined upon oath; the sentence of the court to be determined by the opinion of the majority; but the punishment not to be inflicted unless five members of the court concurred, until the king's pleasure should be known; the provost-marshal to cause the judgment under the governor's warrant.

In this court the judge-advocate was president (there was no provision that he should be a man of legal education); he was also to frame and exhibit the charge against the prisoner, to have a vote in the court, and to be sworn like members of it. The military officers were to appear in the insignia of duty—sash and sword; they had the right to examine witnesses as well as the judge-advocate; he alone centred in his person the offices of prosecutor, judge, and jury.

There was also a civil court, consisting of the judge-advocate and two inhabitants of the settlement, who were to be appointed by the governor, "empowered to decide, in a summary manner, all pleas of lands, houses, debts, contracts, and all personal pleas, with authority to summon parties, upon complaint being made, to examine the matter of such complaint by the oath of witnesses, and to issue warrants of execution under the hand and seal of the judge-advocate." From this court an appeal might be made to the governor, and from him (where the property exceeded the value of three hundred pounds) to the king in council. To this court was likewise given authority to grant probates of wills, and administration of the personal estates of intestate persons dying within the settlement.

A vice-admiralty court was also established for the trial of offences committed on the high seas. The governor was captain-general and vice-admiral, with authority to hold general courts-martial, to confirm and set aside sentences.

Powers equal to those of the first governor of New South Wales, if held, have never been exercised by any other official in the British dominions. He could sentence to five hundred lashes, fine five hundred pounds, regulate customs and trade, fix prices and wages, remit capital ​as well as other sentences, bestow grants of land, and create a monopoly of any article of necessity. All the labour in the colony was at his disposal; all the land, all the stores, all the places of honour and profit; and virtually all the justice, as the case of Governor Bligh afterwards proved. The governor's subjects consisted of his subordinates, officers—for, as captain-general, the commandant of the troops was under his orders—of the few who resorted to New South Wales to trade (whose profits were at his disposal), and the convicts—outcasts without civil rights. The distance from England, the few means of communication, the indifference of the English public to the fate of the inhabitants of a penal or any other colony, rendered the governor, so far as the control of law extended, actually irresponsible. As there was no law, so there was no publicity and no public opinion to restrain the exercise of the despotism which was the only possible government in such a penal settlement.

The chief officers were naval and military, of the old school; not the school of Cook and Keppel, Nelson and Collingwood, Wolfe and Cornwallis, but of that school which, by its tyranny, its abuse of power, its neglect of common honesty, of common decency, and common humanity in the treatment, the wages, the clothing, and the food of sailors, created the alarming mutinies of Portsmouth and the Nore.^[7]

The powers vested in the governor were exercised without the restraining influence of council or law adviser until 1822.^[8]

Amazement and horror overcome us when we look back on the early days of New South Wales. Under the absolute government described, the settlers were crowded together on a narrow space a promontory cleared of a dense forest. The soil was a barren sand; every yard required for cultivation had to be gained by removing enormous trees of a hardness that tried the temper of the best axes, wielded in skilled hands. On one side was an unknown shore and a shipless sea; on the other, an apparently limitless country, inhabited by savages, in which not a step could be taken without danger of being totally lost; a country which produced no wild fruit or root fit for the sustenance of man; and, with the exception of a wandering kangaroo, or a shy, swift emu, no game of any size fit for food.

The want of enterprise which marked the early career of the colonists, and left them so long in ignorance of the rich districts on which, after a long interval, the colony became self-supporting, cannot but be attributed to the form of government and to the moral blight ​caused by the composition of the society. The mass of the community were slaves—slaves without the contented spirit of negroes or Russian serfs, for they had been born in a free country, and could not learn to submit and be happy, even if, in the matter of food and lodging, they had been well provided, instead of being burned with heat, perished with cold, and always half starved. They were slaves, too, labouring hard, but scarcely producing anything.

The long voyage was a bad preparation for useful labour. The convicts were heaped on board ship without selection, the vilest and most venial criminals chained together. No classification of degrees of crime, or for the purposes of useful labour, was attempted. The overseers were prisoners selected by favouritism, or for their bodily strength; and the work was divided between personal service on the officers, handicraft, and mere drudgery.

One chaplain of the Church of England enjoyed a salary for preaching occasionally to an ignorant uninstructed multitude, of whom one-third were Irish Roman Catholics, transported for political or agrarian offences. Religious teaching, the bedside prayer, the solemn call to repentance, were seldom heard in that miserable Gomorrah. Far from all civilising, humanising influences, in such society the finest natures became brutalised into tyrants, while the criminals under their command dragged on a miserable existence or rebelled with all the dogged ruffianism of despair. Although the chief records of the early days of the colony are drawn from the writings and reports of officials, who were naturally inclined to put the best face on a system of which they were the paid instruments, and whose eyes, ears, consciences were seared by constant contact with misery and tyranny, yet there is more than enough testimony of the cruel and stupid despotism which prevailed.

We learn from the journals of Howard, and the reports of the parliamentary inquiries instituted through his influence, how frightful were the abuses practised on tried and untried prisoners at the close of the eighteenth century in England, where the gaols were visited by numerous individuals of various ranks, where the common-law rights of the subject had been established, where what was considered in those clays a free press flourished, where, from Sabbath to Sabbath, Christian ministers assembled and led Christian congregations to prayer and praise, where a parliament held its sittings whose orators made Europe resound with their denunciations of tyranny, and where laws were administered by incorruptible, independent judges. We may more easily imagine how in New South Wales, where there was no law but ​the law of the lash, tyranny became chronic, and cruelty spread through the whole body corporate of the colony.

A singular succession of serious, pitiable, ludicrous, and disgraceful incidents, mark the history of the settlement, from the day of proclaiming the king's commission to the end of the year 1800, which has been minutely recorded by Collins. At one time "a person named Smith, on his way to India, professing some knowledge of agriculture," is engaged by the government, and created a peace-officer at Rosehill, the site of the future town of Paramatta, the said Smith being apparently the only freeman with any claims to the kind of knowledge on which the subsistence of the colony was likely to depend. At another time one Bryant, a Devonshire prisoner, employed in his calling of a fisherman, is detected in secreting and selling large quantities of fish, and is severely punished; but, "being too useful a person to part with, and send to the Brick Cart," he is retained to fish for the settlement. This man afterwards escaped with his family and a party of other prisoners in an open boat to the Island of Timor; he was there captured by a man-of-war, and carried to Batavia, where he died. His wife was conveyed to England, tried, and confined in Newgate until the term of her original sentence expired.

Then we find convicts, "when little more than two years had elapsed," claiming their discharge on the ground that the time of their sentence had expired, which was possible, as it would date from the day of their sentences. When, in answer to these claims, inquiries are made for the documents containing the particulars, "it is found that they have been left in England, and that, therefore, it is impossible to affirm or deny the claims." Consequently, the prisoners are told they must wait for an answer to a despatch to be sent by the first opportunity to England, a period of two or three years. One of the prisoners, not very well pleased with the prospect of such delay, expresses himself disrespectfully of the lieutenant-governor in the presence of the governor. Thereupon he is seized, tried by a criminal court, found guilty, and sentenced to receive six hundred lashes, and wear irons for the space of six months. About the same time a soldier having been found guilty of a horrible criminal assault on a female child, his sentence is commuted to banishment for life to the auxiliary agricultural settlement of Norfolk Island.

These are but a few gems of the judicial system by which New South Wales was ruled for nearly the first quarter of a century of its existence.

In 1790, the third year of colonisation, four ships arrived filled ​with convicts, of whom the greater number were in a dying state: two hundred and sixty-one had died at sea; two hundred were brought on shore in the last stage of exhaustion, from scurvy, dysentery, fever, bad food, and foul air. In order to save the parties in charge trouble, the men had been chained together in rows, and confined below nearly throughout the voyage. On board one of the ships, the Neptune, several of the prisoners had died in irons; their companions concealed their deaths in order to share the extra allowance of provisions, and so slight was the supervision, that the horrible fact was not discovered until betrayed by the offensiveness of putrefaction.

Many years elapsed before a system was adopted by which the preservation of the health of prisoners and troops became the interest as well as the duty of the surgeon in charge. At that time the more and the sooner prisoners died the more profitable the transaction was to the contractor; so they commonly died like rotten sheep.

Those were the days in which transportation really was a punishment almost as terrible as death. New South Wales was then an awful over-sea gaol, offering no prospect of advancement or liberation; where the will of a prisoner-turnkey was law, where death was the punishment of the most trifling crimes, and a reproachful look was punished with the lash.

A few days before the four ships landed one thousand male and two hundred and fifty female convicts, the arrival of one storeship, the Justinian, saved the whole colony from perishing of famine. The Guardian, laden with a great supply of provisions, stores, and live stock, under the command of Riou, "the gallant good Riou," of Campbell's "Battle of Copenhagen," had struck on an iceberg, and, after almost all the cargo had been thrown overboard, was with difficulty carried into the Cape of Good Hope. For weeks before the arrival of the Justinian, the whole settlement had been put on short allowance, The governor, says Collins, had thrown his store, 300 lbs. of flour, into the common stock. The weekly allowance of each prisoner had been reduced to 2 lbs. of salt pork, 2½ lbs. of flour, and 2 lbs. of rice. "Labour stood suspended for want of energy to proceed; the countenances of the people plainly bespoke the hardships they underwent." "Garden-robbing became prevalent; the most severe measures were employed to repress the crime caused by, and yet increasing, the effects of the scarcity, but in vain. A man caught by the clergyman stealing potatoes was sentenced to three hundred lashes, to have his rations of flour stopped for six months, and to be chained for that period to two others caught robbing the governor's garden; but this and many similar ​punishments produced no more effect than the clemency of the governor, who remitted three hundred out of four hundred lashes to which one man was sentenced. The proverb that "hunger will break through stone walls," was exemplified night and day.

"So great was the villany of the people, or the necessity of the times, that a prisoner lying at the hospital from the effects of punishment, part of which he had received, contrived to get his irons off one leg, and in that state was caught robbing a farm;" but the historian reports that at Rosehill, where they had vegetables in abundance, no thefts were committed.

The Justinian, which brought relief from this state of destitution, was driven off Sydney Heads when within hail: it was for some hours doubtful whether she would not strike and become a total wreck on the reefs of Broken Bay. Had that event occurred, and the twelve hundred and fifty additional convicts safely made the port, death by starvation, or in a struggle for food, must have been the fate of the whole settlement.

Could it be wondered if, under such a system of despotism, without discipline in the colony, and in the face of such neglect at home, the descendants of these men had grown fiercely disloyal and anti-British? But yet it is not so. The Australians are a loyal, order-loving, law-obeying race, as they have recently proved more than once. Even gold-digging has not corrupted their honest hearts.

It was not until five years after Governor Phillip's landing that a temporary church was erected, and divine service performed on the 25th August, 1793.

The founders of New England—themselves tyrannical and intolerant, although flying from tyranny and intolerance—did not let a week elapse without making permanent arrangements for religious worship and education, which endure to this day, and have spread their humanising influences all over the wide empire of the American republic. In New South Wales, under the rule of a sovereign which some, disparaging the present, are accustomed to glorify as the reign of a specially Christian king, the penalties of lash, the pillory, the gallows, were administered as freely as teaching and preaching were neglected.

It sounds strangely in this age to hear that "the clergyman complaining of non-attendance at divine service," which was generally performed in the open air, alike unsheltered from wind and rain, as from the fervour of the summer's sun, "it was ordered that three pounds of flour should be deducted from the ration of each overseer, and two pounds from each labouring convict who should not attend ​prayers once on each Sunday, unless some reasonable excuse for absence should be assigned."

In 1791 (April) we find Mr. Schaffer, a German, arriving from England as a superintendent of convicts; but on discovery that as he spoke no English he was unable to discharge his duties, he retired, and accepted a grant of land of 140 acres at Rosehill. One cannot help feeling curious to know under whose patronage and for what services a German, not speaking English, was sent as superintendent of convicts at the antipodes. Is it possible that Miss Burney's friend, Madame Schwellenberg, could have had anything to do with this little appointment?

At the same time James Ruse received a grant of a similar quantity of land as a reward for being the first settler who declared he was able to support himself on a farm he had occupied fifteen months, and to dispense with an allowance from the government stores.

These incidents, with the arrival, in two detachments, of a regiment raised for the purpose of serving in the colony, under the title of the New South Wales Corps, are the most remarkable events during the latter years of the reign of Governor Phillip, who resigned his office to Lieutenant-Governor Grose,^[9] and returned to England on the 11th December, 1792.

At that date there were sixty-seven settlers, holding under grant three thousand four hundred and seventy acres, of which four hundred and seventeen acres were in cultivation, and a hundred more cleared. We have no means of ascertaining where all these grants were situated, but the greater part is now occupied as building land, and was miserably barren for agricultural purposes, although covered with gigantic gumtrees.

This summary of the cultivation by free or freedmen settlers is interesting, because it marks the first step towards rendering the colony self-supporting. These settlers were, if they required, victualled and clothed from the public store for eighteen months from the time of their going on their grants, furnished with tools and implements of husbandry, grain to sow their grounds, such stock as could be spared from the public, and, at the discretion of the governor, the use of as many convicts as they would undertake to clothe, feed, and employ. Every free or freed man had a hut erected on his farm at public expense.

On ground of ordinary fertility, with settlers of average industry, these terms would have insured early independence; but the greater part of the district was and is as barren as the sea-shore, and the majority of the settlers who were not idle were perfectly ignorant of ​agriculture. The difficulties of cutting down and removing the forest were so great that, without the use of compulsory convict labour for a quarter of a century, the Sydney district never could have been cleared.

During this period the government was obliged to carry on cultivation as well as it could on public account, although with indifferent success. A principle as old as the first step the first tribes made toward civilisation—which, however, many statesmen and economists even now appear not to understand—was forcibly illustrated in the answer of a settler, reproached with not having worked so well for the joint-stock account as he did on his own grant of land—"We are working for ourselves now."

The following were the prices of agricultural stock and produce at the close of 1792: Flour, 9d. per lb.; potatoes, 3d. per lb.; sheep (the Cape breed), £10 10s. each; milk goats, £8 8s.; breeding sows, £7 7s. to £10 10s.; laying fowls, 10s.; tea, 8s. to 16s. per lb.; sugar, 1s. 6d. per lb.; spirits, 12s. to 20s. per gallon; porter, 1s. per quart.

At these famine prices the mortality among the convict population was fearful. Between the 1st January and the 31st December, 1792, there died two persons of the civil department, six soldiers, four hundred and eighteen male convicts, eighteen female convicts, and seventy-nine children.

Governor Phillip took with him to England two of the aborigines, with whom, throughout the period of his government, he had endeavoured to promote a good understanding—a task involving great difficulties, arising from the brutality of the convicts and the untameable nature of the savages. The tribes that swarmed round Port Jackson and Botany Bay have, with one exception, all died out; the character and customs of those who survive in less settled districts remain unchanged, or at any rate not more changed than the fox chained in a courtyard, or a pheasant reared in an aviary.

In September, 1795, Governor Hunter arrived, superseded Lieutenant- Governor Grose, and remained the usual term of five years. His difficulties were less formidable than those of Governor Phillip, which were not extravagantly rewarded by a retiring pension of £500. His office was no sinecure. He had had a large body of convict colonists under his command who would not work, who would drink, and who were therefore dependent for subsistence on supplies imported from England and India. By every ship that left the harbour there was an attempt, generally successful, to escape, on the part of convicts; fifty were taken from one ship at a time "when the loss of the labour of one man was important." It was no wonder that all who could, ​endeavoured to fly from a colony where the population was annually put on short allowance of food, and very often in danger of actual starvation.

At this period, and for more than twenty years, spirits were the ordinary currency of the colony. Almost all extra work was paid for in spirits, and it was thought quite proper to stimulate the diligence of prisoners, in unloading a vessel laden with government stores, by giving half a pint of spirits to each. Among free and bond, drunkenness was a prevailing vice. The tyranny of the prisoner-overseers was so great that the best-inclined convicts were goaded to recklessness and crime. Criminal assaults on women were so common that "the poor unfortunate victims were designated by a title expressive of the insults they had received."

The whole population, on the arrival of Captain Hunter, with the exception of one hundred and seventy-nine, were dependent on the public stores for rations, many of the exceptions being reputed thieves, presumed to subsist on plunder from stores and gardens.

The most favourable feature of this epoch was the extension of cultivation by settlers along the rich alluvial land on the banks of the River Hawkesbury, one of the first districts which seemed to yield a fair return to industry.

​Among the events of this five years may be noted the use of a printing-press, the discovery of the lost herd of cattle, and the foundation of a settlement, called Newcastle, on the Coal or Hunter's River.

A printing-press had been sent out with the first fleet, but no printers. All public and private announcements were made in manuscript, or by the bellman, until Governor Hunter discovered a printer among his convict subjects, and established a government gazette. In this age of newspapers, it seems incredible that a number of officers and gentlemen should have been satisfied for so many years without something in the shape of a newspaper; but the colony was divided into slavedrivers and slaves, who were equally content to spend their time in feeding pigs and getting drunk.

The reports of the natives led the governor to send out as scouts men employed as hunters, to collect fresh provisions for public use; and they discovered, feeding on rich pastures on the other side of the River Nepean, still known as Cow Pastures, a herd of sixty cattle, the produce of the five cows and two bulls lost in 1788.

To realise this sight, so pleasant to the eyes of men condemned to perpetual rations of salt meat, rarely varied by fresh pork, the governor himself set out on an expedition, and tracked and viewed the herd with great delight. An old bull, fiercely and obstinately charging, was slaughtered in self-defence; he proved to be of the humpy-shouldered Cape breed of the lost stock, which left no doubt of the identity of the herd, and dispelled the notion of indigenous cattle. The party made a delicious meal, and a few pounds were carried back thirty-eight miles, over a rough road, to Paramatta, the rest being left to the native dogs and hawks, with deep regret, "as meat, fresh or salt, had long been a rarity with the poor sick in the hospital." Many an Australian within the last ten years, galloping through Cow Pastures to purchase the finest cattle at 2 a head to boil down for tallow, has been reminded of the time when a bit of bull beef, that a well-bred dog would now reject, was a luxury to a governor and his suite!

These wild cattle were preserved, and increased greatly, dividing into "mobs," each under the charge of a victorious bull, until the general increase of stock diminished their value. Many were consumed by surrounding small settlers, and the rest, being fierce and a nuisance, were destroyed by order of the government, when beef ceased to be a luxury.

About the time these wild herds were discovered, three miserable cows of the Indian breed sold for 189, and two years afterwards two ​colonial ships were employed eight months in bringing 51 cows, 3 bulls, and 90 sheep from the Cape, at a cost exceeding the highest price ever paid for the finest short-horns.

Governor Hunter, with the best intentions and an excusable ignorance of the laws of political economy, more than once endeavoured to fix the wages of labour, by a convention of employers, and mutual agreement not to outbid each other. Harvest wages were settled at 10s. a day; but we find, from frequent proclamations, that the rule of supply and demand prevailed, and labourers when much needed obtained "exorbitant terms," although a reward and indemnity were offered to informers.

At this period officers were allowed the use of ten prisoners for agricultural and three for domestic services, and so on in a diminishing scale to every description of settler down to the emancipist, who was allowed the use of one prisoner to assist in tilling his grant. All these servants were fed and clothed by the crown.

In 1797 the first school building was erected for the benefit of three hundred children, and the chaplain, the Rev. Mr. Johnson, began to catechise them after the service on each Sunday.

That instruction was much needed among all classes there can be no doubt; for on one occasion the sails of the public mill, by which the corn of the settlers was gratuitously ground, were stolen in the absence of the miller. On another, with a superstition worthy of the middle ages, the authorities compelled a soldier suspected of murdering his comrade to handle the dead body, in order to see whether it would bleed, and so accuse him.

In 1798 a great Irish expedition in search of China took place. We laugh at it, yet it was not more foolish than many expeditions and theories patronised in the nineteenth century. It is also memorable for the foundation of the first brick church, built on the model of the stables of a citizen's mansion, with clock-tower.

A return made in this year shows 6,270 acres in crop with wheat or maize, a much larger quantity of arable land in proportion to the population than is now cultivated in any of the Australian colonies. Among the more industrious settlers, George Barrington, the celebrated pickpocket, figures as the owner of twenty acres of wheat, thirteen sheep, fifty-five goats, and two mares. He was a constable.

In the following year the colony was again threatened with famine, partly owing to the deficiency of live stock, and partly to the incurable barrenness of the Sydney district.

In 1800 Captain Hunter was superseded by Captain King.

​Under Governor King the Female Orphan School was founded, and the first issue of copper coin took place. The Sydney Gazette and New South Wales Advertiser, the first Australian paper, was founded by a prisoner, George Howe, and published by authority in 1803. An insurrection of prisoners, two hundred and fifty strong, armed with muskets, broke out at Castlehill, on the 4th March, 1804, and was defeated in fifteen minutes by Major Johnstone, of the New South Wales Corps, with twenty-four men. Sixty-seven insurgents fell on the field; ten were tried and five hung.

A penal settlement was formed in Van Diemen's Land by Captain Collins. In the first instance he proceeded to Port Phillip, hut unfortunately landed on the eastern arm, where there was a deficiency of water; and being, as most military men are, a bad colonist, he abandoned it and proceeded to the Derwent. Had he made his way to the Yarra Yarra River the probability is that Sydney would have become the second settlement; and, with the profusion of white slave labour then available applied on the fine agricultural land of Port Phillip, by this time a population of several millions would have been established there.

1806 was signalised by the great flood on the River Hawkesbury, on the banks of which the principal grain cultivation of the colony was carried on. The Hawkesbury, in ordinary periods, winds in a strangely tortuous course through a deep valley, between the precipitous banks above which, on the occurrence of heavy rains, it rises as much as thirty feet in a very few hours. These floods are not periodical. Until 1806 none of importance had occurred, and people had settled down on the rich "interval" land, the deposit of former overflowings. Crops, houses, and many colonists, were all swept away in one night. Famine was the immediate result. The two-pound loaf rose to 5s.; wheat fetched 80s. a bushel, and every vegetable in proportion. A serious flood had occurred in 1801, but this far exceeded it. It is difficult to teach caution in such matters.

This great flood on the Hawkesbury caused eventually a complete rearrangement of the cultivation and occupation of that district.

Calamities, according to popular prejudice, seldom come single. It was certainly the casein New South Wales in 1806, for the clock-tower fell, and Governor Bligh arrived. Captain King resigned his command on the 13th of March.

On the Hawkesbury and its tributaries the first successful agricultural ​colonists were planted, and there dwelt, in 1845, a few representatives of the first fleeters. These settlers, whose recollections^[10] do not exactly tally with, although they confirm, the history transmitted to us by Collins, are all in comfortable circumstances some positively wealthy. Among the last was Mr. Smith, who always spoke his mind to high and low. He had been free almost ever since he arrived in the colony, and had never been "in trouble."

"He was an old man, with a large-featured, handsome, military sort of face, of a red-brown complexion, shaved clean. His dress consisted of a red flannel shirt, with a black bandana, tied sailor-fashion, exposing his strong neck, and a pair of fustian trousers. Out of compliment to the lady he once put on a blue coat with gilt buttons, but, being evidently uncomfortable, consented to take it off again. He refused to see the lady until he learned that it was ' the Mrs. Chisholm;' being usually rough to those he did not respect."

A Dr. ———, who had the reputation among the prisoner population of never having spared any man in his anger, or any woman in his lust, during the old flogging days, met Mr. Smith, face to face, coming out of the bank in Sydney; and holding out his hand said, " Come, shake hands, Mr. Smith, and let bygones be bygones: I am glad to see you looking so well." Smith, putting his hands behind him, answered, (t I suppose, because I have got a velvet waistcoat, and money in the bank, you want to shake hands; but no! Dr. ———, it would take a second resurrection to save such as thee." The doctor slunk away.

FROM these doleful chronicles of irresponsible tyranny, of crime, and famine, it is a relief to turn and contemplate the heroism of the two men to whose ill-rewarded enterprise the most brilliant discoveries on the Australian coasts are due.

In 1795 Captain Hunter, who had commanded the "First Fleet," was sent out again to supersede Governor Phillip. Among the gentlemen under his command were Matthew Flinders, midshipman; and George Bass, surgeon. Flinders was born at Donington, in Lincolnshire. He was a descendant of the Flemish colonists, introduced by Henry VII., who first taught the English how to turn desolate, heron-haunted swamps into rich pastures. From his earliest years he displayed an adventurous and investigating spirit. It is among the traditions of his family, that on the day he was promoted from petticoats to ​"buttoned clothes," after being lost for hours, he was found in the middle of one of the sea marshes, his pockets stuffed with pebbles tracing the runlets of water, "wanting to know where they came from." Being desirous of entering the navy, he taught himself navigation from "Euclid" and Robertson's "Elements," without the aid of a master. In 1793, at the age of sixteen, he presented himself as a volunteer on board the Scipio, Captain (afterwards Admiral) Pasley, by whom he was placed on the quarter-deck, and at the instance of that commander joined the Providence, Captain Bligh (afterwards so infamous), engaged to carry bread-fruit trees to the West Indies. In this voyage he was entrusted with the charge of the chronometer, and took his first lesson in the construction of charts.

On his return in the latter part of 1793, he joined the Bellerophon, seventy-four, bearing the broad pendant of Sir Thomas Pasley, to whom he acted as aide-de-camp in Lord Howe's memorable victory of the 1st June, 1794. An account of this action, with diagrams of the position of the two fleets at three several periods of the day, drawn up by Flinders with neatness, clearness, and minuteness, for which all his MSS. are remarkable, are still in the possession of his surviving daughter. From the Bellerophon he followed one of his officers, who took the command of the Reliance, ordered to convey Governor Hunter to New South Wales, and met in George Bass a kindred spirit.

When they arrived in the colony, seven years after the axes of the "First Fleet" rang in the forests of Sydney Cove, little had been done to work out in detail the investigations made previous to the landing in Botany Bay. "Jervis Bay, indicated, but not named, by him, had been entered by Lieutenant Bowen, and Port Stephen had been examined; but the intermediate portions of the coast, both north and south, were little further known than from Captain Cook's general chart; and none of the more distant openings, marked but not explored by that celebrated navigator, had been seen."

The feelings of the colonists seem to have been expressed in a touch of nature which escapes Collins in a note to his heavy, grandiloquent History of New South Wales:—

"In many of these arms of Port Jackson, when sitting with my companions at my ease in a boat, I have been struck with horror at the bare idea of being lost in them, as, from the great similarity of one cove to another, the recollection would he bewildered in attempting to determine any relative situation. Insanity would accelerate the miserable end that must ensue."

Within a month after their arrival in Port Jackson, in 1795, Bass ​and Flinders set out in a little boat, eight feet long, appropriately called the Tom Thumb, with a crew of one boy, proceeded round to Botany Bay, and, ascending George's River, explored its course twenty miles further than the survey had been carried by Captain Hunter.^[15]

On their return, a voyage to Norfolk Island interrupted further proceedings until March, 1796, when they set out again in the Tom Thumb to explore a large river, said to fall into the sea some miles south of Botany Bay. They were absent eight days, explored Port Hacking in the course of their expedition, experienced great danger from the sea, and on land from the savage tribes: as when "on a dark night, steering along an unknown shore, guided by the sound of the sea breaking against overhanging cliffs, without knowing where they should find shelter, Mr. Bass kept the sheet of the sail in his hand, drawing a few inches occasionally, when he saw a particularly heavy sea following, I (Flinders) was steering with an oar, and it required the utmost exertion and care to prevent broaching to; a single wrong movement would have sent us to the bottom. The boy baled out the water which, in spite of every care, the sea threw upon us." On another occasion, when their little boat was tossed upside down on the shore, saved from utter destruction by its lightness their muskets rusted and their powder wet Flinders amused the semi-hostile savages who surrounded them by clipping their beards, while Bass dried the powder, and obtained some much-needed fresh water.

In December, 1797, during the absence of Flinders, who had been despatched to Norfolk Island, Bass obtained leave to make an expedition to the southward, for which he was provided by the governor with a whale-boat, six seamen from the ships, and six weeks' provisions. With the assistance of occasional supplies of petrels, fish, seals' flesh, a few geese and black swans, and by abstinence, he managed to prolong his absence eleven weeks; and in a boisterous climate, with an open boat, in spite of foul winds, he explored six hundred miles of coast, discovered Western Port and the fine district now known as Port Phillip, and satisfied himself that Van Diemen's Land was separated from New South Wales by the straits that now bear his name.

Bass, having returned on the 24th March, in September following he sailed with Flinders, whom Governor Hunter had placed in command of the Norfolk, a colonial-built sloop of twenty-five tons, for the purpose of penetrating beyond Furneaux Islands, and, should a strait be found, ​passing through it and returning by the south of Van Diemen's Land. With a crew of eight men they went through the straits, and returned to Port Jackson in three months and two days, during which part of the coast of Van Diemen's Land, including Port Dalrymple and the River Tamar, was explored, and such information gained as led to founding a settlement there in 1803–1804.

From this time we hear no more of Bass. We cannot learn that, beyond inscribing his name on the straits between Port Phillip and Van Diemen's Land, he received either reward or honour. He left Sydney for England in 1802 as mate of a trading-vessel, and there we lose all trace of him. Flinders, in his great work, when describing the explorations made by his gallant and well-loved comrade, speaks of him as no more.

Flinders obtained the rank of lieutenant, and sailed again in 1799, in the same small vessel, on a short voyage to explore the coast to the north of Port Jackson, which he examined minutely as far as 25°. He says, "Of the assistance of my able friend Bass I was deprived, he having quitted the station to return to England."

On Lieutenant Flinders's return to England, in the latter end of 1800, the charts of the new discoveries, which Mr. Arrowsmith pronounced the most perfect that had come before him, were published, and a plan proposed to Sir Joseph Banks for completing the investigation of the coasts of Terra Australis was approved by him and Earl Spencer, the First Lord of the Admiralty.

In February, 1801, Flinders was promoted to the rank of commander, and appointed to the Investigator sloop. A proof of the popularity of his character and the adventurous spirit of the British sailor was given, when eleven men being required to complete his crew, out of three hundred seamen on board the Vice-Admiral's ship Zealand, two hundred and fifty volunteered.

On July 18th he sailed from Spithead, furnished with a passport from the French Government, which was granted after precedents of similar protection afforded to Admiral La Pérouse, and to Captain Cook, by the respective authorities in England and France.

In consequence of this passport, Flinders received directions from the Admiralty "to act in all respects towards French vessels as if the two countries were not at war."

So miserably slow was the progress of the first Australian colony that at this period, thirteen years after its foundation, it was found necessary to take a supply of salt meat for eighteen months, and to have a general supply of provisions for twelve months more, to be sent ​after the departure of the Investigator, and lodged in storehouses at Port Jackson for the sole use of the Investigator.

Among the gentlemen who accompanied the expedition was William Westall, landscape-painter.

A passport was also applied for by the French, and granted by the English Government, to Captain Baudin, who was said to be going round the world on a voyage of discovery.

In November, 1801, Captain Flinders sighted the coast of Australia, and proceeded to examine the coast line hitherto unexplored. In the course of his investigations he discovered and surveyed King George's Sound, on which the settlement of Swan River, or Western Australia, was planted in 1829; Port Lincoln, where Sir J. Franklin, a kindred spirit, who was one of the midshipmen in the Investigator, erected a monument to his old commander; Kangaroo Island, Spencer's Gulf, and the coast line of the country which, principally from his report, was selected for the operations of the South Australian colonists; and sailed into and surveyed Port Phillip, which had been discovered ten weeks previously by a government schooner, the Lady Nelson, from Port Jackson. Western Port, a bay in the district of Port Phillip, had previously been discovered by Bass in his whale-boat.

In April, 1802, immediately after discovering and surveying Spencer's Gulf, Port Lincoln, and Kangaroo Island, Captain Flinders fell in with Captain Baudin and his ship La Geographe,^[16] which apparently, instead of sailing round the world, had sailed direct for Australia; but, instead of pursuing further discoveries from the point where the English navigators had ended, they repaired to Van Diemen's Land, following the track of their countryman, Admiral D'Entrecasteaux, and there remained many months, thus losing the opportunity of discovering and taking possession (which was the secret object of their voyage) of more than one site for a colony; just as La Pérouse a very different man from Baudin lost by a few days the chance of discovering Port Jackson.

​From Port Phillip Bay Flinders returned to Sydney, where he arrived the 9th of May, 1802. He sailed again the 22nd of July, and, steering north, surveyed the great Barrier Reef, and made the route clear and safe for future navigators through the Torres Straits and round the shores of the great Gulf of Carpentaria, and only ceased his labours on finding his ship "quite rotten." After refreshing at the Island of Timor, he returned to Port Jackson on the 9th of June, 1803, having lost many of his best men.

No suitable ship to complete his survey was to be found in Port Jackson, He therefore embarked in the Porpoise store-ship, "in order to lay his charts and journals before the Admiralty, and obtain, if possible, a ship to complete the examination of Terra Australis."

The Porpoise was accompanied by two trading vessels, the Cato and the Bridgwater. In passing through Torres Straits on the night of the 17th of August, 1804, the Porpoise struck on a coral reef, and "took a fearful heel over on her larboard beam-ends. The Bridgwater was on the point of following, but, the Cato giving way, the former, grazing, escaped, while the latter struck and went over two cables' length from the Porpoise." The coward captain of the Bridgwater, one Palmer, having escaped, sailed away, in spite of the remonstrances of his mate, without making an effort to aid his companions.^[17]

Flinders took the command, safely landed the crew of the two vessels on a sand-bank, of which a narrow space was clear at high water collected stores, erected tents, formed an encampment, and established a disciplined order of proceedings. The reef was a mere patch of sand, about three hundred yards long and one hundred broad, on which not a blade of vegetation was growing.

​It was determined that two decked boats, capable of conveying all but one boat's crew, should be built from the materials of the wreck, and that the largest cutter should be repaired and despatched, under the charge of Captain Flinders, to Port Jackson, a voyage of 750 miles.

On the 26th of August, a Friday, the cutter was launched, named the Hope, and pushed off "amidst the cheers and good wishes of those for whom we were going to seek relief. An ensign with the union downwards had hitherto been kept hoisted as a signal to Captain Palmer of our distress; but, in this moment of enthusiasm, a seaman quitted the crowd, and, having obtained permission, ran to the flagstaff, hauled down the ensign, and rehoisted it with the union in the upper canton. This symbolical contempt for the Bridgwater, and of confidence in the success of our voyage, I did not see without lively emotion."

Flinders safely reached Port Jackson on the 6th of September. He returned in the only vessel he could obtain for his purpose—a small leaky schooner, the Cumberland, of twenty-nine tons burden—accompanied by two trading vessels, on the 6th of October; and was received by his crew with frantic cheers of joy, although his brother, Lieutenant Flinders, after hearing that the rescue-ships were in sight, "calmly continued his calculations on lunar observations until they came to anchor."

In his absence the sailors had planted the reef with pumpkins, oats, and maize, which were sprouting above the sand flourishingly; and Flinders expresses his regret that he had not "palm cocoa-nuts to plant, of which he thought ten thousand might be usefully set in these seas, as warning-marks, and food for shipwrecked mariners, as they will flourish within the spray of the sea."

It is evident that Matthew Flinders in this, as in many other instances, displayed the stuff of which a colonial governor should be made. There have been very few among Australian rulers who would have thought of the cocoa-nuts, especially at such a moment: still less would they have inspired their men with the same spirit.

In the miserable Cumberland, Flinders, intent on laying the result of his researches before the Admiralty, set out on a voyage of sixteen thousand miles to England. Every man of his crew, except his clerk, volunteered to share the danger and accompany him; but the leaky state of his craft compelled him soon to seek shelter at the nearest port, and he put into the Mauritius, relying- upon his passport. This would have been a sufficient protection had the government of the island been in the hands of a gentleman and man of honour; but the governor ​was one De Caen, a low, malignant, envious, insolent wretch, who, to the infinite disgust of many of his countrymen and companions in arms, availed himself of the misfortune which had thrown Flinders into his power to vent his spite on a nation he detested.

De Caen seized the Cumberland, took possession of the charts, journals, and log-books, and detained Captain Flinders for six years, during which period, in spite of the representations of the French Admiral Linois, and of many of the most respectable colonists, he treated him with every kind of cruelty and indignity; and, after evading repeated orders for his release, dismissed him as unceremoniously as he had seized him, detaining, however one log-book, which Flinders was never able to recover. In the meantime appeared an account of Captain Baudin's voyages—the Captain Baudin who had received at Port Jackson every kind of attention and information. In this work, accompanied by an atlas, the discoveries of Flinders and Bass were appropriated wholesale, and renamed.

Baudin had made about fifty leagues of discovery, and claimed nine hundred leagues, part of which had been surveyed by the Dutch a century before his time.

Flinders reached England in 1810, broken in health, but his spirit of duty unimpaired. Under the regulations of the service the time he had passed in unjust imprisonment could not count in his professional employment. At length he petitioned the Prince Regent for promotion, as an act of grace; but his prayer was refused, and neither his widow nor his daughter were able to obtain the pension to which his eminent services formed so strong a claim.

Flinders devoted the last days of his broken health and spirits to preparing his book and maps for the press—an admirable work, which has been the foundation of every subsequent exploration and colonisation in Australia, and died on the 14th of July, 1814, on the very day his "Account of a Voyage to Terra Australis" was published.

Of Flinders' noble fellow-labourer in the cause of discovery—George Bass—we were unable to find any published memorials, but while the first edition of this work was passing through the hands of the reader for the press, a native of Lincoln, he wrote to a relative and obtained the following interesting particulars:—

"The mother of Mr. George Bass lived with them (the Calder family) fourteen years, and died with them. Her son and only child, George Bass, was born at As worthy, near Sleaford, where his father had a farm, and died when he was a boy, The widow and son afterwards went to reside at Boston. From his boyhoood he showed a ​strong inclination for a seafaring life, to which his widowed mother was much opposed. He was apprenticed to Mr. Francis, a surgeon at Boston; and at the end of his apprenticeship walked the hospitals and took his diploma with honour. But his inclination for the sea being unsubdued, according to a promise she made, she yielded to his wish, and sank a considerable sum in fitting him out and buying a share in a ship, which was totally lost. She was a fine, noble-minded woman, of no ordinary intellect. Her son wrote her long- letters containing full accounts of his discoveries. These came into the possession of Miss Calder on the death of Mrs. Bass. A short time ago she thought to take a peep at the letters, went to the old box, but they were gone. The last time his mother heard of Bass he was in the straits of China. She expected him many years, thinking that he might be taken prisoner; but at last gave up all hopes, concluding that he had been wrecked and drowned. He had only been married three months when he sailed away never to return. His widow is dead."

We have devoted thus much space to an imperfect record of the labours of Flinders and Bass, as an act of justice towards two men whose labours profit, but whose merits are scarcely known to thousands of Australian colonists. In their silent paths they were both heroes; who ventured and endured shipwreck, thirst, famine, the attacks of black barbarians, and displayed not less humanity than courage and sagacity while pursuing discoveries of the highest possible importance to their country, with faint and distant hopes of any reward other than that inherent feeling which supports unknown or neglected genius and heroism—the consciousness of power rightly exercised, of the "talent" put out to interest tenfold—a hundredfold.

CAPTAIN BLIGH appears to have received his appointment as Governor of New South Wales as a reward for his gallant conduct in successfully conducting an open boat, with eighteen companions in misfortune, scantily provided with food and water, 3,618 miles, to the ​Island of Timor, without the loss of a single man, after being cast adrift by the mutineers of the Bounty. No man could be more unfit for such an office. But governors are appointed for the oddest reasons: sometimes because they are distinguished soldiers or sailors: sometimes because they have written a timely book or pamphlet; often because they are related to some great personage, and, being in debt, want an opportunity for saving money. But no matter for what cause, or by what influence a governor is appointed, the most important quality of all, the temper of the candidate, is seldom taken into account; and yet in the governor of a colony no talents can compensate for a violent or spiteful temper.

Bligh had a very difficult task to perform. Almost the only unconvicted colonists were the military and civil officers, and their relatives, who formed a sort of Venetian oligarchy of government and trade, and who, beside enjoying the lion's share of grants of land and use of labour, had been accustomed to divide with previous governors, at a price arbitrarily imposed upon the importers, the cargoes of vessels as they arrived, and enjoy the profits derived from distributing articles in demand among the unprivileged settlers at a monopoly tariff. Spirits formed a principal part of these cargoes, and it became the interest of every civil and military officer in the colony that the settlers, free and bond, should drink as much spirits as possible. Bligh brought out instructions to put down this traffic, and hence his immediate unpopularity. But he was a specimen of the naval captain now happily nearly extinct—violent in temper, coarse in language, hating the military, despising the civilians. To those of the humblest class who cringed before him he could be generous of public land and public money; but to those who dared resist, or even question his authority, he was implacable.

At an earlier period in the career of the colony no one would have ventured to question his acts, however tyrannical; but in 1806 the character of the settlement was slowly changing. A few respectable free settlers had arrived under Governor King. They found profitable employment in growing produce for the use of the government by the help of convicts, whom the government also fed and clothed—a very safe speculation. All the officials were, as already observed, more or less engaged in barter; but some of the New South Wales Corps had quitted the military service, in order to betake themselves exclusively to agriculture and commerce. Among these was John M'Arthur, formerly a lieutenant in that regiment, a man of far-seeing views, great energy, great intelligence, and indomitable courage.

​M'Arthur observed the improvement produced by the climate of New South Wales in the texture of the hairy Indian sheep, and appreciated the value of the district called the Cow Pastures, on which the produce of the lost herd of cattle were found feeding. In 1793 he purchased eight fine-wooled sheep which had been sent out by the Dutch Government to the Cape, and re-exported to Sydney as the Dutch farmers preferred their own fat-tailed breed. His purchase subjected him to much ridicule among his brother colonists, who thought it more profitable to grow wheat or pigs for sale at the commissariat stores.

In 1803, in consequence of grievances of which he had to complain at the hands of the colonial authorities, M'Arthur visited England, and there not only obtained permission to purchase a few pure Spanish merinos from the flock of George III., at a time when the exportation

of the merino from Spain was a capital crime, and the breed was only to be procured by royal favour, but produced such an effect on the Privy Council, before whom he was examined on his wool projects, that he carried out to the colony on his return an order for a grant of ten thousand acres. This grant he selected on the banks of the Cowpasture River, for he appreciated the discrimination of the lost herd which had there fattened and increased while the colonists starved. This spot has since become famous as "Camden," where the first pure ​merinos were bred and the first vineyards planted in New South Wales. To Camden, perhaps, future generations of grateful Australians will make pilgrimages. For not greater services the Greeks made of Jason a demi-god. No doubt the Golden Fleece was shorn from a merino ram.

Soon after Bligh landed, Captain King introduced him to M'Arthur, who invited the new governor to visit Camden and inspect his flocks, the result of the crosses from the King's merinos. The answer was a refusal in the language of the forecastle, expressive of Bligh's contempt for all such occupations. This was characteristic of the man. When the mother and uncle of young Hey wood (a boy midshipman on board the Bounty, who received a free pardon and afterwards rose to distinction in the navy) entreated his aid in obtaining mercy for one whose only crime had been not forcing his way through and springing into the overladen boat, he answered in a few lines: "I very much regret that so much baseness formed the character of a young man I had a real regard for, and I hope to hear that his friends can bear his loss without much concern."

It would be unnecessary to dwell upon Bligh's numerous acts of cruelty and tyranny, were it not that his government was one of the great epochs in the history of New South Wales. The results of his despotism turned the attention of the English public to the resources of the colony, and the defeat of his crowning act of oppression enabled M'Arthur to change the destinies of Australia, and make it, instead of a mere gaol, the finest emigration field in the world.

A little anecdote related by Wentworth, culled from hundreds floating in the colony at that period (1816), illustrates a form of government and a state of society strangely at variance with our notions of the rights of Englishmen. Governor Bligh, having heard from his cowkeeper that the servant of an officer of the staff had made some impertinent remarks because disappointed of the customary supply of milk for his master, on the following morning sent for the dissatisfied delinquent. Wondering and trembling, he was ushered into the presence of his excellency, was received with a condescending smile, and told that, as the chief constable's house was on his way home, the governor had merely sent for him to save a dragoon the trouble of going there with a letter. The poor fellow, his mind relieved, respectfully received the missive, delivered it, was immediately tied to the triangles, and rewarded with twenty-five lashes from the cat-o'-nine-tails.

After a career of two years, during which the person and property of every class of the community were at the mercy of his temper for the day, Governor Bligh proceeded with arbitrary illegality to summon, ​arrest, and try Mr. M'Arthur, on a frivolous charge of infringing the customs laws, hatched up for the purpose of wreaking his long-smouldering spite.

M'Arthur having refused to notice an illegal summons, the Advocate-General Atkins arrested him, lodged him in prison, and proceeded to try him in a court over which he himself presided, with the assistance of six officers of the New South Wales Corps. This Atkins had been appointed by private interest in England, had no knowledge of law, and was described in a private despatch to the Secretary of State as "accustomed to inebriety, the ridicule of the community, pronouncing sentences of death in moments of intoxication, his knowledge of law insignificant, subject to private inclination."

To supply his deficiency of legal knowledge he took for his councillor and secretary a convict attorney of the name of Crossley, transported for forgery.

With the help of this miscreant Atkins prepared a monster indictment, charging M' Arthur with a series of offences—from contempt of court up to high treason. M'Arthur protested against being tried by a man who was at once judge, juror, and prosecutor, beside having a private quarrel of some years' standing with the prisoner. The judge-advocate refused to receive the protest, and actually threatened to commit him for words spoken in his own defence. Fortunately for the fate of the colony, the six officers, who, with the advocate-general, formed the court, sided with the prisoner. They admitted him to bail, and repeatedly, in the most respectful terms, addressed the governor, praying him to supersede Atkins and appoint an impartial advocate-general. Bligh refused; perhaps he had no power to adopt that step; but he could have put an end to proceedings, which ought never to have been commenced, by entering a nolle prosequi. But it was his object to crush M'Arthur, so he persisted; and when he found the six officers of the New South Wales Corps equally firm in protecting him, he proposed to arrest and imprison the six officers on a charge of high treason. At this stage of the proceedings the patience of the colony was exhausted. On the 26th of January, 1806, Major Johnstone, lieutenant-governor, commanding the New South Wales Corps, who had been prevented by severe illness from attending to the repeated summonses of the governor, rode into town. He was surrounded by his friends and brother officers, who represented to him the madly tyrannous course which the governor was bent upon pursuing, and urged him to place the governor under arrest.

In order to support him in taking this extreme step, the following ​memorial was signed by every respectable settler then in the town of Sydney:—

Immediately after the presentation of this address, the drums of the New South Wales Regiment beat to arms, the troops formed in the barrack square, and then marched, with Major Johnstone at their head—bayonets fixed, colours flying, and band playing—toward Government House, which they surrounded. Mrs. Putland (afterwards married to General O'Connell, commander of the forces in New South Wales), the widowed daughter of the governor, courageously endeavoured to resist the entrance of the insurgent officers through the Government gate: failing in that, she tried to conceal her father under a bed, whence, after an anxious search, he was dragged, and conducted, without personal injury, to the presence of Major Johnstone, who immediately placed him in custody, and assumed the command of the colony. Thus ended the first act of this bloodless revolution—the 1688 of New South Wales. Had Bligh succeeded in his conspiracy to ruin M'Arthur, the progress of the colony would have been retarded for years. Up to 1845, wool of the breed introduced and improved by the persevering experience of M'Arthur formed the only certain staple export of Australia. Without fine-woolled sheep Australia must have remained dependent for subsistence on the commissariat expenditure, and would, perhaps, in a fit of economy, have been abandoned, in favour of some penitentiary plan or island prison nearer home.

Cowardice has been imputed to Bligh for concealing himself, but without reason. He was neither king nor even commander to awe the troops with his presence; and any man may be excused for flying from an infuriated regiment; above all a man like Bligh, conscious that there was scarcely an individual in the assemblage which surrounded Government House whom he had not injured or insulted.

Major Johnstone transmitted to the Secretary of State a full account of the events which had forced upon him the government of the colony. Lieutenant-Governor Foveaux, arriving from England ignorant of the insurrection, superseded Major Johnstone, and was himself superseded by Lieutenant-Colonel Paterson, who arrived from Van Diemen's Land on the 1st July, 1809; by him Governor Bligh's arrest was continued until the 4th February, when the colonel agreed to put him in possession ​of his ship, the Porpoise, on condition that he should embark on the 20th, and proceed to England without touching at any part of the territory of New South Wales, and not return until he should have received the instructions of his Majesty's ministers. Released from arrest, Bligh treated engagements entered into under duress as void, and lingered on the coast for some time, in hopes of provoking a movement in his favour. He afterwards repaired to Van Diemen's Land, where he was at first treated with much attention, but, on communications arriving from the lieutenant-governor at Sydney, was constrained to remain on board his ship.

It is easy to imagine the sensation created in the king's cabinet when they learned that the gaol colony of Botany Bay had imitated our forefathers of 1688, and, after sending a tyrant unscathed packing, had continued the government of the colony with a new governor and new officials, without bloodshed or plunder. Vigorous measures were decided on, and an able man was selected to execute them.

Lachlan Macquarie was appointed governor, and sent out with instructions to reinstate Captain Bligh in that office, and, after the expiration of twenty-four hours, to resume his own authority to declare void all appointments, grants of land, and processes of law which had taken place between the arrest of Governor Bligh and his own arrival; and further, to send home Major Johnstone in close arrest, to be tried for his rebellion. At the same time the 73rd, Colonel Macquarie's own regiment, was sent out to relieve the New South Wales Corps, which was disbanded, the privates being, however, permitted to volunteer into the 73rd. These orders were obeyed.

Major Johnstone was tried at Chelsea Hospital on the 11th May, 1811, found guilty 5th June, and sentenced to be cashiered. His conduct was clearly illegal and revolutionary, but it saved the colony. He made that a peaceable revolution which would otherwise have flamed into a wild riot, how ending, with the fearful materials present there, it is impossible to foretel. Major Johnstone returned to the colony, and lived many years on his farm at Annandale, near Bathurst district, much respected. We have not been able to learn whether the signers of the memorial ever attempted to compensate him for the ruin of his own professional prospects. The gratitude of a mob, well dressed or ill dressed, is as vain a thing as the gratitude of a prince.

Bligh^[18] became an admiral, but was never again called into active ​service. The slight sentence passed upon Johnstone was a stigma he carried to his grave. He died in 1817.

Since the time of Bligh there have been colonial governors as violent in temper, as tyrannical in disposition, but their powers have been limited not only by law, but by public opinion, the influence of a free press, and the effects of a ready communication with Europe.

Without a free press or a public to restrain him, out of sight and h caring of a British Parliament, had Bligh confined his tyrannies to the humbler classes he might have lived honoured and prosperous, while his victims sank brokenhearted, or died under the lash, as hundreds have on the shores of Port Jackson and Paramatta; but he ventured to attack a gentleman—the comrade of soldiers—a man of courage, eloquence, and determination—and the unjust governor fell.

COLONEL MACQUARIE directed the government of New South Wales for twelve years the longest period that any governor has enjoyed that office. He exercised a pure despotism, but it was neither a stupid nor a brutal despotism, according to the light of the day.

The following extract from his first despatch not unfairly describes the state of the colony on his arrival:—

"I found the colony barely emerging from infantine imbecility, suffering from various privations and disabilities; the country impenetrable beyond forty miles from Sydney; agriculture in a yet languishing state, commerce in its early dawn, revenue unknown; threatened with famine, distracted by faction; the public buildings in a state of dilapidation, the few roads and bridges almost impassable; the population in general depressed by poverty; no credit, public or private; the morals of the great mass of the population in the lowest state of debasement, and religious worship almost totally neglected."

He was the first man of decided talent appointed to office in ​Australia. He was distinguished by his self-reliance and constant energetic action. If the comparison had not been vulgarised, one might liken him, comparing small with great, to Napoleon. His was the same order of mind -- views narrow but clear -- essentially a materialist in politics. In New South Wales wealth was the visible sign of success, and Macquarie rewarded success wherever he found it. He made roads, erected public buildings, and again and again traversed the whole length and breadth of the colony, following closely in the footsteps of new explorers, distributing grants to skilful settlers, planning townships, and pardoning industrious prisoners. His activity was untiring, his vai ity boundless. He seldom condescended to ask advice, and, when he did, generally followed his own opinion. With charming naïveté he observes, in answer to a despatch from the Secretary of State, informing him that it was not the intention of the Government to appoint a council to assist the governor, as had been recommended: "I entertain a fond hope that such an institution will never be extended to this colony."

Even the recommendations of Secretaries of State he disregarded; and, as he was successful, he was permitted to pursue his own course. He infused his own active spirit into the settlers, and under its influence the material progress of the colony was extraordinary. Higher praise his administration scarcely deserves. The moral, not to say the religious, tone of the settlement owes little to his eare. One instance will suffice. He requested, in one of his despatches, that as many men convicts as possible should be transported, as they were useful for labour, but as few women, as they were costly and troublesome; thus losing sight altogether of the inevitable demoralisation which must be the result of a community of men.

Macquarie has been much attacked for saying "that the colony consisted of those who had been transported, and those who ought to have been;" and "that it was a colony for convicts, and free colonists had no business there: "but there was truth at the bottom of both these rude speeches. He looked upon New South Wales as a place where convicts were sent to be subsisted at the least possible expense, and certainly neither he nor any one else at that tune foresaw a period when it would cease to be a convict colony. His strong common sense told him that the cheapest way of ruling his felon subjects was to make them wealthy and respectable. Under his predecessors the idea had grown up that convicts were sent over to be the slaves of the free settlers. Governor Macquarie would perhaps have had no objection to that arrangement on moral grounds, had it been possible; but it was ​not, as the free settlers of free descent were too few in number, too indolent in character. He therefore took up the opposite ground that the colony and all its emoluments and honours were for the benefit of those prisoners who were industrious, prosperous, and free from legal criminality.

The first individual selected for favour was a Scotchman, Andrew Thompson, transported at sixteen years of age, probably for some trifling offence. He had not only attained wealth and developed new sources of commerce for the colony, by building coasting vessels, by establishing saltworks and other useful enterprises, but had distinguished himself by his humanity and general good conduct. For instance, in the Sydney Gazette of the 11th May, 1806, we find Thompson permitted to purchase brewing utensils from the government stores, at the usual advance of fifty per cent, on the invoice price, with the privilege of brewing beer, in consideration of his useful and humane conduct in saving the lives and much of the property of sufferers by repeated floods of the Hawkesbury, as well as of his general demeanour.

Macquarie, within two months after his arrival, created Thompson a magistrate, and repeatedly invited him and other emancipists of similar success and conduct to dine at Government House, in spite of the remonstrances of the free inhabitants, of the officers of the 43rd Regiment, which succeeded the 73rd, and of hints from the Colonial Office. No doubt in New South Wales many a prisoner was induced to persevere in sober industry by the sight of an ex-prisoner and publican riding in his carriage to dine at Government House; but in England the effect could scarcely have been beneficial as a restraint on idle apprentices and incipient pickpockets. Such reports interleaved in the Newgate Calendar, and other light reading of the felonry of Britain, must have tended to diminish the vague horrors that previously hung round Botany Bay.

Governor Macquarie commenced by employing the convict labourers not required by settlers in making roads, and erecting and repairing public buildings. On the first harvest after his arrival, to the horror of the martinets, he permitted the privates of the 73rd Regiment to hire themselves out as reapers, to be paid in grain or money, the price of wheat at that time being £1 3s. 6d. a bushel. At the same time lie patronised amusements which the high prices of provisions did not prevent the wealthier classes from establishing. The New South Wales Gazette of October contains an account of three days' racing, conducted in Newmarket style, followed by an ordinary and two balls, the principal prize, a lady's cup, being "presented to the winner by Mrs. ​Macquarie." The whole proceedings are related in a style which would leave nothing to be desired in the Little Pedlington Gazette. For instance:—"The subscribers' ball, on Tuesday and Thursday night, was honoured with the presence of his excellency the governor and his lady, his honour the lieutenant-governor and lady, the judge-advocate and lady, the magistrates and other officers, civil and military, and all the beauty and fashion of the colony. The business of the meeting could not fail of diffusing a glow of satisfaction the celebration of the first liberal amusement instituted in the colony in the presence of its patron and founder." A supper followed the ball:—"After the cloth was removed the rosy deity asserted his pre-eminence, and, with the zealous aid of Momus and Apollo, chased pale Cynthia down into the Western World; the blazing orb of day announced his near approach, and the god of the chariot reluctantly forsook his company: Bacchus drooped his head, Momus could no longer animate. The bons vivants, no longer relishing the tired deities, left them to themselves!"

In the first year of his government, Macquarie undertook a tour through all the known districts of the colony, and continued the practice annually during his reign. On his return, by a general order, he censured the settlers for the little attention they had paid to domestic comfort or good farming, in buildings for the residence of themselves and shelter of their cattle; offered cattle, sheep, and goats from the government herds, to be paid for in grain, with eighteen months' credit; and announced that he had marked out for settlement the five new townships of Richmond, Pitt, Wilberforce, and Castlereagh, out of reach of floods of the Hawkesbury and Nepean, in which grants would be awarded to deserving applicants, on condition that they erected dwellings according to plans supplied, and other measures of a similar practical character.

In the December of the same year, the first brick church, St. Philip's, was consecrated (on Christmas-day) by the Heverend Samuel Marsden,—a name from that time forward constantly occupying a conspicuous place in the annals of the colony, as clergyman, magistrate, landowner, and stockbreeder. For instance, his next appearance in the Sydney Gazette is, in conjunction with two other gentlemen, advertising a reward of one pound sterling, or a gallon of spirits, for every skin of a native dog,—an animal which was then, and has been ever since, the scourge of flockowners.

examining a number of witnesses, including the ex-Governors King and Bligh, printed a report, from which it appears that the population amounted to 10,454, distributed in the following proportions:—The Sydney district, 6,158; Paramatta, 1,807; Hawkesbury, 2,389; Newcastle, 100: of these, 5,513 were men, and 2,200 women; military, 1,100; of the remainder, one-fourth to one-fifth was actually bond; the rest being free, or freed by servitude or pardon. In addition, 1,321 were living in Van Diemen's Land, and 177 in Norfolk Island, but orders had been sent out to compel the voluntary settlers, who had adhered to that island after the government establishment had been removed, to withdraw.

The settlements of New South Wales were bounded on the west by the Blue Mountains, "beyond which no one has been able to penetrate the country; some have with difficulty been as far as one hundred miles from the coast, but beyond sixty miles it appears to be nowhere practicable for agricultural purposes; beyond Port Stephen and Port Jervis these settlements will not be capable of extension; of the land within the boundaries, one half is absolutely barren." The ground in actual cultivation was 21,000 acres, and 74,000 were held in pasture. The stock, in the hands chiefly of the settlers, was considerable, but it was still necessary to continue the importation of salt provisions.

​The currency of the colony was in government paper and copper money, but barter was the principal medium of sale; and wheat and cattle had been recognised by the court of justice as legal tenders in payment of debts.

The exportations of the colony consisted principally of whale oil, seal skins, coals, and wool. The iron ore, of which there was abundance, had not been worked. The trade in skins and coal was limited by the monopoly of the East India Company. Sheep were not sufficiently numerous to make wool an article of large exportation. The culture of hemp had been less attended to than might have been expected. An illegal trade in sandal-wood had at times been carried on with the South Sea Islands and China. Mercantile speculation had been discouraged by impolitic regulations.

For many years a maximum price was imposed by the governor upon all imported merchandise, often too low to afford a fair profit to the trader; at this price the whole cargo was distributed amongst the civil and military officers of the settlement, who alone had liberty to purchase; and articles of the first necessity were afterwards retailed by them, at an enormous profit, to the poorer settlers. The imposition of a maximum price on imported articles, and on the price of grain and butcher's meat, had been discontinued, and the attempt to limit the price of labour had failed. The trade in spirits Was reported as a great difficulty.

The defects of the system of criminal jurisdiction by court-martial, and civil jurisdiction without legal assistance or juries, are described; and the report states, that the governor, uncontrolled by any council, had power to pardon all offences, except treason and murder; to impose customs duties, to grant lands, and to issue colonial regulations; and for the breach of these regulations to inflict a punishment of 500 lashes and a fine of £100.

The committee recommended that a council should be given to the governor. With regard to grants of land, they reported that, according to evidence, a retiring governor had granted 1,000 acres to his successor, who had returned the compliment by a similar grant immediately after being installed in office.

Free settlers latterly had not been permitted to emigrate to New South Wales without giving proof that they were possessed of a certain capital. On their arrival they usually received a grant of land in proportion to their means.

On the arrival of Governor Bligh, two-thirds of the children annually born in the colony were illegitimate.

​This report, which also entered at considerable length into the treatment of convicts, directed a little of public attention to the antipodean colony, and the result was to induce the Government to appoint a judge, with two magistrates chosen in rotation, who composed a supreme court in civil and criminal cases; and in Van Diemen's Land, as well as New South Wales, a fifty-pound civil court, with appeal, was formed, with the judge-advocate as sole judge.

This was the first step toward meliorating the absolute despotism under which the free settlers had hitherto lived. Measures were also taken for removing the restrictions on commerce with Van Diemen's Land, and abolishing trade monopolies: but Governor Macquarie's protests against the interference or assistance of a council prevailed, and he was enabled to pursue his plans with that concentrated vigour which is the one advantage of an enlightened despotism.

To enumerate all the public works which, with no mean amount of skill and at great cost to the parent country, Governor Macquarie executed, would be neither useful nor amusing. It is sufficient to state, that, while he erected many substantial if not elegant buildings in the town of Sydney, he took care, by well-devised roads, to render available all the cultivable land and pastures to be found within as much of the territory as had been explored. The settlers imbibed his spirit of progress, and imitated his energy; flocks and herds increased to a great extent, although the sheep were for the greater part of an inferior breed, a mixture of the hairy Bengal and heavy-tailed Cape, whose wool was worthless for export. But M'Arthur, whose efforts had been neglected and repressed by previous governors, was steadily pursuing his great idea of naturalising the "noble race," or Spanish merino, on the plains of Australia. In December, 1812, the Sydney Gazette reports that ten rams of the merino breed, lately sold by auction from the flocks of John M'Arthur, Esq., produced upwards of 200 guineas; and that "several coats made entirely of the wool of New South Wales are now in this country, and are of most excellent quality." In 1852 a whole fleet of ships were required to convey the wool of Australia to the manufacturers of Yorkshire.

In 1813 occurred one of those droughts, the one drawback on what would otherwise be a course of unvarying prosperity, which are periodical in Australia. On this occasion it was not only the crops that suffered; the numerous flocks and herds were unable to find sufficient pasturage on plains which, when first discovered, were overspread with luxuriant herbage many feet in height. Necessity forced upon the colonists the idea of again searching for a passage across the Blue ​Mountains. The attempt had been unsuccessfully made by several early colonists; amongst others, by the brave Surgeon Bass.

The last and successful effort was made by three gentlemen whose names are still well known in the colony—William Wentworth, son of the D'Arcy Wentworth who took an active part in the deposition of Governor Bligh, one of the earliest free colonists, himself destined in various ways to occupy a distinguished place in the annals of the colony; Lieutenant Lawson, afterwards one of the greatest land and stock owners; and Gregory Blaxland, one of the first members of the Legislative Council of New South Wales.

With incredible toil and hardships, they effected a passage across a chain of mountains clothed with dense timber and brushwood, and intersected by a succession of ravines, which presented extraordinary difficulties, not so much from their height as from their precipitous character. At the foot of the opposite side of the mountains, an easy journey led to

Bathurst Plains, the finest pasture country the colonists had yet seen, far exceeding even the famous Cow Pastures on the Nepean. It is to this country, the discovery of Messrs. Wentworth and Lawson, that the gold-diggers are now streaming in thousands, but not clambering up ​precipices, sliding down ravines, and cutting paths through impenetrable brushwood, like the early pioneers; but easily travelling, and grumbling as they go, at the ill-kept condition of a macadamised road which has been conducted with admirable engineering skill in a series of ascending and descending gradients, over which even loaded drays can travel with ease.

Within fifteen months from the discovery of the first pass over the Blue Mountains, Governor Macquarie caused a practicable road to be made. He never lost any time in planning and executing such works. Some governors would have occupied as much time in preparing a despatch as he did in completing the work. Many settlers, without waiting for the road, contrived to transfer portions of their live stock to the new pastoral El Dorado. In April, 1815, the governor himself, with Mrs. Macquarie, accompanied by his principal officers and Mr. Lewin, painter and naturalist, set out on a progress to view what he called "his last conquest."

The results of this progress, made two months before the battle of Waterloo, are recorded in the following extracts from a "General Order:" certainly one of the most curious documents of the kind ever published.

"The commencement of the ascent from Emu Plains, through a very handsome open forest of lofty trees for twelve miles, was much more practicable and easy than was expected. At a further distance of four miles a sudden change is perceived in the appearance of the timber and quality of the soil, the former becoming stunted, and the latter barren and rocky. Here the country became altogether mountainous and extremely rugged. From henceforward to the twenty-sixth mile is a succession of steep and rugged hills, some so abrupt as to deny a passage altogether; but at this place an extensive plain is arrived at, which constitutes the summit of the western mountains, and from thence a most extensive and beautiful prospect presents itself on all sides to the eye. On the south-west side of this table land [query, King's Table Land?] the mountain terminates in an abrupt precipice of immense depth. At the bottom [the governor does not mention how they got to the bottom] is seen an immense glen, twenty-four miles in length, terminating as abruptly as the others, bounded on the further side by mountains of great magnitude, to which the governor gave the name of Prince Regent's Glen. Proceeding hence to the thirty-third mile, on the top of a hill, an opening presents itself on the south​south-west side of the glen, from whence a view is obtained of mountains rising beyond mountains with stupendous masses of rock in the foreground, in a circular or amphitheatrical form. The road continues from hence, for the space of seventeen miles, on the ridge of the mountain which forms one side of Prince Regent's Glen, and there suddenly terminates in a perpendicular precipice of 676 feet. Down this Mr. Cox had constructed a road to which the governor gave the name of Cox's Pass, and to the ridge, Mount York.^[19] On descending the pass, the first pasture land and soil fit for cultivation appeared, watered by two rivulets running east and west, and joining, forming Cox's River, which takes its course through Prince Regent's Glen, and empties itself into the River Nepean. Three miles hence the expedition of Messrs. Blaxland, Wentworth, and Lawson, terminated. A range of very lofty hills and narrow valleys, alternately, form the part of the country from Cox's River for a distance of sixteen miles, until Fish River is reached.

"Passing on, the country continues hilly, but affords good pasturage, gradually improving to Sidmouth Valley, distant eight miles from the pass of Fish River. The land level, and the first met, unencumbered with timber, forms a valley north-west and south-east between hills of easy ascent, thinly covered with timber. Leaving the valley, the country again becomes hilly; thirteen miles brought the party to Campbell River, where an extensive view opened of gently rising hills and fertile plains. In the pool of Campbell's River, that very curious animal the paradox, or water-mole, was seen in great numbers.^[20] The Fish River, which forms a junction with the Campbell River a few miles to the northward, has two fertile plains named O'Connell's and Macquarie's Plains. Seven miles from the bridge over Campbell River, Bathurst Plains open to the view, presenting a rich part of champaign country of eleven miles in length, bounded on both sides by very beautiful hills thinly wooded. The Macquarie River, which is formed by a junction of the Campbell and Five Rivers, takes a winding course through the plains, which can easily be traced from the highlands by the verdure of the trees on the banks, which are the only trees throughout the extent of the plains. The level and clean surface (marked in plough ridges) gives them very much the appearance of lands in a state of cultivation." On the south bank of the Macquarie, the governor encamped for a week, occupying his time in making excursions in different directions

through the country on both sides the river; and on Sunday, 7th May, 1815, fixed on a site suitable for the erection of a town at some future period, to which he gave the name of Bathurst."

This discovery, made by the courageous perseverance of the three gentlemen before named, rendered available by the wise energy of Macquarie, and profitable by the fine-woolled sheep of M'Arthur, assured the future fortunes of the Three Colonies of Australia, and laid the foundation of an empire on the sweepings of our gaols.

Macquarie was vain, hopeful, ambitious, and not unjustly proud of what, in his despatches to Earl Bathurst, he called "his discovery;" but his utmost expectation only extended to supporting a considerable but isolated population by pastoral and agricultural pursuits. He expressly stated, in his curious general order, that "The difficulties which present themselves in the journey from hence [Sydney] are certainly great and inevitable; those persons who may be inclined to become permanent settlers will probably content themselves with visiting the capital rarely, and of course will have them seldom to encounter." And under this impression the grants of land were made chiefly in large blocks of several thousand acres.

What would have been his pride and admiration could he have ​foreseen that, within a few miles of the plains of pasture land which have realised to the first settlers hundreds of thousands of pounds in wool, gold lay in heaps for gathering; and that within the lifetime of Wentworth, the explorer, an unbroken army of gold adventurers would crowd the highway from Sidney to the "City of the Plains," and in one year double the exports and the consuming powers of the colony.

The road to Bathurst Plains, executed in an incredibly short period, under the direction of Governor Macquarie, was materially improved by succeeding governors, and especially by the surveyor-general, Sir Thomas Mitchell, the Cook of Australian inland discovery. Sir Thomas Mitchell effected works second only in importance and merit of design and execution to the Siraplon Pass over the Alps. It is unfortunate that he was not permitted to carry out other public works which he suggested at a period when the barracks and gaols were filled with idle convicts. The road by Mount York was so steep that bullock drivers were in the habit of cutting down and attaching part of a tree to their drays, by way of substitute for a drag. Sir Thomas filled up an intervening valley by cutting down part of the summit of Mount Victoria.

Under Macquarie, in addition to the Bathurst, the Argyle district, one of the best agricultural and pastoral districts on the road, of which Goulburn is the centre, was discovered; as also Port Macquarie, afterwards a penal settlement, at the mouth of the River Hastings, leading to a fertile district, as yet, in consequence of the price of land and labour, unoccupied to its full extent. Mr. Oxley, the surveyor-general, traced the Rivers Lachlan and Macquarie to the west of the Blue Mountains, where they disappear in a swamp in dry seasons, and in seasons of extraordinary rain form an inland sea. Macquarie also formed one penal settlement on the fertile soil of Emu Plains, and another in the coal district at the mouth of the River Hunter, not improperly named Newcastle. He also materially improved the aspect of Sydney by laying it out on a new plan, and gave encouragement to every useful enterprise. He was wise enough to see the importance of, and did his best to create, a class of small farmers, who, tilling the ground with their own hands, would be independent of hired labour, and assist in protecting the colony against the effects of a dearth of corn. With this view, he gave grants of thirty acres each to emancipated convicts. Unfortunately, he did not accompany this wise measure with an importation of female population.

Among the gossiping libels against the yeomanry class current among the squatocracy is a statement that Macquarie's settlers sold all their farms for rum. This statement was investigated by Mrs. ​Chisholm, who found a great number of the settlers in the Hawkesbury voting for members of council on their original grants. That under the horrid single-man system many should have flown to rum for consolation, is not extraordinary. The old saw says—

Very little could be expected from a population of which not one in five could obtain an honest helpmate, and which knew little of clergymen except as sellers of rum and dispensers of lashes. Even in the mother country, the duty of educating the masses had hardly begun to make way; thus it was only the inoculation of whatever good there was in the colony, and the facility of getting an honest living, that prevented the colonists of Macquarie's time from becoming a nation of bucaneers.

The ignorant and the vicious were turned loose in New South Wales with the lash and the gallows for those who were found out, but with independence for those who were industrious. The result showed how human nature can run clear where not pressed down by poverty or compressed in towns.

The Rum Hospital was a specimen of the tone of morality during the early years of New South Wales. It was built by three gentlemen, under a contract with the governor, which gave them a monopoly of the sale and importation of rum for a certain number of years. The workmen were, as much as possible, paid in rum, and public-houses were multiplied to an extent exceeding the proportion in the lowest and poorest haunts of Great Britain.

Many individuals, profiting by the enormous government expenditure, became wealthy; and all the sober, and many who were not sober, of the free or freed population were prosperous. It became manifestly better policy to live by work or trade than by robbery.

Of churches there were two, and these barely filled; of the few clergymen the majority were occupied as magistrates, in awarding lashes to refractory servants, in farming, in breeding stock, and dealing in anything that would bring a profit. When New South Wales was considered worthy of an archdeacon, one honourable exception, the much-loved Parson Cowper,^[21] was passed over and neglected, according to the rule of the duy, in favour of an ex-wine-merchant.

The Roman Catholics, amounting to some thousands, were not ​allowed to have the comfort of a priest of their own religion. Considering that the Roman Catholic cannot, like the Protestant, retire to any solitude and there relieve his mind by prayer and confession to God that he deems the intervention of the priest, especially on his deathbed, essential to his salvation it is not extraordinary that the Irish part of the prisoner-population should have been turbulent and desperate; they felt themselves condemned to misery in this world, and perdition in the next dying "unhousel'd, unannointed, unanel'd."

The tone of society in the towns was horrible: no educated or honourable class; no church worthy of the name; no schools except for the wealthy, and these chiefly taught by convicts; slave-masters who sold rum; slaves who drank it; an autocrat surrounded by parasites, whose fortune he could make by a stroke of his pen. Except military honour, and the virtue cherished by a few who lived apart, there was as little virtue and honour as freedom in this wretched, prosperous colony.

From the foundation of New South Wales to the end of Governor Macquarie's administration, about 400,000 acres of land were granted to private individuals. Of these, in course of time, many town lots have become of enormous value, as likewise some of the country land; but much was barren, and not worth cultivation when better land was rendered accessible by roads.

In 1817, the first judge, Mr. Field, arrived; a branch of the Bible Society was established, and a Roman Catholic priest, Father O'Flynn, landed and spent some time in the colony, but, not having been duly authorised by the home government, he was compelled to return. Bigotry was in full bloom before Christianity had taken root.

In 1819 arrived a commissioner of inquiry, John Thomas Bigge, Esq., and his secretary, Thomas Hobbs Scott, Esq. He remained until February, 1821, having collected a body of evidence, which was afterwards printed for the use of the House of Commons. It contains many curious stories. The publication of this report had a considerable effect in directing the attention of the British public to the resources of Australia, and eventually caused the influx of a superior class of emigrants. But it was not until Governor Darling's time that the demand for convict labourers, on terms then in force, began to exceed the supply. Colonists, chiefly the Scotchmen, discovered the advantage of agricultural pursuits in a colony in which, with a grant of land, they became entitled to rations for twelve months for themselves and their wives, and convict labourers at the rate of one for each thirty acres, ​who were also rationed by the government for the space of eighteen months. The inquiry by Mr. Commissioner Bigge was partly owing to the representations made, in a work published by Mr. William Wentworth, during a visit paid to England for the purpose of being called to the bar.

Among other subjects that came under the notice of the commissioner was the ecclesiastical government of New South Wales. The report of Mr. Bigge recommended the appointment of an archdeacon. Mr. Scott, the secretary, lost no time in taking orders, and in 1825 reappeared in the colony as Archdeacon Scott.

In the year that the royal commissioner quitted the colony a Wesleyan chapel was opened, and the foundation stone of a Roman Catholic cathedral was laid by the governor at the request of Father Therry—good Father Therry—who shared with Parson Cowper the honour, the respect, the affection of the poorer colonists, and of the outcast prisoner population, whom they so faithfully tended, and the persecution of their spiritual superiors.

In 1822 Governor Macquarie embarked for England, after a longer and more successful administration than any governor in the Australian colonies has hitherto enjoyed. He found New South Wales a gaol, and left it a colony; he found Sydney a village, and left it a city; he found a population of idle prisoners, paupers, and paid officials, and left a large free community, thriving on the produce of flocks and the labour of convicts.

MACQUARIE was succeeded by Sir Thomas Brisbane, whose term of office, undistinguished by remarkable actions on his part, was full of events of importance to a colony which was fast acquiring a population that could no longer be controlled by a purely military despotism. From the day of Macquarie's departure a struggle commenced between the people and the government which was carried on up to the present year, when the Duke of Newcastle conceded to the Australians full powers of self-government and self-taxation.

Under any circumstances Sir Thomas Brisbane's task would have been difficult. The fortunes made in the colony had attracted a class ​of emigrants not prepared to submit to the despotic system which the prisoner part of the population could not, and the officials and settlers living on government patronage were not inclined to resist. Succeeding to the absolute powers of Macquarie, in 1824, three years after landing, the Legislative, or rather Executive Council, against the check of which his imperious predecessor had protested, was estabblished. The first chief-justice, the first attorney-general, a solicitor-general, who was also a commissioner of the Court of Requests, a master in chancery, and colonial treasurer, arrived in the colony. Trial by jury took place in the first Court of Quarter Sessions; liberty of the press was conceded; and the Australian, the first colonial newspaper independent of government aid, was published by Mr. Wentworth and Dr. Wardell, and followed by two other journals.

While on this side of the globe we were declaiming and subscribing for the liberties of Greeks, Spaniards, and South Americans, at the antipodes our countrymen were struggling for trial by jury and "unlicensed printing."

Commercial liberty yet remained to be gained. The East India Company claimed the monopoly of trading in the Indian seas, and repeatedly asserted their right by confiscating vessels loaded with produce for Port Jackson. In 1824 the captain of a man-of-war actually seized the ship Almorah, with a valuable cargo of tea and rice, at anchor in Sydney Cove, and sent her as a prize to Calcutta in charge of his lieutenant . Major-General Sir Thomas Brisbane, K.C.B., had acquired a high reputation as a soldier in the Peninsula, and as a man of science. The first observatory in Australia was erected under his auspices. But his government, which only lasted four years, was unpopular, and the political concessions made rendered further concessions inevitable. To this fire was added the fuel of grievances which went home to the pockets of almost all the settlers and traders, and an insult which deeply offended a powerful, united, and intelligent religious community—the Scotch Presbyterians.

The Presbyterians applied in 1823 for assistance to build a Presbyterian church in Sydney, and referred pointedly to the support afforded the "Roman Catholics." The tone of the application appears not to have pleased either Sir Thomas or his secretary, and he returned a bitter reply, of which the following is the concluding paragraph. The style is eminently characteristic of colonial secretaries and governors:—

"When, therefore, the Presbyterians of the colony shall have ​advanced by private donations in the erection of a temple worthy of religion; when in the choice of their teachers they shall have discovered a judgment equal to that which has presided at the selection of the Roman Catholic clergymen; when they shall have practised what they propose, 'To instruct the people to fear God and honour the King;' when, by endeavouring to 'keep the unity of the spirit in the bond of peace' in a a colony requiring it more than all others, they shall have shown through their lives the influence of the holy religion they profess, then assuredly will the colonial executive step forward to extend its countenance and support to those who are following the Presbyterian creed."

The governor, it is said, acted under the advice of his secretary, a gentleman of the old Tory school. The Scotch gentlemen applied to the home government, when the governor received a severe reprimand, and the Presbyterians the aid they required.

Sir Thomas Brisbane's financial measures were equally unfortunate, yet there is no reason to question the purity of his motives.

It had been usual under previous governors to purchase the surplus grain from farmers at the current price of the day. The colonial government was almost the only purchaser, and to government the corn-growers looked for a certain share of their profits. Among the smaller settlers, the only cash they received in the course of the year was from the commissariat. This was the latter phase of a system which began with rationing the whole community, and gave liberty to prisoners who undertook to support themselves, which, in its second stage, willingly provided a free and emancipated settler with land and prisoner labour, and purchased the produce of land so tilled, to feed the prisoners whom the settlers could not employ.

Sir Thomas Brisbane, who arrived with Commissioner Bigge's report hanging over him, adopted the ordinary contract system, and invited tenders for the quantity required at the lowest price. The small farmers, unused to calculate the effects of open competition, rushed forward to the stores with such eagerness, that wheat fell from 10s. and 7s. 6d. a bushel to 3s. 9d. Abstractedly Sir Thomas Brisbane was right, practically he was wrong; so serious a change required care and time.

About the same time the governor established a colonial currency which raised the pound sterling twenty-five per cent., and proceeded to pay government debts in colonial money to parties who had contracted debts in sterling currency;—a revival of the system of depreciating the circulating medium obsolete in England, but still practised by continental monarchs.

​The colonists, seeing the price at which wheat was transferred to the government stores, took it for granted that the harvest had been redundant, proceeded to feed pigs, and otherwise expended the unsold proceeds of their harvest. As the season advanced it was discovered that the harvest, so far from being plentiful, was deficient. Wheat rose to £1 4s. a bushel. Those who had sold cheap had to buy at a high price. The tampering with the currency added to the severity of the crisis. A great flood swept away the finest crops on the Hawkesbury. A famine followed: the government, by proclamation, required that cabbage-stalks should not be rooted up. A large body of small farmers became so insolvent that their farms were sold to pay their debts, and passed into the hands of money-lenders and grogshop-keepers.

The discontent of the colonists reacted on the home government, and Sir Thomas Brisbane was recalled on the 1st December, 1825. Four very important discoveries were made during his administration. In 1823, the Maneroo Plains, situated between two and three thousand feet above the level of the sea, separated from Twofold Bay by a lofty range of mountains, over which there is now a dray-track, were explored by Captain Currie, R.N., who named them Brisbane Downs, but they have since reverted to their native name. In the same year, Mr. Oxley, the surveyor-general, by order of Sir T. Brisbane, explored Moreton Bay, and discovered the navigable River Brisbane, leading to the fine semi-tropical country now fully occupied by squatters, but capable of supporting a large agricultural population.

In the following year Messrs. Ho veil and Hume made their overland journey to Port Phillip; and in 1825, Mr. Allan Cunningham, one of the most enterprising and accomplished of Australian explorers, discovered Pandora's Pass, a cleft than which the Alps offer nothing more wild, more imposing, or more picturesque, affording the only practicable road from the Upper Hunter to the pastoral uplands of Liverpool Plains.

Lieutenant-General Sir Ralph Darling, K.C.B., succeeded Governor Brisbane; the colony, during an interregnum of eighteen days, having been in the hands of Colonel (afterwards General) Stewart, of Bathurst, an honour which formed one of the boasts of the gallant officer and standing jokes of the district for the remainder of his life.

Sir Ralph Darling arrived in December, 1825; his administration lasted six years, and was singularly and deservedly unpopular. He ​was a man of forms and precedents, of the true red-tape school neat, exact, punctual, industrious, arbitrary, spiteful, commonplace. He laboured hard to reduce into order the confusion he found in the public offices of the colony,, and substituted a system which became quite as corrupt and more dilatory. It was like changing from the court of a Turkish cadi to the Court of Chancery. He obstinately evaded the control intended to be imposed upon him by the secret official and nominee council, and perpetrated one act of tyranny which has no parallel in English history since the time of Charles I. and the Star Chamber, The red-tape tendencies of Governor Darling were shown in his management of the waste lands of the colony.

New South Wales, in common with South American mines, Greek and Spanish loans, and a crowd of other bubble speculations, which seem to be decennially necessary to the commercial existence of Englishmen, became, in the last year of Governor Brisbane's official reign, the subject of the operations of a great company, incorporated by charter and by act of Parliament, with a directorate including the best men of the city of London, a capital of a million pounds, a grant of a million acres, and various other privileges and pre-emptions, of which a monopoly of the working and sale of coal eventually proved the most profitable to the shareholders and offensive to the colonists. Under Governor Darling, the agents of this Australian Agricultural Company selected, took possession, and commenced operations on their grant.

A retrospect of the plans and prospects of this company in 1825 will perhaps afford the best landmark of the progress of the colony from the time when the whole community depended for salvation from famine on one ship, and that ship driven by adverse gales out of Sydney Heads away to sea.

The directors of the Australian Agricultural Company, in their original prospectus, represent New South Wales as well calculated for the growth of "timber, wheat, tobacco, hemp, flax, and fruits, amongst which are the olive, grape, fig, mulberry, guava, almond, peach, citron, and orange." They derived their information chiefly from the reports of Mr. Commissioner Bigge; and from the same source rested great hopes of profit—

"1st, On the growth of fine merino wool.

"2ndly, From the breeding of cattle and other live stock, and the raising corn, tobacco, &c., for the supply of persons resident in the colony.

​"3rdly, From the production, at a more distant time, of wine, olive oil, hemp, flax, silk, opium, &c., as articles of export to Great Britain.

"4thly, From a progressive advance in the value of land, as it becomes improved; and by an increased population."

The grant of land was made on the ground that the colony would derive advantage from the importation of so large a capital, invested in cattle, horses, and sheep of the Cheviot breeds; in the cultivation of the produce of southern Europe; and that the mother country would be saved the cost of maintaining a certain number of convicts.

At that period it was still so much an object with the government to relieve itself of the cost of the maintenance of criminals, that it was agreed that the company should be relieved of quit rent, on condition of their employing a certain number of prisoners. But from the period of the grant to the Australian Agricultural Company, the value of convict labour rose so rapidly, that they never were able to obtain the stipulated number of servants. In 1830 we find the editor of the Sydney Monitor proposing that convicts should be sold on arrival to the highest bidder, and anticipating that they would realise, in lots of two hundred, 100 a year each for five or ten years!

In the course of the correspondence with this company, the Secretary of State for the Colonies announced that in future, "instead of giving grants of land free, lands were to be put up to sale, according to a valuation of the surveyor-general, similar, in many respects, to the system adopted in the United States of America."

This plan had been suggested by Mr. Commissioner Bigge, with a price of 10s. an acre for lands near towns, and 5s. an acre in the country.

Unfortunately the example of the Australian Company infected many members of Parliament and other persons of influence, who hastened to obtain grants which cost the minister nothing, and appeared to the granters of immense value—a delusion on both sides. The precedent became most embarrassing to the government, while many of the huge blocks were of very little money value to the absentees, and of great disadvantage to the colony.

As to the Australian Agricultural Company, their proceedings created, in the then state of the colony, a financial revolution. They sent out from England, according to the custom of joint stock companies, a numerous staff of officers, with cargoes of implements and breeding stock on a most costly scale; and purchased ewes and heifers in the colony so largely, that prices were raised nearly two hundred per cent. "The company with a long pocket" was a popular toast at ​colonial dinners, and sellers were never wanting as long as they had any money to invest.

A reaction followed, as it always does follow, extravagant expectations of pecuniary profit. Nevertheless the colony derived advantage from the introduction of the company's capital and superior stock in sheep, horses, and cattle. The grand ideas of vineyards, olive oil, opium, silkworm cultivation, and orange groves, which formed applauded passages in speeches in the House of Commons and the court-room of the company, were never extended beyond the resident manager's gardens.

Unfortunately the beneficial influences were neutralised by a further grant, which not only handed over the large tract of coal seams which had been unprofitably worked by the government, but actually created a monopoly which precluded the colonists from working, on any terms, any coal which might happen to be found under their estates.

These doings seem monstrous now. At that period they were ordinary transactions, in which honourable men and liberal politicians took a share without shame. In the same perverse spirit the authorities and merchants at Sydney, up to 1826, compelled every ship to enter and break bulk at Sydney before calling at the ports of Van Diemen's Land. In 1825 monopoly was as much an article of faith with statesmen as free trade in 1852.

Under Governor Darling emigration from England of persons of moderate capital increased. But a vicious system was established in the surveyor's office, for the benefit of favoured or feeing parties, by which surveys of waste land were kept secret from the uninitiated. In 1830 the author of "A Letter of Advice to Emigrants" recommends " every settler to bring out an order from the Secretary of State to be allowed to inspect charts and maps in the surveyor's office;" and adds, " from being* denied such inspection, emigrants wander about the interior of the colony at great expense, but to little purpose." Reform makes slow progress in the Colonial Office. If we are to believe the boasts of an Hibernian-German captain who, in 1848, visited Port Phillip, even in that year there existed secret choice reserves near the town of Melbourne, which, by the "open sesame" of his letter from Earl Grey, after being long retained, were handed over to a German colony.

Darling ruled the convicts with a rod of iron. The times of the "first fleeters," with floggers, and short allowances of food, were revived. A penal settlement was formed at Moreton Bay; and there, it is commonly affirmed, the prisoners were so badly treated that they committed murder in order to be sent for trial to Sydney. County magistrates ​were permitted to award any number of lashes for insolence, idleness, or other indefinite offences. As it was not lawful for a man to flog- his own assigned servants, he exchanged compliments with a neighbour. Considering the class of persons who were then frequently selected for magistrates in the colonies, it may easily be conceived to what brutal excesses such irresponsible authority led.

But year by year the civilising elements of society made way. At one time, in 1826, we find a dispensary opened: in the following year a great public meeting is held, with the sheriff in the chair, to petition the King and both Houses of Parliament for the civil rights of trial by jury, and a House of Assembly; and the next year a general post-office throughout the colony, and an Australian jockey club, are established. The editor of a newspaper is found guilty of libel, and two gentlemen fight a bloodless duel. A dispensary, a post-office, an action for libel, and a duel!—the banes and antidotes of civilised society.

The two last years of Governor Darling present events and contrasts still more remarkable.

A Legislative Council, being a step in advance of the Executive Council established by the charter of 1824, held its first meeting in 1829. This was the check against which Governor Macquarie so earnestly and naively protested. The council consisted of Archdeacon (the late Bishop) Broughton, who superseded Mr. Scott, the Commander of the Forces, the Chief Justice, Attorney-General, and Colonial Treasure*, Alexander M'Cleay, afterwards (at eighty years of age) the first speaker of the first Australian Legislative Assembly, and four members selected by the governor.

The proceedings of this council were secret, under an oath administered to that intent; and the governor had an absolute veto. The majority were officials, totally unacquainted with the colony; and, looking at the minority in which the nominees of the government were constantly found in the subsequent open Legislative Assembly, it is not extraordinary that this council gave no satisfaction to the colony. It must, however, be confessed, that in 1829 New South Wales did not possess the materials for representative institutions.

The first act of the council was to establish trial by jury in civil cases.

In the following year, on the 31st March, 1831, the first steam-boat in Australia was launched; two other steam-boats came into use within a few months. Close upon the steam-boat followed Dr. Lang, from Scotland, the first Australian agitator, a Presbyterian O'Connell, who, after professing and printing every shade of political opinions, has ​recently avowed his preference for a republic, and his hopes that he "shall yet see the British flag trailed in the dust."

Decidedly, in 1831, Australia was making progress.

The history of General Darling's administration reads more like that of one of Napoleon's pro-consuls than that of an Englishman reigning over Englishmen.

The case of Sudds and Thompson is an instance which stands out in the history of the colony as a sort of landmark indicating the termination of the Algerine system of government, and affording a singular example of the state of society in which such an outrage on law, justice, and constitutional rights could be not only done, but defended. The story is worth relating, if only to show what deeds could be perpetrated in the same age by the same race that expended millions in redeeming negro slaves and attempting to convert aboriginal cannibals.

Sudds and Thompson were two private soldiers in the 57th Regiment, doing duty in New South Wales in 1825, the second year of Sir Ralph Darling's reign. Thompson was a well-behaved man, who had saved some money; Sudds was a loose character. They both wished to remain in the colony. In New South Wales these two soldiers saw men who had arrived as convicts settled on snug farms, established in good shops, or become even wealthy merchants and stockowners. As to procure their discharge was out of the question, Sudds, the scamp, suggested to Thompson that they should qualify themselves for the good fortune of convicts, and procure their discharge by becoming felons. Accordingly they went together to the shop of a Sydney tradesman, and openly stole a piece of cloth—were, as they intended, caught, tried, convicted, and sentenced to be transported to one of the auxiliary penal settlements for seven years. In the course of the trial the object of the crime was clearly elicited. It became evident that the discipline of the troops required to keep guard over the large convict population would be seriously endangered if the commission of a crime enabled a soldier to obtain the superior food, condition, and prospects enjoyed by a criminal. Accordingly, Sir Ralph Darling issued an order under which the two soldiers, who had been tried and convicted, were taken from the hands of the civil power, and condemned to work in chains on the roads of the colony for the full term of their sentence, after which they were to return to service in the ranks. On an appointed day the garrison of Sydney were assembled and formed in a hollow square. The culprits ​were brought out, their uniforms stripped off and replaced by the convict dress; iron-spiked collars and heavy chains, made expressly for the purpose by order of the governor, were rivetted to their necks and legs, and then they were drummed out of the regiment, and marched back to gaol to the tune of "The Rogue's March." Sudds, who was in bad health at the time of his sentence (from an affection of the liver), overcome with shame, grief, and disappointment oppressed by his chains, and exhausted by the heat of the sun on the day of the exposure in the barrack-square died in a few days. Thompson became insane.

A great outcry was raised in the colony: the opposition paper attacked, the official paper defended, the conduct of the governor. The colony became divided into two parties. Until the end of his administration, Sir Ralph Darling, whose whole system was a compound of military despotism and bureaucracy, was pertinaciously worried by a section which included some of the best and some of the worst men in the colony. Combining together for the extension of the liberties of the colony, they found in the Sudds and Thompson case "the inestimable benefit of a grievance."

It would be unjust to consider Sir Ralph Darling's sentence by the light of public opinion in England. He was governor of a colony in which more than half the community were slaves and criminals; he had to punish and to arrest the progress of a dangerous crime; but he fell into the error of exercising, by ex post facto decree, as the representative of the sovereign, powers which no sovereign has exercised since the time of Henry VIII., and violated one of the cardinal principles of the British constitution, by rejudging and aggravating the punishment of men who had already been judged. At the present day it is, as we before observed, only as an historical landmark that we recal attention to this transaction, which can never be repeated in British dominions.

During General Darling's government further successful explorations of the interior were made, both by private individuals and officials. Among the latter were Major (now Sir Thomas) Mitchell, Mr. Allan Cunningham, Mr. Oxley, and Captain Sturt, the most fortunate of all. In his second expedition, in 1829, Captain Sturt embarked with a party in a boat on the Morrumbidgee (which receives the waters of the Macquarie, the Lachlan, and Darling), until he came to its junction with the Murray, an apparently noble stream. Pursuing his voyage, in spite of many impediments, hardships, and dangers, from rocks, snags, sandbanks, and hostile savages, he reached the Lake Alexandrina, and discovered the future province of South Australia. This ​lake is a shallow sheet of water, sixty miles in length and forty miles in breadth, which interposes between the sea and the river, thus presenting an impassable obstacle to ocean communication. The hopes excited by the discovery of this picturesque river have hitherto not been realised. Although broad, deep, and bordered by rich land for many score miles, the perpetual recurrence of shallows limits the draught of water to two feet, at which depth steamers cannot be profitably navigated. Captain Sturt, having made this important discovery, returned by reascending the river. In consideration of these and other services rendered to South Australia, the new Legislative Council of that colony have recently voted to Captain Sturt, who has unfortunately become blind, a pension of 500 an act of liberality for which no precedent is to be found in the proceedings of the other settlements.

In October, 1831, General Darling resigned his government, and after an interregnum of two months, filled by Colonel Lindsay, was succeeded by General Sir Richard Bourke.

MAJOR-GENERAL SIR RICHARD BOURKE, K.C.B., became Governor of New South Wales in December, 1831, and retired in November, 1837. He was, without question, the ablest man who had as yet occupied that office; equal in zeal, energy, and plain common sense to Macquarie; superior in the liberality, humanity, and statesman-like far-sightedness of his views. With wise self-reliance he resisted the blandishments of the official clique who have been the curse of all our colonies, and the opposition of the faction of white slave-drivers, who looked upon the colony as a farm to be administered for their sole benefit. He had courage, too, of a rare quality, for he dared to differ from his chief, the Secretary of State for the Colonies, on a vital point of administration. His recorded objections to the Wakefield land system are remarkable for their prophetic wisdom. Sir Richard was, and his memory still is, deservedly popular among the humble, or the wealthy sons of the once humble settlers—a rare merit, and not a qualification for favour at the Colonial Office. The six years of his reign were crowded ​with measures and events of the utmost importance in the history of New South Wales.

1. The discussions of the Legislative Council became public, and the financial estimates were regularly submitted and discussed.

2. The Church and School Corporation (which had become a gross job) was abolished, and religious equality established by an act of the Legislative Council.

3. An attempt was made to introduce the Irish national school system (which the bigots defeated).

4. Free grants of land were abolished, and sale by auction at a minimum price of 5s. substituted.

5. The despatch was received from Lord Glenelg, and steps were adopted which, in 1840, finally abolished transportation to New South Wales.

6. The squatting system was legalised and systematised on a plan which has since produced nearly £60,000 per annum.

7. Rules for regulating the number of convict servants to which each settler should be entitled (without favour), and the number of lashes which should be inflicted on a convict servant by a single magistrate, were framed and promulgated.

8. Port Phillip was peopled by settlers from Van Diemen's Land, and South Australia by colonists from England.

The powers of the executive council imposed on the Governor of New South Wales in the last year of Sir Thomas Brisbane's administration were, under Sir Ralph Darling, almost nominal. Not only were its deliberations secret and its dissent powerless, but Governor Darling illegally and systematically exercised authority in the only matter entrusted to the council—the distribution of the revenues. Towards the close of his administration he introduced a bill indemnifying himself, and legalising his illegal assumptions. Sir Richard Bourke, on the contrary, earnestly co-operated in raising the character of the council, treated the non-official members with the utmost respect, and endeavoured to give the council, as far as possible, the tone and functions of a representative assembly; a course directly the reverse of his successor, Sir George Gipps. Both were able,, but the one was a frank and generous, the other an astute and jealous man. It is very much to be regretted that Governor Bourke had not been permitted to govern with as little interference from Secretaries of State as Governor Macquarie, and to remain long enough to initiate the partly elective council which fell into the unhappy hands of his successor.

First in importance among the legislative changes effected by Sir Richard Bourke's government, must be ranked the "Order in Council," subsequently embodied in an act of parliament, by which sales by auction, at a minimum upset price of 5s. per acre, superseded free grants of land; and the act of the Colonial Legislative Council, by which pastoral occupations of the vast territories beyond the surveyed limits of the colony (colonially, the Bush) were legalised, placed under the control of special commissioners, and charged with a rent in the shape of a licence-fee and a poll-tax.

From these two sources (the sale of land and pastoral or squatting rents) a fund has been derived, which, during the last twenty years, has conveyed to Australia more than one hundred thousand free emigrants, selected from the poorest labourers of the United Kingdom. The introduction of these labouring emigrants rendered the abolition, first of the assignment system, and finally of transportation, possible.

Here it may be convenient to review the various "land-laws" which had prevailed in the colony up to the time when those changes were introduced, which occupied so important a place in colonial discussions during the government of Sir Richard Bourke and his successor.

From the foundation of the colony in 1788 to 1824, regulations for the disposal of land were left entirely in the hands of the governor. From time to time the home Government exercised the right of bestowing grants upon such persons as were willing to proceed to the colony to occupy them. Up to 1818 free passages, as well as grants of land, were offered to such free emigrants as were willing to proceed to the colony, with rations for two years.

Thus, John M'Arthur, in 1804, after reporting the result of his experiments for naturalising the merino in New South Wales before the Privy Council, received a grant of fifty thousand acres, to be selected with the permission of the governor, in any part of the unoccupied territory.

So, too, as long as the settlement depended for subsistence on imported provisions, lands were bestowed on any man, bond or free, who would undertake to support himself after the expiration of the first year of occupation of his farm. With each grant a certain number of convicts were allowed as labourers for every eighty acres, who, as well as the settler and his wife, were rationed for a limited period by the local government, thus receiving from the government stores, beef, mutton, ​and flour of the same quality as that which they themselves had the profit of selling to the commissariat.

Up to the time of Governor Darling the produce of the colony was so uncertain, and the means of profitably employing the prisoners so limited, that every means was adopted to induce settlers to relieve the Government of the care and cost of convicts for whom there was no work.

In Macquarie's time the settler usually obtained, in addition to a supply of farm labourers, the use of a "clearing-gang," which cut down, burned, rolled, and cleared the huge trees from great tracts that no one would have attempted to cultivate without such assistance.

Under these rude means, up to 1820, the last year of Macquarie's government, 400,000 acres passed into the hands of private individuals. Brisbane granted 180,000 acres at a yearly quit rent of 2s. per 100 acres, and 573,000 at 15s. annual quit rent per 100 acres; he also sold between December, 1824, and May, 1825, 369,050 acres at 5s. an acre, giving a long credit, with a quit rent of 2s. per 100 acres in addition. In 1828, under Darling, the total number of acres alienated amounted to 2,906,346. But this acreage cannot, for any useful purpose, be compared with that of cultivated Europe; large patches and vast continuous tracts are so barren or so thickly timbered as to be of no more value than those Connemara estates offered for sale at 5s. an acre, and dear at the money.

It must also be noted that these quit rents were scarcely ever collected, but allowed to run in arrear until, under the government of Sir George Gipps, they exceeded in amount the value of the whole fee-simple of many estates, and became the source of a very formidable grievance.

Under Governors Brisbane, Darling, and the first years of Bourke's government, it was usual to make grants to colonists in proportion to the amount of capital they imported in cash or implements of husbandry.

In 1822 Commissioner Bigge recommended that sales of land contiguous to grants issued in consideration of capital imported into the colony, should be made at the rate of 10s. an acre for land in very favourable situations, and 5s. an acre in more remote situations. But this suggestion remained a dead letter.

In 1825 Lord Bathurst, as already stated, announced to the Australian Agricultural Company, but did not carry out his determination, that instead of free grants as theretofore, land in New South Wales would be "put up to sale according to a system similar in many ​respects to that adopted in the United States of America." In 1824 the Secretary of State for the Colonies issued regulations for the disposal of land in New South Wales, of which the following is an abstract:—

"1. A division of the whole territory into counties, hundreds, and parishes, is in progress. When that division shall be completed, each parish will comprise an area of 25 square miles. A valuation will be made of the lands throughout the colony, and an average price will be struck for each parish.

"2. All the lands in the colony not hitherto granted, and not appropriated for public purposes, will be put up for sale at the average price thus fixed.

"3. All persons proposing to purchase lands must transmit a written application to the governor, in a certain prescribed form, which will be delivered at the surveyor-general's office to all parties applying, on payment of a fee of two shillings and sixpence.

"4. The purchase-money must be made by four quarterly instalments. A discount of 10 per cent, will be allowed for ready money payments.

"5. The largest quantity of land which will be sold to any individual, 89,600 acres. The land will generally be put up in lots of three square miles or 1,920 acres.

"6. Any purchaser who, within ten years of his purchase, shall by the employment and maintenance of convicts have relieved the public from a charge equal to ten times the purchase-money, will have the money returned, but without interest. Each convict employed for twelve months will be computed as £16 saved to the public."

Persons desirous of becoming grantees without purchase might obtain land on satisfying the governor that they had the power and intention of expending in the cultivation of the land a capital equal to half the estimated value of it.

On grants of not less than 320 acres, and not more than 2,560 acres, subject to a quit rent of 5 per cent, per annum on the estimated value, redeemable within the first twenty-five years at twenty years' purchase, with a credit for one-fifth part of the sums the grantee might have saved by employing convicts. No quit rent was required for the first seven years, but the grantee was subject to forfeiture of his grant if unable, to prove to the satisfaction of the surveyor-general that he had expended a capital equal to one-half its value.

Detailed regulations like those above quoted as to expenditure of capital can never be enforced. In practice, quit rents fell in arrear ​and could not be recovered. Thousands of acres granted were barren and utterly valueless.

In September, 1826, Sir Ralph Darling created a land board, composed of the Colonial Secretary, the Civil Engineer, and the Auditor-general of accounts, which issued the following set of regulations worthy, for their thorough absurdity and impracticability, of their bureaucratic descendants, the South Australian commissioners, and the New Zealand Company.

Persons desirous of obtaining land were (1) to apply to the colonial secretary for a form to be filled up and submitted to the governor, who (2), if satisfied of the character and respectability of the applicant, directed the colonial secretary to supply him with a letter (3) to the land board, in order that they might carefully investigate the stock articles of husbandry, &c., and cash, forming part of his capital. On the land board reporting (4) to the governor satisfactorily as to capital, the governor furnished the applicant (5) with a letter to the surveyor-general, who (6) was to give him authority to proceed in search of land! When he had made his selection he had to apprise the surveyor-general (7), who twice a month was to report (8) to the governor such applications; and, if approved (9) by the governor, the applicant received written authority (10) to take possession of the land until his Majesty's pleasure should be known, or the grant made out. Terms as to quit rents the same as the first set of regulations—viz., 5s. per cent, after seven years; grants to be in square miles; one square mile, 640 acres, for each £500 of capital, to the extent of four square miles.

Land selected for purchase, not granted, to be valued by the commissioners, put up for sale, and sold by sealed tender, not under a price fixed by commissioners. Personal residence, or residence of a free man as servant or deputy, required on purchases and grants.

These regulations of Sir Ralph Darling were marked by every official vice unnecessary forms, expense, and uncertainty, inquisitorial investigation, bribery and corruption among the subordinates in the various offices; in fact, everything that could be done, was done to disgust decent, unpolished, unlearned settlers. They were adopted by the Colonial Office in 1827, and had the effect of rendering the business of obtaining and granting land one series of jobs. The home government always reserved to itself the right of making grants, and exercised it in a most baneful manner.

One effect, unintentional on the part of the authors of these cumbrous arrangements for obtaining grants of land, was to encourage unlicensed squatting in districts unsurveyed, and at that period allowed to remain ​in "healthy neglect." So the live stock increased in spite of the forms of the "land board."

An impartial retrospect of the granting; system,, before it was systematised and encumbered with regulations, leads to the conclusion that with a just and intelligent governor, it was the best that could be devised for such a colony.

The attraction of a free passage, with free grants of land and the use of convict labour which were offered up to 1818, did secure a certain number of respectable colonists. The free grant of land made to emigrants, in proportion to their capital, and to prisoners who had served their term, during the governments of Macquarie and Brisbane, between 1788 and 1825, with the aid of convict labour, did colonise and cultivate the country. For instance, in 1821, the great road across the Blue Mountain to Bathurst was executed, and rendered practicable for wheeled vehicles. In 1822 the Hunter River District was a wilderness; in 1827, for a distance of 150 miles along the river, half a million acres had been surveyed, granted, or sold to settlers whose capital was estimated at from four to five hundred thousand pounds, and whose stock included 25,000 horned cattle, and 80,000 fine-woolled sheep. All the improvements, buildings, fences, and cultivation were effected by assigned servants, whom the government fed and clothed for the first eighteen months of their servitude. Nothing but convict labour could have done so much in public and private works in five years.

Considering the slight offences for which the majority of the prisoner population of New South Wales had been transported, between 1788 and 1825, there can be no doubt that had the free grants of land system been accompanied by measures for classifying, teaching, and Christianising the convicts, and for providing, from the destitute parts of the United Kingdom, such an emigration of women as would have equalised the sexes, the character of the colony would have been materially changed, and a population provided well calculated to amalgamate with and rise to the level of free emigrants, when the time came for abolishing transportation, and giving up the land which convicts had pioneered to the use of a free population.

But as it is difficult to obtain a succession of governors, able and honest enough to bear the responsibility of granting land when it comes to be of value, it is to be regretted that, when it was no longer considered necessary to bribe prisoners to honesty and industry by the prizes in the shape of a farm of wild land, we did not imitate the simple system by which, during half a century, the vast territories of the United States ​have been colonised, cities founded, harbours constructed, canals cut, and railroads made.

Under this system the territories for sale are surveyed in advance, and laid out in lots of eighty acres and upwards, at a fixed price of a dollar an acre; a map containing the land for sale is open to every intending purchaser; there are no reserves except for special stated public purposes; parties settling beyond the bounds of surveyed land do so at their own risk, and have no power to inflict on the parent state heavy expenses in armies or officials. They are expected to govern and protect themselves, and to retire or purchase when the government surveyor makes his appearance. No doubt the American system has its defects, but, taken as a whole, it is the best which has ever been devised for employing a large emigrant population, and conquering and subduing the earth, at the least possible public expense.

It is possible that something like it might have eventually been transplanted to Australia, but a series of accidents threw that island-continent entirely into the hands of a clique of political land-jobbers.

In 1829 the colony of Swan River was founded on principles, under circumstances, and in a situation which ensured failure.

Mr. Peel, a gentleman who had influence with government, combined with Sydney merchants to found a colony in some other part of Australia. The merchants found the money, Mr. Peel the influence. The large fortunes which had been realised by colonists in New South Wales led the colonisers to believe that the same might be realised in a new colony, without the disadvantage of a convict population.

Swan River, on the north-western coast of Australia, was the site chosen. Sailors who had visited the shores gave the favourable reports, as sailors always do of any safe harbour where they find wood and water enough for their ship's crew. Geographical reasons led the adventurers to expect a temperate climate; further precise investigations as to the quality of the soil, extent of pastures, and character of the aborigines, were considered unnecessary.

The government, in total ignorance of the simplest principles of colonisation, did its part by bestowing a million acres on the founder, and to every other colonist acres in proportion to his capital in cash, live stock, implements, or the number of labourers whose passage he paid.

In great haste ships were freighted, and loaded with fine gentlemen and ladies, farmers and labourers, blood-horses, short-horned cattle, merino rams, carriages of fashionable build, and agricultural implements ​enough for one of the best farmed English counties. Those who had little money made use of their credit to obtain consignments which would entitle them to land. Not one of them doubted that the wild land in an unknown country would soon be as valuable as in Bedfordshire, or, at any rate, as on the banks of the River Hunter in New South Wales, and that the labourers would labour as contentedly for the same wages abroad as at home.

The first fleet of Western Australian colonists arrived to find the country not only unsurveyed, but unexplored. They were disembarked on a narrow slip of beach, bordered by thickets filled with hostile savages, who speared men and their cattle on every opportunity. A fine stud of thorough-bred horses perished for want of fresh water; whole cargoes of furniture and agricultural implements rolled on the beach without being unpacked. The labourers repudiated their home engagements, and obtained exorbitant wages. When the country was further explored, the quantity of available land turned out to be extremely limited; the live stock was rapidly consumed for food, while the remoteness of Swan River from the old colony rendered importations of any kind difficult, expensive, and uncertain. The sheep turned out to pasture repeatedly died, poisoned by a plant which, up to this day, the colonists have been unable to discover and extirpate.

In a word, planted in a remote district, far from other ports and out of the track of commerce, with very little land available for agricultural or pastoral purposes—what little there was of the one monopolised by a few hands, much of the other poisonous; with colonists, both high and low, the most unfitted by previous education for a rude, self-dependent life, without leaders or servants of colonial experience, without forced labour—the Swan River settlement failed miserably. This failure would have been confined to the fortunes of the first colonists, however bad the system of colonisation, had there been, as in the other settled districts of Australia, vast plains of sound pasture on which pure-bred merinoes could have fed and multiplied; or coal, or copper, or gold to be had for digging; but there was nothing, and is nothing up to the present hour, beyond the bare means of sustenance; thus, without a single staple export, Swan River, in spite of a series of systems of colonisation, has never been able to rise from the condition of an eleemosynary dependency, supported by the bounty of the parent state. With the failure of Swan River the system of free grants of land ended in Australia.

THE apparently digressive sketch of the colonisation of Western Australia and its lamentable results is rendered necessary by the fact, that on the failure of Western Australia a new theory of colonisation was floated into public notice and incorporated in our colonial legislation and administration.

It was in 1829 that a sensation was produced in the literary and political world of London by the appearance of a little book entitled "A Letter from Sydney," the principal town of Australasia (edited by Robert Gouger), which was soon known to be the production of Mr. Edward Gibbon Wakefield. Out of this book grew the "High-Priced Land System of the Three Colonies"—the monopoly of wild lands at a nominal rent, which the squatters now enjoy—the colonisation of South Australia and New Zealand—some good, and a world of misery, ruin, social and political estrangement, of which we have not yet seen the end.

This "Letter from Sydney," by far the most brilliant of the many works on colonisation by the same author, is now out of print. It contains so clear a statement of the origin, merits, and objects of a theory which was at one time accepted, supported, and acted on by almost every statesman, political economist, and journalist of eminence, that the following abstract of its contents will not be out of place.

The writer represents himself to be an English gentleman of large fortune and refined tastes, who has emigrated under the idea that an estate of twenty thousand acres in Australia would procure the same comforts, income, and consideration that an estate of a thousand acres would in England. He says—"I have got 20,000 acres for a mere trifle, and I imagined that a domain of that extent would be very valuable. In this I was wholly mistaken. As my estate cost next to nothing, so it is worth next to nothing. The trees on my property, if growing in any part of England, would be worth at least £150,000. The best thing that could happen to me would be the annihilation of all this natural produce; but the cost of destroying it would be at least £15,000." He then goes on to enumerate mines of iron and coal which would make him "a peer in England," but which are ​valueless for want of labour or roads. "I did not, you know, intend to become a farmer. Having fortune enough for all my wants, I proposed to get a large domain, to build a good house, to keep enough land in my own hands for pleasure grounds, park, and game preserves, and to let the rest, after erecting farmhouses in suitable spots. My mansions, park, preserves, and tenants, were all a mere dream. There is no such class as a tenantry in this country, where every man who has capital to cultivate a farm can have one of his own." He then graphically describes the miseries of a solitary life to a man accustomed to the elegant luxuries of civilised life. His "own man" leaves him, and invests his savings in a small farm. He imports labourers and mechanics from England, and they leave him without repaying the cost of their passage. He observes to a friend, "Were you a broken farmer, or a poor lieutenant, I should say, come here by all means; you cannot be placed more unhappily than at present, and you may gain by the change. But I am advising a man of independent fortune, who prefers his library even to the beauties of nature, and to whom intellectual society is necessary for his peace of mind. I thought at one time of establishing a dairy; but my cows were as wild as hyænas, and almost as wicked. I had no dairy woman, no churns, no anything that was wanted; and, above all, I wanted industry, skill, economy, and taste, for any such pursuits, or, at least, a drudge of a wife to supply those wants." He then paints an amusing although exaggerated picture of the want of intellectual society in a colonial town.

Having come to the conclusion that the colony would fall into total barbarism whenever the abolition of the convict assignment system should leave the colonists dependent on free labour, he proceeds to state the cause of these miseries—

The whole evil, according to this unfortunate gentleman, of fortune without "industry, skill, economy, or taste for agricultural or pastoral pursuits," lies in cheap land, which produces dear labour, by drawing labourers into landowners, by promoting dispersion—by deterring men from renting land, as they prefer freehold. Dear labour obstructs improvements in agriculture, in public works, in arts, in science. There being no tenants and few servants, there is no easy, refined, intellectual class: mere mechanics, labourers, and even common farmers and poor lieutenants, such in fact as suffer privations in lands where labour is cheap, are the only persons who enjoy colonial life. With cheap land and dear labour, colonists could get the advantage of the presence of such emigrants as the letter-writer.

​The remedy propounded in 1829, (repeated with equal confidence in 1849,) is to make land so dear that labourers shall not be able to obtain posession of land "too soon"—to affix to all colonial land what Mr. Wakefield calls in another work a "hired labour price." And further, that the money for which the land sold should be devoted to the importation of the redundant labour of the mother country an importation which he advises should be conducted with a view to the greatest benefit of the capitalist,—that is to say, it should consist entirely of young married couples under five-and-twenty years of age, unencumbered by children or parents. "Family Colonisation" had no charms for Gibbon Wakefield.

Thus supplied with ample cargoes of healthy young labourers of both sexes, debarred by a sufficient price from becoming freeholders, the writer of the letter from Sydney "promises that the capitalists shall find ample profitable employment for their capital, shall concentrate population, carry on model farming, cultivate art and science."

But he anticipates one important question which he answers thus:—

"It becomes clear that the object we have in view may be attained by fixing some considerable price on waste land. Still, how is the proper price to be ascertained? Frankly, I confess I do not know. I believe that it could be determined only by experience." This was in 1829. Twenty years later, in 1849, after having experimented on New South Wales, and on three colonies in New Zealand, and provided for all his relations in snug colonial berths, he says,—"It is here that I have been frequently and tauntingly required to mention what I deem the sufficient price; but I have hitherto avoided falling into the trap which that demand upon me really is. I could do that certainly for some colony with which I am particularly well acquainted, but I should do so doubtingly and with hesitation, for the elements of calculation are so many and so complicated, in their various relations to each other, that in depending on them exclusively there would be liability to error."

We may observe that this caution in naming price only extended to books and pamphlets, as Mr. Wakefield never hesitated to assure those who bought lots of land in his model colonies that they would enjoy all the advantages it was presumed a sufficient price would confer. Therefore, of course, the colonising purchasers, seeing Mr. Wakefield in constant communication with the managers of each colony, took it for granted that 12s. in South Australia, or 20s. at Wellington, New Zealand, or 30s. at Nelson, and £3 at Canterbury, according to the colony, was the "sufficient price."

At the period when this theory, in every respect so plausible, was ​propounded, there were no adverse critics except mere colonists, and they were silenced with a jest, or a sneer at their selfish jealousy. And it is not extraordinary, for seldom has a chapter of political economy been clothed in language of such eloquence as adorned and enlivened the pages of the "Letter" from Sydney. It contains passages—(the picture of the Italian girl—the journey from Alexandria to Genoa)—so beautiful, so warm, so real, that one cannot help regretting, for the sake of his own happiness and reputation, as well as of his numerous colonising victims, that Gibbon Wakefield had not devoted himself to writing novels and travels, instead of puffs, paragraphs, articles, pamphlets, and books in praise of joint stock and lottery colonisation.

But Mr. Wakefield had to assist him in propagating his tenets not only the charm of "style," but of personal fascination, with a more than Protean adaptativeness, which rendered him the friend and bosom adviser of Republicans and Radicals, Whig and Conservative Peers, Low Church and High Church Bishops. Five secretaries of state for the colonies—Lords Glenelg and Stanley, Monteagle, Aberdeen, and Grey—have been more or less his pupils; the influence of his writings—even quotations from them—are to be found in their despatches; while so late as 1850, he led, or rather sent captive, to Canterbury, New Zealand, a crowd of educated victims. Energetic, tenacious, indefatigable, unscrupulous, with a wonderful talent for literary agitation, for simultaneously feeding a hundred journalists with the same idea and the same illustrations in varying language, for filling eloquent, but indolent, orators with telling speeches; at one time he had rallied round him nearly every rising man of political aspirations, and secured the support of nearly every economical writer of any celebrity. He has shaken a ministry, founded and distributed the patronage of at least two colonies, and left the seeds, after nearly exciting open rebellion in a third.

But one hard unvarying undercurrent of fact destroyed the edifice of fame and fortune which seemed rising under the influence of Gibbon Wakefield, with his troops of friends, his fiery orators, his city bankers, his well-descended nobles, his bishops of all hues—Whig, Tory, and Trimmer—Hinde, Exeter, and Oxford. The results of his theory, his best arranged plans, were, invariably disastrous. His disciples only continued his disciples as long as they sat at the desk critical, speculated within reach of Threadneedle-street, or reclined on the soft benches of the Houses of Parliament. No sooner did the colonisers become colonists than they renounced him and all his works.

​We are willing to admit Gibbon Wakefield's first experiment in colonisation was perfectly legitimate, although the manner in which he hunted down all who ventured to question his views was as inexcusable as the recklessness with which he sacrificed established colonies in order to prop up his model speculation. For like the Bourbons, he forgets nothing and learns nothing, fiercely implacable, he has neither candour, nor truth, nor humility. In 1849, in order to float off his Canterbury colonisation scheme, he published "The Art of Colonisation," a volume of 500 pages, which, as regards the land question, is merely an amplification, in a diffuse style, with the same arguments and even the same illustrations, of the theories so fervidly propounded in 1829. Not a sentence, not a word, does the book contain of Mr. Wakefield's twenty years' experience, during which he had directed the colonisation, with successive variations in detail, but always on the "sufficient price," or "hired labour price" system, of four colonies—South Australia, Wellington, Nelson, New Plymouth, beside planning half a dozen others. Not a hint that the "Wakefield theory" had, in every colony in which it had been attempted, ruined all those who put faith in it, and been acknowledged to be absurd and impracticable by the intimate friends and brothers of the theorist.

In New South Wales the year 1830 was marked by a change from the complicated system of sales at quit rents and free grants to uniform system of sale by auction at 5s. an acre, which, in effect, except for choice lots, was a fixed price of 5s. an acre, for practically there was no competition. Whether this change was brought about by the ventilation of Mr. Wakefield's theories, it is impossible to say.

The announcement of land for sale by auction at the minimum upset price of 5s. an acre soon brought money into the government chest. Those who had occupied land of a superior quality near their grants purchased their occupations; others rounded off their grants, and took in slices of land for the sake of uniformity, for a natural boundary for pasture, or for access to water; others, who had not had either influence or patience, or time to wade through the dreary forms of Governor Darling's land board, indulged in freehold .as soon as it became a mere matter of money. This was especially the case with a considerable section of the emancipist population.

Governor Bourke had distributed a number of ten-acre grants on the alluvial flats of rivers among poor prisoners of good conduct before the sales by auction were sanctioned. ​During the years between 1831 and 1836, great encouragement to purchase land was held out by the facility for obtaining the labour of prisoners without favour on fixed terms; by the large purchases of produce by the commissariat; and the activity with which the governor prosecuted road-making wherever land was settled. The result was a rapid and annual accession of funds to the colonial Treasury.

The news of the avidity with which both colonists and absentees purchased wild land, which the government imagined it had been giving away for nothing, or for a nominal price, ever since the foundation of the colony, appears to have inflamed the imagination of the colonial department of Downing-street; and very soon the Colonial Office began to think and act as if it had discovered an exhaustless treasure, which could be sold in any quantity and at any price they chose to fix. Just as in 1845, when all the British public was mad on railways, there were parties who believed that because one or two lines paid 10 per cent., all lines would pay 10 per cent., and therefore wished government to buy up and complete the whole net-works of iron roads, and pay off the national debt with the profits.

In like manner, in the course of a few years after the publication of Mr. Wakefield's theories, the whole colonial possessions of Great Britain were surveyed, on maps only, priced, and offered for sale at sums per acre in which intrinsic value formed no element of the calculation.

The one part of the Wakefield theory for which the author deserved credit, was the application of part of the purchase money of land to the introduction of free emigrants in equal numbers of both sexes. Thus, preparation was made for substituting free for convict labour.

The first five years of land sales at 5s. an acre, including the acreage sold by Governors Brisbane and Darling, and paid for in those years, amounted to £176,435, of which the last year amounted to £89,380. During the same period £31,028 only was expended in introducing 3,079 emigrants.

But in 1835 two events occurred which materially affected the colonising fortunes of Australia. A party of stockowners from the Island of Van Diemen's Land, in which the accessible pastures had been nearly all appropriated, crossed Bass's Straits, and established themselves on the shores of Port Phillip Bay, on the River Yarra Yarra; about the same time squatters, pushing on westward over the plains of Maneroo, gradually extended their pastures overland, while whalers settled at Portland Bay in the same district. And before the government of New South Wales, within which this territory was included under ​Governor Phillip's commission, acknowledged the existence of the settlement of Port Phillip, many thousand sheep and cattle were feeding over the finest plains that had yet been discovered in the vicinity of a natural port. These "unauthorised squatters," as they were called in a despatch, poured into the new land with such rapidity that the home government was very unwillingly obliged to sanction the measures for their recognition and settlement which had been taken by Governor Bourke.

At the same time that the Tasmanians were swarming across Bass's Straits, and the pastors of New South Wales were marching overland with their flocks to this and other new lands of promise, in England a commission had been issued, an act of Parliament obtained, and a charter granted for colonising South Australia (the unexplored tract of land, traversed by a river which the adventurous Sturt had descended and ascended in 1829, and named South Australia), on the "sufficient price" principle propounded by Gibbon Wakefield in his "Letter from Sydney."

The history of the origin, rise, progress, fall, and revival of South Australia, will be found duly chronicled in the chapter devoted to that province. We refer to it here in order to show how the speculations of the South Australian colonisers affected the progress of New South Wales and Port Phillip.

Their scheme was floated on the success of New South Wales and the failure of Swan River.

Give us, they said to the legislature and the stock-jobbing public, the territory we mark on the map; the right of imposing a "sufficient price" on the land, and of applying it to the importation of labour; and we will render labour cheap by the exclusion of labourers from the possession of land, concentrate society, introduce agriculture as scientific as that of Great Britain, in addition to the productions of Spain and Italy, reap all the profits that have been reaped in New South Wales and Van Diemen's Land, without the taint of convict labour, or "the dispersion of the semi-barbarous squatter;" and we will produce a state of society so prosperous and so charming, that the neighbouring cheap-priced convict colonies shall hasten to follow our example.

As they desired so it was granted to them; and under "South Australia" we shall tell how bands of youths and maidens, and old men who had not gained wisdom with their grey hairs, went singing in triumph to sit down in a sandy plain and spend two years in gambling for town lots and village lots, with their own and with borrowed paper ​money; and how they sank into a slough of despondency, and were only saved by resorting to the people and pursuits they had been taught to despise.

But the South Australian interest—an interest much more successful in its parliamentary tactics than in its colonising operations—in the course of a few years succeeded in raising the price of land successively from 5s. to a minimum of 12s. and 20s.; in inoculating the Colonial Office with their own notions as to the value of wild land and the injurious effects of dispersion; and in suddenly, without due preparation, abolishing the assignment system, which supplied the greater part of the pastoral and agricultural labour in the colony.

So early as 1834 the Earl of Aberdeen, then Secretary of State for the Colonies, appears, from a despatch addressed to Governor Bourke on the subject of the vast extensions of the pastoral interest in every accessible direction, but especially toward the unexplored Port Phillip district, to have embraced Mr. Wakefield's doctrine as to the banefulness of dispersion. Both the theorist and the statesman were applying the rules of an agricultural to a pastoral state of society. They were looking to the condition of the Lothians, when they should have been studying the history of the Patriarchs. And although the squatting system was then in its infancy and not one-third of the territory was then explored that has since been occupied, Lord Aberdeen expressed a strong opinion "that it was not desirable to allow the population to become more scattered than it then was."

In 1836 a committee of the House of Commons, appointed under the influence of Mr. Wakefield's parliamentary disciples, made a report in favour of that gentleman's principles of colonisation, after hearing evidence which consisted almost entirely of witnesses interested in the South Australian speculation, and which did not include a single colonist from New South Wales. After this report, Lord Glenelg, then Colonial Secretary, authorised the Governor of New South Wales to raise the price of land to 12s. if he thought fit.

The replies of Sir Richard Bourke on the two questions of "dispersion" and price of land, place him in the first rank of colonising statesmen; they display a degree of foresight which we can now duly appreciate:—

"Admitting," he said in answer to Lord Aberdeen, "as every reasonable person must, that a certain degree of concentration is necessary for the advancement of wealth and civilisation, and that it enables government to become at once more efficient and more economical, I cannot avoid perceiving the peculiarities which in this colony render it impolitic, and even impossible, to restrain ​dispersion within limits that would be expedient elsewhere. The wool of New South Wales forms at present its chief wealth. The proprietors of thousands of acres find it necessary, equally with the poorer settlers to send large flocks beyond the boundaries of location, to preserve them in health throughout the year. The colonists must otherwise restrain the increase, or endeavour to raise artificial food for their stock. Whilst nature presents all around an unlimited supply of wholesome pasture, either course would seem a perverse rejection of the bounty of Providence. Independently of these powerful reasons for allowing dispersion it is not to be disguised that government is unable to prevent it. * * * The question I beg leave to submit is simply this: How may government turn to the best advantage a state of things which it cannot wholly interdict? It may be found practicable, by means of the sale of land in situations peculiarly advantageous, however distant from other locations, by establishing townships and ports, and facilitating the intercourse between remote and more settled districts of this vast territory, to provide centres of civilisation and government, and thus gradually extend the power of social order to the most distant parts of the wilderness."

In answer to the suggestion for raising the price of land, made at the instance of Colonel Torrens, chairman of the South Australian speculation, who found "semi-barbarous" Port Phillip a serious rival to his model colony:—

"Whatever minimum is fixed, there will be found instances in which land acquired at that price without opposition will prove a cheap bargain; but such is not often the case. Land even of very inferior quality, happening to possess a peculiar value to the individual purchasing in consequence of its proximity to his other property, finds a sale solely on that account, cannot be considered as cheaply obtained, even at the minimum price. The cases in which land is sold without opposition, from ignorance of its marketable value on the part of the public, or from the secret agreement or friendly forbearance of those otherwise interested in bidding against each other, must diminish yet more and more as the colony advances in wealth and population; nor are such accidents, even if they were more numerous, deserving of much consideration. It is upon general tendencies and results that all questions of public policy are to be decided.

"The lands now in the market form a surplus, in many cases a refuse, consisting of lands which in past years were not saleable at any price, and were not sought after even as free grants.

"By deciding to dispose of them at 5s. an acre, it by no means ​follows that they will be sold at a higher rate. The result may be to retain them for an indefinite time unsold, a result more certain in consequence of the alternative at the settler's command of wandering over the vast tracts of the interior. A facility for acquiring land at a low price is the safest check to this practice. The wealthiest colonists are continually balancing between the opposite motives presented by the cheapness of (then) unauthorised occupation on the one hand, and the desire of adding to their permanent property on the other. The influence of the latter motive must be weakened in proportion to the augmentation of the upset price.

"It is possible that the augmentation of the minimum price would have the injurious effect of checking the immigration of persons possessed of small capital, desirous of establishing themselves upon land of their own"

"We shall hereafter show that all Sir Richard Bourke's predictions were realised. To this hour, in the midst of settled districts, large tracts of land remain the haunt of wild dogs and vermin, which are no more likely to be worth 1 an acre in twenty years to come than they were twenty years ago, unless they turn out to be gold fields.

Parallel with the new arrangement, which enabled every man with money to buy a farm, and filled the colonial treasury to overflowing, the pastoral system, which, at the least possible expenditure for labour, raised a vast exportable produce in wool, was extending itself both east and west, daily discovering new pastures, and driving the emu, the kangaroo, and the aborigine before armies of soft-fleeced merinoes.

In the early days of the colony, landowners grazed near their grants without paying anything for what in fact was valueless except to them. As the population of Sydney increased a charge of 2s. 6d. per 100 acres was imposed on wild lands, conveniently situated for pasture.

No instance occurred of refusing- this privilege at this rent on unoccupied land until the time of Governor Darling, who refused to permit the editor of a paper which had ridiculed his government to rent additional land for his increasing herds.

Beyond the boundaries of settlement—colonially "the bush"—no rent was charged, and until Governor Bourke took the matter in hand, club-law prevailed. It was not unusual for a great squatter to drive a small one out of a district of peculiar richness in grass or water by what was called "eating him out;" that is to say, sending such a flock as would, in four-and-twenty hours, devour every blade within many miles of the small settler's hut, until Sir Richard Bourke, to a certain extent, ​extended the operation of the law beyond the boundary. He seems to have been the only governor, with the exception of Macquarie, thoroughly impressed with' the necessity of encouraging and protecting against the prejudices of the great settlers a class of agricultural yeomanry. It was the policy of Sir George Gipps, acting under his instructions, to throw every impediment in the way of freehold farms for those who, not rich enough to become great flockowners, were not willing to become mere shepherds. Governor Bourke saw through the selfishness of the colonial monopolists, in the shape of great flockholders, who, forgetting their own or their fathers' original insignificance, grudged every acre and every head of stock that fell to the share of hardworking men; he was not led away by a cry against the frugal peasantry, who fed small flocks or a few cattle on wild land. He observes, in a despatch of 18th December, 1835:—

"Another cause to which Judge Burton attributes the prevalence of crime in this colony, is the occupation of waste lands by improper persons. The persons to whom Mr. Burton alludes, familiarly called 'squatters,'^[22] are the objects of great animosity on the part of the wealthier settlers. It must be confessed they are only following in the steps of all the most influential and unexceptionable colonists, whose sheep and cattle stations are everywhere to be found side by side with the obnoxious squatter, and held by no better title. * * * I trust I shall be able to devise some measure that may moderate the evil complained of, without putting a weapon into the hands of selfishness and oppression. * * *." And again, in September, 1836:—

"There is a natural disposition on the part of the wealthy stockholders to exaggerate the offences of the poorer classes of intruders upon crown lands, and an equal unwillingness to suit themselves to such restraints as are essential to the due and impartial regulation of this species of occupancy. Of the former disposition I have had ample proof in the result of an inquiry lately instituted as to the number of ticket-of-leave holders in unauthorised occupation of crown land. The dishonest practices of this class of persons in such occupation had been represented as one of the principal evils which required a remedy. I have, however, discovered from the returns of the magistrates, which I called for, that not more than twenty to thirty ticket-of-leave holders occupy crown lands throughout the whole colony, and of these a great proportion are reported to be particularly honest and industrious."

Out of this despatch grew the pastoral or crown land rents, which ​produced, the year before the gold discovery, upwards of forty thousand a year, and which—although less equitably worked than Sir Richard Bourke intended, or would have permitted had he remained long enough to adapt the details to the circumstances of the colony—had, doubtless, a great effect in stimulating the growth of the pastoral resources of Australia.

Sir Richard Bourke divided the wild land or bush, beyond the boundaries of the settled districts, into "squatting districts," each under the charge of a "Commissioner of Crown Lands." An annual licensing fee was charged to each squatter for his occupation, and a poll-tax on his stock. Advantages of pre-emption were, by custom, conceded to the discoverers of new pastures. In arranging this system, it seems Sir Richard Bourke did not expect to obtain a greater revenue than would defray the expenses of the machinery which superseded club law by magistrates and police. Thus it will be observed that under Governor Bourke, the means of obtaining either the absolute possession of land in fee-simple, or the use for pastoral purposes, were systematised and simplified. It ceased to be a matter of favour, of complicated form, or of bribery to subordinates; and what was still more important, and directly reverse to the policy of his successor, the administration was conducted on the principle that the possession of land could not be made too easy to those who were disposed to occupy or cultivate it.

Sir Richard believed that he was best serving the interest of his sovereign by promoting the prosperity of colonists of all classes, by permitting them to follow their pursuits in their own way, so long as they did not injure each other. He did not think a few acres, more or less, were of the least consequence to the crown; he thought capital would be better employed in the hands of the colonists than in the treasury of the colony; therefore he never attempted like his successor to extract the uttermost farthing by haggling at land sales, or dreamed of treating worthless, limitless forests as if they were plantations of English oaks, or of laying claim to such waifs as "Australian guano." In fact he believed that he was serving the crown by administering the colony for the benefit of the colonists; he did not pretend, like Cyrus, to force upon them a garment they did not like, or to teach them how to transact their own business.

But while these reforms were being so wisely carried out, and cultivation among small proprietors and sheep-feeding among the rich was daily adding wealth and stability to the colony, the Home Government, worked upon by the parliamentary evidence, the literary agitation, and ​the so far successful speculations of the South Australian interest, became inoculated with most extravagant ideas of the value of wild lands, and of the necessity of asserting, with the utmost rigour, the rights of the crown to everything worth or supposed to be worth a shilling. There were many excuses for an infatuation which has since cost colonists dear in Australia, New Zealand, and Natal, and induced this country to make expensive wars on the Maories and Boers, besides keeping up expensive colonising establishments at such wretched outposts as the Falkland Islands.^[23]

In the new colonies of South Australia and Port Phillip, enormous prices were given by infatuated speculators for town and country lots, and for a time enormous profits, or apparent profits, were realised. A land mania very soon infected New South Wales. This mania was supported by an influx of emigrants from England, with capital and without experience. Into the details of this mania we shall enter more precisely in a future chapter. It is enough for our present information to observe that after a time all ranks and ages were carried away by the infatuation. Everything rose in price; the colonial treasury was overflowing with the produce of land sales. These funds the governor placed with the banks. The banks, over supplied with capital, extended their accommodation, and credit became almost unlimited. Imports rose enormously. To those who did not look below the surface, there were all the outward and visible signs of prosperity produced by the change from grants to sales. In 1837, the last year of Sir Richard Bourke's government, the land sales produced upwards of £120,000.

It was about this time that we see a sign of the fatal idea of the intrinsic value of wild land which had begun to make way in the Colonial Office, in the refusal of the Secretary of State for the Colonies to permit a meritorious pilot, who had rendered essential services, to be rewarded according to colonial custom by a grant of fifty acres. The secretary, Lord Stanley, saw no reason for so bestowing her Majesty's land, the said land being worth nothing to the state, although much to the pilot. From that time forward rigid adherence to a theory substituted ingratitude, or money payments, for the previous convenient payment of fifty-acre grants.

DURING the six years, between 1831 and 1837, that Sir Richard Bourke had the government of New South Wales, convicts were introduced at the rate of about three thousand a year, while the number of free emigrants for that period, including those introduced at the expense of the land fund, did not exceed fifteen thousand. The proportion of the sexes throughout the colony was about thirty women to every hundred men.

During the government of Brisbane and Darling, able-bodied convicts had ceased to be an expense to the government; they were eagerly sought as mechanics, labourers, and shepherds, and their distribution became an important part of government patronage. A man on good terms with the powers in office might not only farm, build a house, furnish it, manufacture carts and agricultural implements, and carry on any mechanical trade with workmen to whom he had not to pay any wages except such presents as it pleased him to make to stimulate their vigilance. The proprietor of a newspaper, who had criticised some act of Sir Ralph Darling's government, was punished by the recal to government service of the prisoner compositors he employed.

One of the early acts of Sir Richard Bourke was to arrange a set of rules, on which, without favour, and according to priority of application and extent of occupation, employers were to be entitled to the use of prisoner servants.

In 1831, Sir Richard Bourke introduced and passed an act, by which the number of lashes to be inflicted on summary conviction by a single magistrate were limited to fifty* The moral condition of the employing classes in the colony at that period may be imagined from the fact, that for this measure, of justice and mercy, the governor was assailed with a loud cry of pro-flogging indignation, and from that time forward was subjected to a factious opposition and a series of annoyances from the Plutocracy of the colony, which eventually led to his resignation. Foremost among his assailants was a Scotchman, of the name of Mudie, who had had the misfortune to take up his abode in New South Wales a few years too late, instead of proceeding to Louisiana or Cuba, where his little peculiarities might have had full scope, without impertinent interference from governors or newspapers. ​Facts which came out in the course of the trial of six servants of this Mudie, who were all hanged for an attempt to shoot his overseer, induced Sir Richard Bourke to strike him out of the commission of the peace. Thereupon this white slave-driver became a grievance-monger, and wrote a book, in which, with perfect unconsciousness, he painted his own picture in such colours as to more than justify his erasure from the roll of magistrates. The curious and instructive part of the business was, that Mudie actually succeeded in obtaining a long string of testimonials in favour of his virtue and humanity from parties, some of whom were highly respectable.

Yet the following extract unconsciously conveys the severest satire on the man and the state of society:—

​The American slave-owners are very indignant at the picture of Legree, painted by their own countrywoman. If they will only take the trouble to search the convict annals of New South Wales, Simon Legree will appear mild beside some convict masters.

In 1836-7 a committee of the House of Commons sat on the subject of transportation, at the instigation of Mr. Gibbon Wakefield. The object of the promoters was to put a stop to the source which supplied New South Wales with cheap slave-labour, in competition with the hired labour of the South Australian speculation.

Thus, although the subject well deserved investigation, the promoters were dishonest, the evidence was cooked, the conclusions were foregone, and the results, although eventually most advantageous to Australia, retarded criminal reform, and created vices worse than those which it was intended to eradicate. Van Diemen's Land was sacrificed, and turned into one vast overflowing- cesspool of crime.

The government was not to be blamed for the series of mistakes committed on the subject of transportation. After fifty years' indifference they were forced by active public opinion to do something; they were pressed upon by a number of excellent men, like Archbishop Whateley and Mr. C. Buller, who had been overpowered by a " case" got up in a manner then new to the House of Commons, but now perfectly understood. A change that should have been gradual, and accompanied by the foundation of a new colony, was made abruptly, at an enormous pecuniary loss and moral gain to New South Wales, but to the ruin, social and financial, of Van Diemen's Land, on which alone was poured the felonry previously distributed over New South Wales.

Governor Bourke was directed to discontinue assignment by a despatch from Lord Glenelg, dated 26th May, 1837, which took effect in 1810. In answer to that despatch, Sir Richard Bourke observes, with his usual good sense, "If the abolition of the assignment system be resolved on, it should without doubt be gradual, as the sudden interruption of the accustomed supply of labour would produce much distress." The system was suddenly discontinued under Sir George Gipps, and succeeded by the horrible gang system.

BOURKE'S CHURCH AND SCHOOL ACT. The "Church and School Incorporation," under which one -seventh of the crown lands was devoted to the support of episcopalian churches and schools, had not worked well, and in 1833 it was dissolved by an ​order of the king in council. The expenses of management had been large, the receipts small, and the results, in the extension of religion and education, insignificant.

In the same year Sir Richard Bourke addressed a despatch, dated 30th September, in which he propounded principles of religious equality which had a very important influence on the: religious and educational institutions of the colony, and displayed principles much in advance of the traditions of the colonial government.

After stating that the followers of the Church of England were most numerous; that one fifth of the population was Roman Catholic; that the members of the Church of Scotland were less numerous, but among the most respectable, consisting almost entirely of free emigrants; that the annual charge for the Church of England amounted to £11,542 10s.; for the Church of Scotland to £600; and for Roman Catholic chaplains and chapels to £1,500; while Protestant dissenters of several denominations, who had formed congregations, "received no support from government beyond some small grants of land for sites of chapels;" that the Church of England possessed seven churches of stone or brick in or within forty miles of Sydney, two in more remote districts, and several less permanent buildings in various places; the Church of Scotland one respectable building in Sydney, and three temporary buildings in country districts, the one church having been built by subscription, aided by a loan from government of £520; the Roman Catholics one handsome church, towards which the government had, at various times, granted sums amounting to £1,200; that the chaplains of the Church of England were provided with glebes of forty acres each, and with houses or lodging-money; that the magnitude of the sums annually granted to the Church of England in New South Wales were a subject of general complaint, and had been the origin of a public meeting and petition numerously signed, praying for a reduction; Governor Bourke proceeded to observe, that "in a new country to which persons of all religious persuasions are invited to resort, it will be impossible to establish a dominant and endowed church without much hostility, and great improbability of its becoming permanent; if, on the contrary, support were given, as required, to every one of the three grand divisions of Christians indifferently, and the management of the temporalities of their churches left to themselves, the public treasury might in time be relieved of a considerable charge, and, what is of more importance, the people would become more attached to their respective churches, and be more willing to listen to the voice of their respective pastors."

​He then proceeded to sketch out the plan afterwards carried out by the act which will presently be quoted, and recommended that New South Wales should be created into a separate diocese, instead of being included in that of Bengal.

From the same despatch it appears that the schools which had been established under the Church and School Corporation consisted of a male orphan school, in which 133 boys were boarded and taught at an annual expense of £1,300, and a female orphan school, in which 174 girls cost £1,500 annually, exclusive of supplies from lands cultivated for the use of the schools.

At Paramatta there was a boarding-school for the wealthier classes, who paid £28 each for boarders, and £10 for day-scholars—the head master, a clergyman, receiving £100 a year and the rent of a house.

There were thirty-five primary schools in various parts of the colony in which 1,248 children were taught, at an expense of £2,756. In all these schools the Catechism of the Church of England was part of the instruction.

The Church of Scotland had received a loan of £3,500 toward the erection of the Scotch college founded by Dr. Lang; and 800 had been granted to the Roman Catholic schools.

The governor stated that the disproportionate assistance for education was a subject of very general complaint; and expressed an opinion "that schools on the Irish system, in which Christians of all creeds are received, where approved extracts from Scripture are read, but no religious instuction is given by the master or mistress, such being imparted one day in the week by ministers of different religions attending at the school to instruct their respective flocks, would be most suitable to the condition of the colony. It would be necessary that the government took the lead in their institution, erecting school-houses, appointing well-qualified teachers at liberal salaries." In like manner infant schools should be established in the towns. And he adds: "I may without fear of contradiction assert, that in no part of the world is the general education of the people a more sacred or necessary duty of the government than in New South Wales." The home Colonial Office have never taken any pains to perform this duty.

In 1836 the Legislative Council passed an act, under which, whenever 300 had been raised by private contributions toward the building of a church or chapel, the governor, with the advice of his Executive Council, might issue from the colonial treasury, in aid of the subscribers, any sum not exceeding £1,000.

And for minister of church or chapel with 100 adult attendants, ​£100 per annum. If 200 adults, £150 per annum. If 500 adults, £200 per annum. Under special circumstances the governor and council could grant a salary of 100 per annum where the congregation amounted to less than 100. Where there was no place of worship, £100 might be granted from the colonial treasury if £50 a year were raised by private contributions. Under this act £3,000 a year was divided between the Church of England, the Church of Scotland, and the Church of Rome, and recently the Wesleyan Methodists shared part of the grant.

In his attempt to introduce an improved system of education Sir Richard Bourke was defeated by religious jealousies, but the despatches and Act quoted will remain monuments of his patriotism and statesmanship.

In December, 1837, Sir Richard Bourke retired—deeply regretted by all the colony, except a small section of prison-flogging magistrates and officials of the true colonial school. New South Wales had attained the highest state of prosperity; Port Jackson was crowded with shipping bringing free labourers and capitalists, the banks overflowing with money, and the whole population full of the happiest excitement. The discussions of the Council, although still secret and irresponsible, had assumed a real character, and prepared the way for representative institutions. Restrictions placed upon the summary conviction of prisoners by magistrates, and preparations for the abolition of the assignment system, concurrently with the introduction of free emigrants by funds derived from the sale of lands, had laid the foundation of a free colony. The colonisation of Port Phillip and South Australia by emigrants of a superior class had done much towards directing the attention of this country to an island which had previously been only considered a receptacle for criminals, while the discovery of vast tracts of fine land in the interior, with an overland communication between the three districts, and the establishment of the squatting system on a legal basis, greatly stimulated the increase of live stock, the growth of wool, and the general value of colonial exports. The Australians began to think they could walk alone without the aid of convict-labour, and the money of the commissariat.

SIR RICHARD BOURKE was succeeded by Sir George Gipps, who was sworn in on the 2nd February, 1838; the government, during an interregnum of ten weeks, having been administered by the Lieutenant-governor, Colonel Snodgrass.

Sir George Gipps, who was a captain in the Royal Engineer Corps, owed his appointment entirely to the talent he had displayed while acting as secretary to the commission issued for inquiring into the grievances of rebellious Canada. During his residence in that colony he had devised and published a plan for educating colonists to the use of representative institutions by "district councils" for the administration of local affairs. It was an ingenious theory, but, as we shall hereafter show, no more suited for the state of society in pastoral Australia than an American river steamboat for crossing the Atlantic. Nevertheless, the forcing this district council scheme on the unwilling colonists was the one great idea of Sir George Gipps's colonial career, to which he sacrificed them and himself.

He was a man of abilities far above the average; an eloquent speaker, a nervous writer; with industry, energy, and a special aptitude for the details of administrative business; but haughty and narrow-minded; impenetrable to reasoning which did not square with his preconceived views; filled with inordinate ideas of his own importance as "the representative of majesty;" with a violent, temper, which in dealing with the colonists he took little pains to control, although his communications with the Colonial Office displayed a pliability almost amounting to subservience. He claimed to receive the deference due to a viceroy, and at the same time to exercise the duties of an English prime minister. With sharp and ready tongue he introduced and pressed legislative measures for carrying into effect theories most distasteful and unsuitable to his colonial "subjects;" but opposition, or even that fair criticism and discussion which a British premier would expect and even invite, he treated as personal insult to his authority; almost as high treason.

​The period of his accession to power was in every respect most inopportune. Backed by a Secretary of State as fiery and obstinate as himself, with the sanction of a House of Commons utterly ignorant of the condition of Australia, Sir George Gipps came determined to govern on high prerogative principles, at a time when the colony had advanced from the Algerine rule of Phillip and Darling, to enjoy the externals of a free state. A Legislative Council no longer secret, although not elective, had superseded the irresponsible decrees of the governor. Courts regularly constituted, with juries in political cases, had taken the place of courts martial. The press was free; the liberty of assembling to discuss political questions had been sanctioned and exercised. A rapid, enormous immigration from the mother country swelled the ranks of the thousands who, however descended, were born free; and, under the guidance of the burning eloquence of a native-born Australian, claimed to exercise those rights of representation and self-taxation which they had forfeited by becoming colonists.

The history of this long contest would fill a volume; but the time has not yet come for writing at full length the details of the struggles in which the liberties of Australia were born* That must await the growth of a colonial public. It is, however, not venturing too much to assert that if ever—which Heaven forbid!—Australia should rise up and violently sever her connection with the British crown, the origin of so dire a calamity may be distinctly traced back to the period when, with the high approval of the home authorities, and of politicians of all colours, Sir George Gipps coerced and insulted the colonists of Australia, forcing, with threats and blows, legislative shoes, modelled in Downing-street, upon their unwilling feet. Yet Sir George Gipps was not without noble as well as brilliant qualities. His hands were clean. He took no share in the jobs of the servile crew whom he used and despised. But he was intoxicated by the greatness thrust upon him. At one stride he passed from a subordinate military rank to the government of a great province of wealthy and discontented men; having in his hands authority which could make or mar a whole class or a whole district. In a different sphere, and subdued by the even competition of English parliamentary life, he might have done himself honour and the state service.

In the temper of the governor and the governed, questions of difference were not long in arising.

Under Sir Richard Bourke the Legislative Council, although composed of salaried officials and an equal number of the colonists nominated by the governor, had nurtured enough of the spirit of independence to ​occasionally dissent from the views of the home government or its representative. But Governor Bourke took a colonial view of colonial subjects; he did not hesitate to dissent from the views of a Secretary of State; he treated the opinions of his council with deliberate consideration and respect, even where he came to a contrary conclusion. Sir George Gipps adopted an opposite course. Nothing could equal the contempt with which he treated colonial opinions, except the zeal with which he echoed and carried out the instructions issued by the Secretary of State.

The following were among the more prominent political questions which formed the subject of contention and agitation on the part of the colonists against the governor:—

1st. The appropriation of the revenue of the colony.

2nd. The extent to which the colonists were taxed for gaols, police, &c., rendered necessary by the transportation system.

3rd. The manner in which the home government exercised the patronage of the crown, passing over colonial claims, and appointing unfit persons, at high salaries paid by the colonists.

4th. The price of land, and the arbitrary manner in which it was raised, lowered, and raised again, at the will of the governor.

These four grievances were discussed in one or more distinct cases. On each the governor took up the position of "high prerogative" in the most offensive manner, and found his policy approved by the home government.

It is very odd that, whether Whigs or Tories hold office, the most obnoxious regulations issued, the most discreditable rights of patronage exercised, have been defended under the plea of asserting "the sacred rights of the crown" in the colonies. Thus ignorant bushmen were taught, when a few acres of waste land were not granted, as the Legislative Council prayed, to the worthy captain who had saved a shipwrecked crew; or when a worn-out attorney was sent out to fill a useless office at an extravagant salary, that the ungracious refusal and disgraceful job were both the effect of the "Queen's Prerogative."

Such are the modes in which Downing-street, before the days of unrestricted political competition, used to drag the sacred name of the sovereign through the dirt.

No sooner had Sir George Gipps commenced his government than he became involved in discussions involving very important principles, which were carried on with such feeble means of attack as the colonists possessed, until, in 1842, an act of the Imperial Parliament bestowed ​upon New South Wales a Legislative Council, which consisted of twenty-four elective members, and twelve who held their seats either in an official capacity or on the recommendation of the governor. The opening of the Colonial Parliament took place on August 3rd, 1843, and in his "speech from the throne," Sir George Gipps described the Council as "composed of three elements or three different classes of persons the representatives of the people the official servants of her Majesty, and of gentlemen of independence the unofficial nominees of the crown."

The nominees were soon taught that so far from being independent, they were expected to follow the lead of the governor without discussion or hesitation.

The questions which had already occupied the attention of the colonial press and the nominee council, afforded ample employment for the elective chamber; among the first and most important of these was

The revenue dispute commenced in 1832, when Lord Goderich, then Secretary of State for the Colonies, directed Sir Richard Bourke to submit annually to the Legislative Council an estimate of the expenditure proposed to be charged on the colonial revenues. This estimate, if passed by the Council, was to be embodied in an ordinance, and forwarded to the home government for his Majesty's approval. If rejected, the majority were to be requested to furnish their estimate, and the two were to be forwarded for "his Majesty's approval." With this illusory control, the non-official but nominee members and the colonists were obliged to be content. It was not of much use to object to an estimate that had to travel round the world; and although the non-official councillors sometimes protested against any particularly scandalous job, their protests were received, and laid up with other dusty papers.

At the period to which we are alluding, the administrative powers of the governor had been so clipped, without addition to the legislative powers of the colonies, that he could scarcely erect a pair of stocks without first reporting to Downing-street, with plan and estimate. No wonder that almost all the non-official party in the colony were republicans.

In 1835 the expense of maintaining the police establishment and gaols was made a colonial charge. Every non-official and two official members of the council protested against this heavy burden, on the ground that these expenses were largely increased by the presence of ​all the transported felonry of Great Britain, either as prisoners or freedmen. To this it was answered, that the colony had had the benefit of their work. However, as a per contra, the surplus of the fund derived from the sale or lease of crown land was allowed to be taken to assist the colonial revenues, after defraying the expenses of emigration. The terms of this arrangement or contract, as the colonists assert, are to be found in despatches with enclosures from Mr. Spring Rice, and from Lord Glenelg, dated respectively 15th November, 1834, and 10th July, 1835. It is not now worth while to quote or discuss them. The truth seems to be, that, while the returns from the land revenue were trifling, the officers of the crown did not care to have the spending of them, having admitted that it was "just and reasonable that the revenues should be applied wholly and exclusively for the benefit of the colony." But, when the land revenues rose to hundreds of thousands of pounds annually, the question assumed a different aspect in the eyes of a young but accomplished bureaucrat like Sir George Gipps.

Sir Richard Bourke, after receiving the despatches in question, believed that the Legislative Council had the complete control of the land revenue. He seems to have been always anxious to extend the legislative powers of the colonies.

Sir George Gipps commenced what may be called, to use a slang term of modern politics, his reactionary course of policy, by repudiating the assumed contract in the extract from a despatch, dated November, 1838, which alone affords a complete key to the favour in which he was held at the Colonial Office, and the detestation in which he was held in the colony:—

"It is asserted in the colony that the right to appropriate this revenue was conceded to the governor and council by a despatch, &c., and that this right was recognised by Sir Richard Bourke … Notwithstanding the strength of these expressions, I must say that I very much doubt whether, by the Treasury letter of the 24th September, 1834, it was intended to give up unreservedly, and for ever, the right to select the objects on which the crown revenue (viz., from colonial land) should be expended; and I therefore, whenever occasion required, maintained, during the last session of the council, that the crown has still power to do so—feeling that, if wrong in this opinion, I could easily set myself right with the council; but, if I committed an error the other way, I might involve myself in difficulties from which there would be no escape." And he proceeds with great ingenuity to "get up a case" to enable the Colonial Office at home to shear the colonists of the trifling powers recently conceded to them.

​This was a very pretty quarrel to begin with, and the governor lost no opportunity of improving it.

Whether the contract existed or not, it is quite clear that the powers claimed and exercised by the governor and the colonial secretary, in the much-abused name of the sovereign, amounted to revolting despotism under a caricature of free discussion. The colonists were expected to defray the cost of their own government, with all the addition of police and gaol expenses incident to a periodical inoculation of British-grown felonry, while, with the sham of a Legislative Council and financial discussions, all sources of revenue, except additional taxation, were removed from their control. As to the crown or waste lands—the price, the management—the expenditure of the funds arising from them in emigration—were settled by English commissioners; the surplus was appropriated by the crown. The custom-house tariff and the rules for levying it were settled, and the officers appointed, by the English custom-house. As to the funds raised by local taxation, the Colonial Secretary, in the name of the crown, created offices, fixed fines, salaries, and appointed officers, without the slightest .regard, to the wants or wishes of the colonists.

The grievance with respect to the appropriation of the land revenues became more unbearable inconsequence of the orders and acts of the home government in respect to the land question, which were in direct opposition to the feelings and interests of the colonists.

It was with the representative members of the Legislative Council, while the colony was in a state of insolvency, that Governor Gipps's battles commenced, and were carried on with an acerbity on both sides which did not breed a rebellion, because the materials in the shape of coercive powers had not been conceded to the governor. The new council lost no time in investigating the grievances of the colony, and soon collected a most formidable list, although the most oppressed class of all, the small settlers, were entirely unrepresented.

The revenues, the price of crown lands, the assessments on the pastoral proprietors, the abuses in the exercise of crown patronage, successively attracted the attention of the opposition, vigorously led by William Wentworth, a gentleman of brilliant talents and great oratorical powers, whose influence was to a certain extent unfortunately impaired by a violent temper and want of tact, the result of a provincial education among men vastly his inferiors in intellect, and long exclusion from a legitimate exercise of his powers.

Without the evidence printed by these Legislative Councils of ​New South Wales, it would be impossible to credit that a government at home, professed to be formed on "reform" and "retrenchment," could have perpetrated and maintained powers so oppressive and jobs so corrupt. But jobbery and despotism seem incident to all corporate bodies which have the control of sea-divided territories. It was impossible to imagine anything worse than the administration of the Colonial Office, until the New Zealand Company, composed of colonial reformers, showed in. perfection what a colonising Robert Macaire could do with a large capital, a directorate of credulous capitalists, and an array of still more credulous colonists.

The following cases, gathered from the reports of the committees of the Legislative Council appointed to inquire into certain gross cases of embezzlement and mismanagement, afford examples of the "patronage grievance," of the sort of persons selected for colonial office, the nature of the powers they assumed On the strength of holding a home instead of a colonial appointment, and the manner in which they performed their duties.

In 1841 the Registrar of the Supreme Court became a defaulter; in the following year he took the benefit of the Insolvent Act, and eventually paid a dividend of sixpence in the pound. The committee which investigated his case, with the view of obtaining redress from the home government for the sufferers by the malversation of their appointed, reported, that the first registrar, Colonel Mills, was a decayed gentleman, with no knowledge of business, and who, therefore, left what there was to be done to other officers. On his death the governor and council recommended that the office, in the then state of the colony not needed, should be abolished; but, before receiving or without attending to this recommendation, the defaulter in question, Mr. M——, was appointed. His antecedents were not more encouraging than those of Colonel Mills. In 1811 he had executed a deed of assignment of all his property for the benefit of his creditors; and in 1823, after returning from an eight years' residence on the Continent, had taken the benefit of the Insolvent Act; in 1828 had been appointed Chief Justice of Nova Scotia, and had been permitted to exchange the appointment for that of Registrar of the Supreme Court of New South Wales, with the duty of collecting the effects of intestates, and, according to his own account, the privilege of investing the money for his own benefit pending its distribution.

On arrival at the colony Mr. M—— took up a high position. That ​part of his duty which related to registering deeds of grants of crown land he entirely neglected and suffered to fall into an arrear, which eventually involved great numbers of the humbler class in litigation and ruin. But the collection of the estates of intestates he entered on as zealously as any wrecker on the spoils of storms. The presence of near relatives was no protection for the moneys of the deceased: in defiance of son, brother, or father, the registrar grasped all the estate, invested it in his own name for his own benefit, and from 1828 to 1838 kept neither day-book, cash-book, nor ledger, but one account at his banker's, rendered no statement for audit to any one, and paid over what balance, if any, to the next of kin of intestates when and how he pleased.

In 1838 the judges made rules of court requiring the registrar to pass his accounts and pay the balance into the savings' bank. The great man remonstrated against these rules in a most indignant tone, "as threatening to take from him a source of legitimate income, on the faith of which he immigrated to the colony," and intimated that, "unless he was permitted to retain and make use of the money himself, he would use no exertions to obtain it."

At this audit he reported himself to be in possession of £1,980 17s 0½d., but the court, after argument, found £3,085 18s. 2d. due, compelled him to pay it into court, and, in spite of violent resistance, in which he was supported by one of the official legal advisers of the governor, had a set of rules of court sanctioned by the governor in council, under which the registrar was bound to account regularly and pay in the proceeds of every intestate estate within a certain fixed time (three months from the period of the intestacy); the injured registrar all the time protesting that "the judges were reflecting on his honour by calling for accounts, and depriving him of the legitimate profits to be derived from the employment of other men's money, which had induced him to settle in the colony." The judges being firm, and supported by the council, the registrar then resorted to fraud, and in the course of two years became possessed of £9,000. When no longer able to conceal his appropriations, he announced his insolvency in a debonnair yet dignified manner—a condescending, much-injured style—which could only come from a colonial official. The sufferers by this embezzlement petitioned for compensation from the home government. The correspondence with the appropriator is extremely rich and racy. Throughout he appears to consider himself deeply injured. The home government rejected the prayers of the petitioners.

The next case is illustrative of the confidence with which colonial secretaries set aside colonial recommendations; the avidity with which they embrace opportunities of patronage; the indifference with which they increase salaries; and the admirable skill with which certain governors imbibe the principles of the chiefs.

The judge, Chief Justice Dowling, finding it needful to recommend that certain offices included in the charter of justice should be filled up, and especially that of prothonotary, at a salary of £800 per annum, for which he recommends one Mr. John Grover, late chief clerk, "who, from his long services, indefatigable industry, and experience, is admirably qualified for the office," Governor Gipps, the late captain of engineers, enters into a correspondence, as was his custom, with the judges, in which he instructs them how to manage the business of their courts, and save £50 a year. The judges demur, and show the governor that he knows nothing about the matter.

The question is referred to the Colonial Secretary, Lord Stanley, who settles the question in King Stork fashion, without a moment's loss of time. He does not appoint the gentleman recommended by the judges. In other respects he follows out their recommendations, but sends out two new officers, one at £1,000 a year, and the other at £850; and creating a third appointment, at £650, to be filled up by the governor; thus at a blow saddling the colony with increased salaries to the extent of £400 a year, on the ground that in England competent persons could not be induced to accept these offices for less. An early act of one of these gentlemen was to set the local legislature at defiance on a matter of salary; the other was a worn-out, ruined attorney.

We have only to imagine, in order to understand colonial feeling on these subjects, the case of the town council of Liverpool applying to the Home Office for a stipendiary magistrate, stating their willingness to pay a salary of £800, and suggesting a particularly well-qualified gentleman to fill it, and their having a total stranger thrust upon them, with orders to pay him £200 more than they had offered. It seems the rule with all officials appointed from England to treat with the greatest contempt the colonists who pay them.

An inquiry into the management of the Colonial Lunatic Asylum brought out facts equally characteristic of the independence and ​irresponsibility of all officials, up to the time that the elected members of the Legislative Council began to exercise their privilege of inquiry. In 1846, a select committee of the Legislative Council investigated the condition of Tarban Creek, the only lunatic asylum in New South Wales. In the course of this inquiry it appeared that the head keeper and his wife, the matron, in consequence of having received their appointment direct from the Secretary of State, habitually resisted all attempts to control, or even investigate the performance of their duties, by the visiting magistrates or colonially-appointed physician. Lunatics are sufficiently neglected and abused even to this hour in England, but it is only in a colony that a sort of turnkey for lunatics would presume to set the dignity of his office against both magistrates and medical men.

The visiting magistrate "had occasion to refer to the governor for definite instructions in consequence of the superintendent considering that he was interfering." He states, "My authority is repudiated by Mr. Digby; he says I have no right to interfere. Although he gives me every information in his power, he does so in courtesy, protesting against my right to interfere."

The committee found "no books or registers such as ought to be kept in a public establishment; no record of cases; no written statement of the appearance of any patient at the time of his admission, or of the progress of the disease, or of the treatment, medical and moral." They report that—

"The medical officer is not in his proper position." According to evidence, "he gets all his information from me [the keeper] as to the particulars of the case and form of insanity." The keeper stated, that in going round with the doctor, if he suggests any alteration in their moral treatment, and it appears to him [the keeper] an improvement, he acts upon it; but if he does not approve of it he does not yield to him. "For instance, he might recommend that restraint should be taken off a patient, but if, from a better knowledge of the party, he might not deem it advisable, he should refuse to do so."

We quote this passage because it so perfectly illustrates the manner in which colonists and colonial interests are treated.

It is quite evident that the merits of this worthy officer of the order of the strait-jacket were not duly acknowledged. He ought to have been a colonial governor or a colonial secretary. Colonists are treated like the Tarban Creek lunatics: they do not know what is good for them neither do their representatives. The governor is the man; he ​is responsible to no one; and although the Legislative Council, like the doctor, may recommend removing restraint, he knows better. We have not space to go into the jail cases, where the governor provided himself with coachman, footman, gardener, and a crew of boatmen, out of the criminals sentenced to imprisonment for colonial offences, and the convicts of Hyde Park Barracks were left under charge of a convict turnkey, who let them out to rob at so much a night, with pistols hired at ten shillings for each case.

With these examples we leave the subject of official responsibility, and return to the two great questions which agitated the colony during the whole administration of Sir George Gipps, and which still continue to excite the interest and apprehension of all who look ahead—"The Land," and "Emigration."

The question of the terms on which the waste lands of the colony were to be sold, and, until sold, occupied by flock-owners and stock-owners, formed the subject of the most bitter contest between Governor Gipps and the colonists. To the colonists the question was one of existence; it involved not only the liberties so dear to every English-speaking race, but the means of existence.

Just before the departure of Sir Richard Bourke, the pastoral proprietors of New South Wales, as well as all the merchants, capitalists, and every one else possessed of money or credit, were seized with a land mania, which can be compared to nothing less than the share and stock-jobbing manias which, from the period of the Mississippi scheme down to the last rage for railway scrip, have, from time to time, carried bankruptcy, ruin, and roguery through the length and breadth of the infatuated nation.

The disease arose in South Australia in the manner which will be found described in the chapter devoted to the foundation of that colony, and it received a great stimulus from the foundation of Port Phillip, where a considerable extent of picturesque, and more than ordinarily fertile land, easy of access from the port, became the object of competition among English colonists with more money than colonial experience. Mr. Gibbon Wakefield's theories seemed to receive, in one important respect, confirmation from the large sums paid into the colonial treasuries by colonists bidding one against another for land at government auctions. These large funds were placed in the colonial banks. The banks, in order to employ the government deposits, gave unusual ​accommodation to their customers, until, moving in a circle of fallacies, the whole colony dreamed of growing rich by selling to each other land which produced nothing.

The series of Secretaries of State for the Colonies, Lords Aberdeen, Glenelg, Normanby, and John Russell, who succeeded each other in rapid succession up to 1842, and Lord Stanley, who held office until 1845, seem all to have taken the promised results of the Wakefield theory for granted—assumed that it was the duty of the government to obtain the highest price for crown lands—that a high price of land would keep down wages, and check dispersion; and to this notion their successor, Lord Grey, adhered, in face of an unbroken line of colonial evidence of the most practical character.

Thus, in August, 1838, Lord Glenelg instructed Sir George Gipps to substitute 12s. for 5s. an acre as the upset price of ordinary land, adding, "If you should observe that the extension of the population should still proceed with a rapidity beyond what is desirable, and that the want of labour still continues to be seriously felt, you will take measures for checking the sale of land even at 12s."

It would be an insult to the powerful understanding of Sir George Gipps to doubt that he was as well aware of the fallacy of this idea as his predecessor, but he came out with the fixed principle of earning the approbation of his official chiefs by zealously and actively carrying out their desires and orders. As he once answered a colonial remonstrant, "I was sent here to carry out the Wakefield system of land sales, and whether it suits the colony or not, it must be done."

Animated by this spirit he adopted two measures which soon transferred the greater part of the ready money of the colonists, new and old, into the colonial treasury. He limited the quantity of land offered for sale so as to raise the competition between new arrivals to the highest pitch, and he successively raised the upset price to the last sum given by the last land-lunatic under the excitement of an auction.

Thus, at a land auction on the 10th June, 1840, at Port Phillip, the price was run up by emulation and competition to such a height, that shipmates of Richard Howitt, with a capital among them of £20,000, only ventured to invest £600. Land was sold at £30 and £40 acre, which, for years afterwards, remained in a state of nature.

In the New South Wales district Sir George Gipps offered and sold land at Illawarra at 12s. and £1 an acre; when raised to £10 an acre it remained unsold; it was then reduced to £1, and, being worthless refuse, still remained unsold. In a second and third district, the upset price was raised to £10 in one instance, and £100 in another, ​and afterwards reduced to £2 an acre. And all this was done repeatedly against the advice of the official surveyors, on the principle that it was the duty of the governor to wring the uttermost farthing from the settler.

The land mania was followed by a crash of universal insolvency. Land became unsaleable; live stock fell to nominal prices; and the importers of British and foreign luxuries had nothing better to offer their creditors than the dishonoured bills of their customers.

It was in 1841, in the commencement of this crisis of insolvency, that the British Parliament, in utter ignorance of colonial affairs, under the influence of a band of stock-jobbing theorists, attempted to prop up the insolvent colony of South Australia by an act which fixed the minimum price of land in Australia at £1 an acre.

In 1843, when the elective Legislative Council commenced its labours, the dissatisfaction of the colonists with the fixed minimum price of £1 an acre had become universal.

The wealthy parties who had expected their free grants, and their purchases at five shillings an acre, to be augmented in value by the increased price, were disappointed—the speculators who, following the example of the South Australians, had purchased large estates in the hope of realising large profits, by laying out paper towns and villages, were either insolvent or encumbered with tracts of useless waste land, unsaleable and unprofitable—the small settlers were deeply discontented with the impediments thrown in the way of purchasing small farms in good agricultural districts—while the great pastoral proprietors, or squatters, who were many of them also landowners in the settled districts, were worried—(no other word will express the policy of Sir George Gipps) by taxes, regulations, and restrictions imposed, repealed, and reimposed in a most arbitrary manner, with a view of compelling the purchase of their occupations at the ruinous price of £1 an acre.

Live stock became absolutely valueless; cattle were allowed to rove wild, unbranded on the hills; and sheep which had cost 30s. a piece were unsaleable at 1s. 6d., until it occurred to an ingenious gentleman to boil them down for tallow, by which the minimum price was raised to 3s. Land sales had ceased; the fund, which had previously imported labouring emigrants to take the place of convicts, was exhausted. The pastoral interest, whose fortunes had already been seriously injured by the depreciation of their stock, determined to resist the governor in his attempt to regulate their taxation, and to virtually confiscate their property on the fiat of himself and his irresponsible representatives, the Crown Commissioners.

​In the same year Lord Stanley's despatch, accompanying the act of Parliament which gave legislative fixity to the land system, arrived in the colony, and damped the expectations of those who had hoped that the failure of the £1 an acre panacea for promoting concentration, regulating wages, and encouraging cultivation, would induce the home government to consult a little more the wishes and interests of actual colonists.

Under these circumstances, the first of six committees of the Legislative Council which have examined and reported on this question—viz., two committees in 1843, one in 1844, one in 1845, and two in 1847—was appointed, held its sittings, examined witnesses, and made its report.

The committee of 1843 on "the crown land sales" examined, amongst others, the surveyor-general, Sir Thomas Mitchell, one of the M'Arthurs, and several landed and pastoral proprietors. They reported that "the act of Parliament under their consideration cannot but be injurious in its operation—that it is calculated to prevent emigration (of small capitalists), to withdraw capital, and to prevent the permanent occupancy of the soil."

In the same year the select committee on immigration also reported by its chairman, Dr. Nicholson (since elected speaker of the Council, and knighted), "that the measure of her Majesty's government for raising the upset price of land from 5s. to 12s., and subsequently to 20s. an acre, had completely annihilated the land fund, which, in six years previous to the change, had produced one million sterling;" and they recommended, in a series of resolutions, one for "rescinding the present land regulations and effecting a return of the old system of sales by auction, at an upset rate not exceeding 5s. an acre for pastoral land."

In 1844 a "select committee on grievances connected with land in the colony" examined twenty-six witnesses, and received answers to a printed circular of questions from one hundred and twenty-two justices of the peace. The attention of the committee was directed, among other subjects, to the minimum price of land, and to the attempts to harass the squatter, not being a purchaser of land, by rendering his tenure of crown lands as uncertain and onerous as possible.

All the witnesses who were asked the question (except Mr. Deas Thompson, the Colonial Secretary, who declined, on the ground of his official character, to give an answer), and all the replies to the circulars, except three, expressed decided opinions against the measure which raised the minimum price of crown land from 5s. to £1; all justly taking it for granted that at £1 an acre the purchase of pastoral lands ​was impossible, claimed fixity of tenure by lease, and right of pre-emption for the squatter. The latter was the grand point with the squatters; that gained, their interest in the land question, except in promoting sales to create an emigration fund, ceased.

The opinions of the three dissentients from the report of the committee exhibit very exactly the feelings of the small class, resident chiefly in Port Phillip and South Australia, who advocate the high price of land.

These three gentlemen are—John Leslie Foster, of Leslie Park, Melbourne—Peter M'Arthur, of Arthurton, Melbourne—John Moore Airey, of Geelong.

Mr. Foster^[24] says, very candidly, "I look on the price of one pound as not too much for agricultural land, and as a prohibition on the purchase of mere pastoral land. Being both a landowner and a settler, I would in both characters regret to see any reduction in the price, as it would not only reduce the value of my (purchased) land, but, by rendering it easier for others to purchase my (rented) runs, would diminish the permanent interest I now hold in them."^[24]

Mr. Moore thought "the country destined, from its physical character, to become an aristocratic one;" that "the class of emigrants really beneficial to the country, English country gentlemen with some property, but with large families and limited means, would not be deterred by £1 an acre; that a class of small but independent farmers will never be generally adapted to the country; that it will eventually fall into the hands of a landed aristocracy, who, possessing the frontages to water convenient to the residence of tenants, will possess capital sufficient to guard them against the vicissitudes of the seasons, as well as means to cultivate the interior to advantage."

Mr. Peter M'Arthur (no relation to "the M'Arthur," of Camden) "arrived in the colony in 1834, specially introduced to the favour and protection of the governor by the Secretary of State." He recommends that "the governor shall have the power to grant twelve thousand eight hundred acres to respectable parties of station and education, and capital, and of habits worthy of being imitated by the humbler class;" one thousand acres to be purchased at £1 an acre, payable by instalments in ten years; the remaining eleven thousand eight hundred to be held on a perpetual quit rent of £12 per annum.

These three gentlemen evidently considered that imperial and colonial interests were bound up in the encouragement of their class, in ​the protection of their interests, and the keeping down of aspiring yeomanry.

The report of the committee on crown land grievances was the foundation of a fierce agitation on the part of the pastoral interests for the suppression of the obnoxious regulations as to the pastoral occupations, and for fixity of tenure. In this agitation, which was also directed against the £1 acre minimum, the whole colony joined. Public meetings were held in every part of New South Wales; petitions and memorials addressed to the home government were signed, sent to England, and placed in the hands of political men of influence; and influential organs of the English press were enlisted in defence of the great pastoral interest.

In the same year the whole Council adopted resolutions condemning the high price of land in the terms suggested by the committee.

In 1845 a fourth select committee reported against the 1 an acre Act, supporting their opinions with a great body of facts and statistics, and concluded by observing, that "the practical evils resulting from the augmentation of the upset price of land had already been fully developed in the Report on Immigration and the Report on Waste Lands in 1843, and in the Land Grievance Report of 1844, and in the opinions of your honourable Council, distinctly pronounced on the same subject, in the resolutions of the whole Council of the 17th September, 1844."

To complete the history of the land question we will add, that in 1847, under the administration of Sir George Gipps's successor, a select committee on immigration, of which Mr. Cowper was chairman, reported "the disastrous results and impolicy of the high upset price;" and also that a select committee, presided over by Mr. Robert Lowe (now so well known in England), made an elaborate report against the high upset price of land, to which we shall have occasion to allude more minutely in describing the compromise effected between the government and the squatters under the government of Sir Charles Fitzroy.

But Governor Gipps stood firm; determined to make war on the squatters, determined to maintain the obnoxious £1 an acre, and to carry out the spirit of the act which imposed it, by throwing, as he was instructed, all possible obstacles in the way of men of small capital investing their savings in land; and he was supported by the British Colonial Office.

For while the governor was courageously attacking the most wealthy and powerful body in the colony, he took no pains to foster that class of yeomanry which were the object of Sir Richard Bourke's peculiar care. He divided the land into large lots; discouraged small holdings, ​whether of land or stock; and treated emigrants as merchandise or live stock consigned for the benefit of the purchasers of land.

It certainly was most unfortunate for the colony that the initiation of a representative government, the substitution of free emigrant for prisoner labour, and the attempt to establish local self-government, should have fallen under the direction of one who, with great talents, was obstinately determined not to learn anything from experience, and not to permit any measure of reform he did not originate. His want of pliability was strikingly displayed in the conduct of emigration.

WHEN grants of land ceased altogether, and were superseded by sales, the character of emigration to Australia, and even the motives which directed it, were materially changed. To Australia, previous to 1831, the same class of persons proceeded in small numbers, who by thousands have resorted, during the last ten years, to Canada, and, above all, to the western states of America—families with capital varying from fifty to five hundred pounds, intent on living on land of their own.

The distance, and the then little known capabilities, of Australia, would, twenty years ago, have made it, under any circumstances, a difficult task to direct towards its shores a similar stream of colonists; but the new system of so raising the price and the quantity of land sold, so as to discourage the purchases of all but the wealthy, and of devoting the proceeds to the importation of able-bodied labourers for their use, altered the whole character of the free colonisation. The new system was not without merits as a temporary expedient for supplying, as rapidly as possible, the demand for shepherd servants, occasioned by the abolition of the assignment system, peopling the shores of the newly-settled districts in Port Phillip and South Australia. But as a permanent measure the moral and social defects were, and are, very serious.

By the emigration land fund system the parent state is relieved of a certain amount of (surplus?) labour without expense, and the colonies are supplied with the same, in proportion to the amount received for the purchase or rent of land. According to the principles of the system, those who are rich enough to purchase or rent land (the ​minimum of rent Toeing 4,000 sheep) have a right to dictate what manner of labour shall be supplied for the money. The sort of labourers who suit the employers of labour are not often those who would contribute most to the intelligence and education of a colony. For a long series of years the Australian flockowners' beau-ideal of an emigrant was an able-bodied single man from an agricultural county — humble, ignorant, and strong.

The South Australian commissioners exhibited one halfpennyworth of sense, amid gallons of nonsense and jobbery, by introducing the system of pairs of both sexes. This was the one good feature in their system.

The Australian squatters, and all persons more or less in communication with, and able to influence, the home government, like our own agricultural and the American manufacturing interest, held two very strong opinions first, that their pursuit was the only calling of any consequence to the State; and, secondly, that it could not be protected too much. They always wanted labour, and it could not be too cheap.

We find them constantly desiring to bring down wages to a level which, if reached, would have very soon put a stop to all emigration, for it would have been lower than in England, and that was not worth crossing the sea to earn. We find them constantly desiring to dictate what class of labourers they would have, and that class specially in reference to sheep. We find them depreciating, not untruthfully perhaps, but untruly, the character of the Australian soil and of the Australian agricultural settlers. To them the Alpha and Omega of the Australian colonies was breed sheep, to grow wool and tallow.

Even when claiming a return to a low price of land, many desired to keep up the size of lots, so as to exclude small farmers from freehold.

The result we now see. For fifteen years the agents of the colony and the emigration commissioners have been recruiting and sending out emigrant recruits. Their most successful operations have been conducted in times of distress in the home labour market. The fund in the early period of the system down to 1839, when all the colonists were madly engaged in nodding at the government continental land sales, was sufficient to pay the passages out of fifty thousand emigrants. For a time the market was apparently glutted, but the increase of stock, and the judicious measures introduced by Caroline Chisholm, soon absorbed them. Soon arose an increased demand for labour. The land fund was dried up; sales at 1 an acre were few and far between, except in the copper-mining colony of South Australia; but by degrees he rents from pastoral occupations of crown lands became so large that security was found for an emigration debt, to which was added, from ​time to time, the produce of town and suburban lots, and, as the population increased, occasionally of choice rural land. But it occurred more than once that when labour was needed in the colony there were no funds, and, when funds were forwarded to England, that the commissioners found a difficulty in collecting suitable emigrants.

Indeed, until the discovery of the gold-fields, very few, except the utterly destitute among the labouring classes, turned their attention to Australia.

Committees on emigration were appointed by the Legislative Council in 1839, when the bounty system was in operation, in 1842, in 1843, and in 1845; and in 1843 and 1844 committees on the "distressed labourers" of Sydney collected important evidence bearing on the same subject. It is worthy of remark that in these, as in committees appointed by the British Parliament, witnesses have seldom been called from among the respectable mechanics and labourers who are most interested in emigration, and best acquainted with the emigrating classes.

The committee of 1839 reported that emigrants were being introduced at the rate of 12,500 souls a year, at a cost of about £17 per adult, expressed a decided preference for bounty over government emigrants, and recommended a loan to be raised on the security of the land fund, and devoted to emigration a bounty at £19 a head for adults only, excluding children, and very humbly prayed that the crown would devote the land fund, which they calculated at not less than £150,000 a year, to emigration purposes. It is curious to remark that the committee object to the introduction of emigrants over forty years of age. The government emigration agent had invited emigrants of fifty years of age. The gold discoveries have recently enlightened the pastoral interests to the value of parents of even sixty years of age.

In 1842 the committee repeat their preference for the bounty system, announcing that in the preceding twelve months 23,000 emigrants had been introduced, and the cessation of emigration, in consequence of the falling off of the land fund, to an extent unexpected by the home government. They gently hint at the propriety of a reduction of the price of land to five shillings an acre. The tone of the document is that of a respectable nominee council.

The committee of 1843 represented the wealthy squatting class, and the majority took an entirely colonial and pastoral view of the labour question. They wanted shepherds as quickly and as cheaply as possible, and nothing else. No seven-shilling a week farmer—no cottage-destroying landlord—no unlimited-time-of-labour ​manufacturer–no woman-employing coal-worker, could have taken a narrower view of the question.

There is unfortunately in all of us a germ of selfishness which, when unchecked by public opinion or political opposition, is apt to grow into injustice and tyranny. In private life the squatters were excellent, generous, hospitable men; but one large proportion consisted of old colonists accustomed to convict servants, who cost nothing beyond their board and lodging, and another of young bachelors of capital, who arrived in the colony to make a fortune, intent on returning to the old country as soon as it was made. The one despised, and the other were indifferent to the opinions of the working classes. Both dreamed of naturalising in Australia the miserable wages of the southern counties of England and the Highland counties of Scotland.

To resist the aggressions of Sir George Gipps on the pastoral interest the squatters had formed themselves into a protective association, and by an easy process the association, founded to resist unjust confiscation and taxation, branched off into a combination for permanently lowering the wages of the colony. At the head of this association was the late Mr. Benjamin Boyd. Mr. Boyd arrived with the express purpose of making investments at the time (1841) that the colony was in a general state of insolvency, or, as he expressed it, "in a jam." A yacht of the Royal Squadron, an apparently unlimited capital, an imposing personal appearance, fluent oratory, aristocratic connexions, and a fair share of commercial acuteness, acquired on the Stock Exchange, at once and deservedly placed him at the head of the squatocracy. His aim was the possession of a million sheep. He was the chief of the hundred thousand sheepmen, with whom he combined to obtain fixity of tenure for their sheep pastures, to put down small settlers, and to reduce wages.

At the period we are describing, from 1841 to 1844, the colonial labour market presented the most curious contradictions. The bounty agents were pouring in a crowd of most unsuitable persons, who, once landed, were soon left to shift for themselves. Among the merchants of the town of Sydney distress prevailed in consequence of the cessation of building and other works, the wages of mechanics were depressed to a rate before unknown, and newly-arrived immigrants were astonished at the low rate of pay for town labour, so different to the flaming representations of the crimps by whom they had been collected. But in the country districts, and especially in the bush, where sheep and cattle were breeding, while their proprietors were going through the insolvent process, wages were maintained; and the anomaly was presented of ​large bodies of men being employed at the expense of government, at high wages, at public works, on a sham labour test, while flocks were wanting shepherds in the interior. Several causes supported this anomaly: 1st, There was no government machinery for distributing newly-arrived emigrants; 2ndly, The preference of the squatters for single men left families on the hands of the government; 3rdly, The Squatters' Club were not sorry to see the government embarrassed by the presence of a large body of unemployed labourers in Sydney; 4thly, The dishonest conduct of certain masters in withholding or unfairly deducting wages promised had given the bush a bad name; 5thly, Many of the emigrants were of a class who, having left parish aid behind, liked to keep close to government rations and wages. All were engaged, as far as their short-sighted views would permit, in killing the golden goose of colonisation.

Mr. Boyd's evidence before the immigration committee of 1843 affords, when read with the notes we can supply, a fair specimen of the haughty, gentlemanly, selfish class he represented. He had then been eighteen months in the colony, and was employing two hundred shepherds and stockmen, besides artificers. He was building a town and port at Twofold Bay; had two steam-boats, and a schooner yacht, the Wanderer. He had devised a wild scheme of saving labour, by putting three thousand sheep, instead of eight hundred, under the charge of one shepherd, on horseback.

Mr. Boyd despaired of the prosperity of the colony "unless the wages of a shepherd could be brought to 10 a year, or about 3s. 10d. a week, with meat and flour, without tea and sugar." The two last had been previously universally allowed; but he expressed his intention of doing away with them, "being of very questionable utility and necessity, although such is the waste and extravagance here that 8 lbs of tea and 90 lbs. of sugar are consumed per head." He states, further, that he "had no difficulty in engaging shepherds at 10 with these rations, but much difficulty in getting men engaged at these low wages forwarded to stations, as they were generally picked up on the road." "Any money advanced towards travelling expenses was usually spent in public-houses;" and it is his decided opinion that "more than 10 a year only does harm to shepherds, by sending them to public-houses."

Mr. Boyd also mentioned how he had kindly given a free passage to Twofold Bay, distant 600 miles from Sydney, to one hundred labourers out of employ. He did not mention that, on their arriving there, those who refused to accept 10 wages were refused a passage back for less than 5 j and that, while a few strong men walked back ​over the mountains, those who remained created such a feeling in the country that Mr. Boyd could not venture to visit his stations until the time of the year when the police magistrate, with a guard of policemen, took his annual round.

Fortunately all squatters were not like the Boyd clan, and the productiveness of the land defeated the combination. Had it been otherwise, a very few years would have produced a servile war of men against masters. From the Boyd clan proceeded stories founded on fact, and dressed to suit a purpose, about allotments of land sold for quarts of rum, champagne drunk in buckets by shearers and shepherds, who insisted on having pickles with their [measley?] pork.

Another order of men, chiefly permanent colonists, residing on their own property, were represented by Mr. Charles Campbell as employing from fifty to sixty shepherds and watchmen. "He had been obliged by the pressure of the times, to reduce his old servants to 18 for shepherds and 16 for watchmen, and had not found them so reluctant to accept the reduction as he expected. He would hardly like to see wages lower." He thought a great oversight had been committed by settlers in neglecting to form villages on their estates. He says, "Many of those who now complain of want of employment in Sidney might have been comfortably settled up the country in small villages, containing from ten to twelve men, heads of families, in various callings. In the present state of things we employ, at sheepshearing and reaping, men who wander through the country, from one place to another, in quest of occasional employment. Many of these are handy, clever fellows, but unmarried, and of irregular and dissolute habits. All these men earn is frequently spent in the first public-houses they come to after leaving the station where they have been employed. If, instead of employing men of this class, the flockmasters and landowners had invited married emigrants to settle in small villages, by allowing them land at a low rent, and not attempting to monopolise their labour, permitting them to choose their own employer in the neighbourhood, we should have our reaping, mowing, and shearing done at a cheaper rate; and the emigrants, by means of the money made during the busy season, added to their earnings, would maintain their families well, and their children, from not being scattered, might have opportunities of learning to read and write, and of receiving religious instruction. Many would in a few years become small farmers—first as tenants, then as landholders, and in either capacity would increase the demand for labour."

This was sound sense in Charles Campbell, as contrasted with the selfishness of Benjamin Boyd; but although Mr. Campbell's views were ​afterwards enforced and illustrated with a large collection of facts gathered by the one great colonial reformer produced by Australia, yet 1851 found the pastoral interests as ill provided with permanent labour as 1843. The selfish maxims of Mr. Boyd's Bent Street Club prevailed after the ruin and death of the founder. The successful efforts to retain good land as sheep walks only,—to encourage the growth of sheep and discourage the rearing of children, found Australia, when the golden revolution broke out, largely dependent on wandering shepherds, bound by no ties, either moral or local, social or domestic, to the district or the land of which they had no share. Even at this hour short-sighted successors to the Boyd policy are attempting to forge legal bonds to retain the unwilling services of cheap shepherds, hired in Europe—anything rather than give up a share in the land monopoly, although it is melting from their grasp.

But while the governor, backed by the Colonial Office, was deep in the contest which killed him and deceived thousands—while the bounty crimps were pouring in their miscellaneous collections to work or saunter, or, if women, walk the streets while the squatters, losing sight of the just half of their claim, were factiously obstructing all government, and ready to ruin the bodies and souls of shepherds to save wool—an individual appeared, unencumbered with colonising theories, undebased by any mercenary objects, laborious in collecting facts, diffident in expressing new opinions, prepared to learn, willing to teach, and anxious to be useful to all conditions of men. This individual—Caroline Chisholm—the greatest, the only practical reformer and worker in colonisation of the age, who will be remembered and blessed by thousands following their flocks and cultivating their farms in Australia, when the names of the land-jobbers and charlatans of the "sufficient-price school," the "Protectionists of colonial capital," are forgotten.

MRS. CAROLINE CHISHOLM arrived in Sydney in 1839, with her children and husband, Captain Archibald Chisholm, of the Madras army, who had been making a tour of the Australian colonies during a limited sick leave. On returning to India he decided to leave his family in New South Wales.

Soon after their arrival, during the first crash of insolvency of 1839, some Highland emigrants, who spoke no English and had large families, found difficulty in obtaining employment. A little money lent them by Captain Chisholm to purchase tools, and a little useful advice, set them up as wood-cutters, and they prospered; while assisting his countrymen, having seen the neglected state of the bounty emigrants, he pointed them out to his wife as fit objects for her charitable zeal and energy. There is a wonderful freemasonry among the poor by degrees Mrs. Chisholm's rooms were crowded by emigrants seeking advice. But it was 'the unprotected position of female and often friendless emigrants that awakened her warmest sympathies. She commenced her work, in the literal sense of the term, by at the same time gathering information and acquiring the confidence of the working classes.

Mrs. Chisholm found young women who had emigrated nominally under the care of friends, but really under that of strangers, at the instigation of the bounty agent, without home, some lodged in tents with companions of indifferent character, others wandering friendless through the streets of Sydney. Many of them having been collected in rural districts, knew more of cows and pigs than housework, and if engaged in town, soon lost their situations, and were superseded by more accomplished servants from ships which arrived daily. Some of these poor creatures slept in retired nooks out in the public gardens and in the rocks, rather than face the contamination of the streets. The total number of respectable females unemployed in Sydney at one time in 1840-1 amounted to six hundred.

​Emigration Board sat in Sydney merely to apportion the bounty; the utmost punishment they could inflict was to stop the passage-money due to the agents. So long as the emigrants were delivered in good health, and within the standard, there was neither tribunal nor even organised opinion which could be brought to bear on any of the parties connected with the mercantile transaction. If duly invoiced, the bill for the live lumber was paid, while damaged goods were rejected. In some ships the emigrants were deprived of their fair share of provisions, insulted and assaulted by the crew, even by the officers, and otherwise abused. In others unrestrained intercourse took place between the officers, the crew, and the female passengers. In more than one instance the captain or surgeon selected pretty emigrants for companions during the voyage, and during their stay in Sydney.

On arrival in harbour, not only were single gentlemen allowed to choose housekeepers on board, but notorious brothel-keepers regularly visited the emigrant-ships. The captain and surgeon could not know them, and had no power to impede them if they did. There was no government officer on board to superintend the contracts or protect the emigrants; and thus, while women fell into the hands of seducers and harlots, there were a certain number of keen hands, with whom few in the colony would deal without a lawyer, who skimmed the cream of the labour from the ship on terms of very sharp practice. All these things oozed out in England among the emigrating classes, and made, and continued to make, long after they were to a great extent remedied, emigration very unpopular; but no one cared, or dared to take up the obnoxious and ungenteel position of the emigrants' friend in Sydney. The colonists had not then learned that the cheapest and most powerful mode of colonising is to make the working colonists content.

Mrs. Chisholm had courage and foresight. She began by appealing to the press and to private individuals on behalf of the poor destitute girl immigrants. At first she met with much discouragement, a few civil speeches—no assistance.

The most imperious section of the employer class saw no advantage from the protection of the employed. The officials foresaw more work, some supervision, and no increase of pay. The Roman Catholics, as soon as they found it was to be a universal, or, to use the Irish term, a "godless" scheme of practical philanthropy, and not sectarian and proselytising, opposed it vehemently. A dignitary of that church wrote a letter to a newspaper, in which he termed Mrs. Chisholm a lady labouring under amiable delusions. At the same time the Protestants raised the cry of "No Popery!"

​But she pressed on her plan of a "Home," and when almost defeated was nerved to determination by the sight of a Highland beauty, "poor Flora"—whom she had last known a happy, hopeful girl—drunken, despairing, contemplating, and hastening to commit, suicide.

Mrs. Chisholm offered to devote her time gratuitously to a "Home of Protection," and to endeavour to procure situations for the emigrant girls, unengaged and out of place, in the country an offer which was eventually accepted, after "she had given an undertaking not to put the government to any expense." On obtaining this concession she issued the following circular, which will give an example of that practical business talent to which she owes her success, not less than to her genuine philanthropy:—

It was in reply to one of these circulars that the Rev. Henry Styles, of Windsor, the chaplain to the Bishop of Australia, an honest opponent, wrote:—"I fully appreciate the zeal and charity in your endeavours to establish the 'Home for Female Emigrants.' My only reason for declining to co-operate in a design which at first sight appears so entirely laudable is, that it is natural to suppose that an institution established by a lady who is a devoted member of the Catholic Church, which renders allegiance to Rome, should prove rather an instrument for augmenting the numbers of that communion, than merely what its name imports—a home for all destitute female emigrants, without respect to their religious professions. The result would be, that the immigrants in your 'Home' would be advised, restrained', and protected by the clergy of the Church of Rome." After thus expressing himself, the reverend gentlemen replied minutely to every question in the circular.

Mrs. Chisholm's answer to this plain and proper letter produced a second letter from Mr. Styles, in which he said, "Your frank and straightforward avowal of the objects you aim at, and the means you will use for their attainment, disarm suspicion. The assurance in your note that you will not be led by the agents of any ecclesiastical party, but that you will pursue steadily the good of the whole of the emigrants who may come under your care, referring in matters of religion to their respective clergy and teachers, induces me to offer you very cordially whatever support I am able to afford. I beg to enclose £2 as a donation."

Eleven years have elapsed since this correspondence took place. Proselytism and propagandism are not to be done in a corner. For every day during that period Mrs. Chisholm has almost lived in public, yet no case of misuse of her influence has ever been brought against her.

The government building appropriated to the "Home" consisted of a low wooden barrack fourteen feet square. Mrs. Chisholm found it needful, for the protection of the characters of the girls, to sleep on the premises. A store-room seven feet square, without a fire-place, and infested with rats, was cleared out for her accommodation. There she dwelt, eating, drinking, and sleeping, dependent on the kindness of a prisoner employed in the adjoining government printing-office for a ​kettle of hot water for tea, her only luxury; and there she laid the foundation of a system to which thousands owe their happiness in this world and the world to come—saved from temptation to vice, and put on the road to industrious independence; a system which, if fairly carried out, would save and civilise a great empire from the pollution of nomadic money-earning and unsocial profusion—from the rule of a plutocracy and the horrors of a servile war.

Following the example of our greatest philosophers in every branch of science, Mrs. Chisholm was careful and eager to collect facts, but slow to publish grave conclusions. If she claimed publicity it was not to propound a complicated theory, but to attack some flagrant abuse.

The first party of girls collected within the "Home" amounted to ninety, whom Mrs. Chisholm protected from open insult, covert seduction, and the evil influence of black sheep, inevitably admitted at times, while seeking to obtain them employment. The difficulties were great, the annoyances most wearying. The girls were many of them ignorant and awkward, others too pretty, and others again too proud and idle to work; but Mrs. Chisholm never gave them up while there was hope and a good heart.

She says in her first pamphlet—"If I had entered the office expecting grateful thanks from all, I should have seen in a week my folly; but, having a very fair knowledge of human nature, I was aware that to be able to do a good I must be prepared to encounter certain disagreeables. I did not start expecting to please all, but intending to be just and fair towards all."

As for the mistresses, she told them in print probably the first time so wholesome a truth had been so plainly stated that " the assignment system of convict servants had spoiled them a little; it will take some time to teach them," she observes, "that they have lost a little power, or, in fact, that they must bear and forbear;" "an English servant would not like the ration and lock-up system, and would expect domestic comforts not common in Sydney;" "many of the mistresses are apt to take the law into their own hands."

These statements were unpleasant to make and unpopular; but they worked a cure, which if not effected would have damaged the character of the colony in the home country.

The general public, as distinguished from the official class, when they understood the nature of the plans Mrs. Chisholm was engaged upon, responded very liberally to her appeal for assistance. But before they gained confidence in her plans the "Home" became crowded with a number of girls more fit for rough country work than town service. ​There was no machinery extant for distributing them, so Mrs. Chisholm determined to avail herself of the information supplied in answers to her circulars, and to send them into the country. The first dray that came to the door was sent away empty: frightened with foolish 'board-ship stories of blacks and bushrangers, not one girl would go. A second attempt, the first failure having been kept a secret, was successful. Mrs. Chisholm, at her own risk and expense, took a party up the Hunter River district by steam-boat. The enterprise was considered so Quixotish by her friends that, as she sat on deck in the centre of her troop of girls, no one of her acquaintance dared to expose himself to the ridicule of owning acquaintance by offering any refreshment.

The plan succeeded; the girls were well placed in the families of often humble but always respectable married people, and competent committees were induced to undertake the charge of "Branch Homes" in the interior. The bush journeys were repeated with parties of young women, varing from sixteen to thirty, who were conveyed to Campbell Town, Maitland, Liverpool, Paramatta, Cross Roads, and Port Macquarie—Yass, Gundegai, Murrumbidgee, Goulburn, and Bathurst—where she went from farm to farm, scrutinising the characters of the residents before she trusted them with "her children."

The settlers came forward nobly, and supplied provisions, horses, and drays; the inns universally refused payment for Mrs. Chisholm's personal accommodation; and the coaches, a most costly conveyance in Australia, carried her sick women and children free. Mr. William Bradley, a gentleman born in the colony, a member of the Legislative Council, gave an unlimited credit to draw for anything for the use of the emigrants—of which she was not obliged to avail herself, so liberally did the colonists of the interior come forward.

Very soon the fathers, brothers, sons, and husbands claimed the same care, and asked to be permitted to form part of her parties. Her journeys became longer and her armies larger: 147 souls left Sydney, which increased on the road to 240, in one party, in drays and on foot, Mrs. Chisholm leading the way on horseback. She established a registry-office for servants, where names could be inscribed and agreements effected on fair terms gratuitously: she drew up and printed a fair agreement, of which the master took one, the servant one, and one was filed. The result of this registration was to extinguish litigation as far as regards servants engaged at the "Home." Out of many thousands only two were litigated. Yet in the course of her experience, before she stirred in the matter, and for want of agreements and speedy ​justice, fifty-one cases occurred up to 1843 of wages unjustly detained or taxed. For the first time the emigrant found a "friend."

The abuse of power by captains, and the immorality of the inferior sort of surgeons, at that time engaged in the Australian trade, were checked by a prosecution which she compelled the governor to institute against parties who had driven a girl mad by their violence.

When Sir George Gipps, hesitating, said, as officials will say, "A government prosecution is a very serious matter," she answered, "I am ready to prosecute: I have the necessary evidence; and if it be a risk whether I or these men shall go to prison, I am ready to stand the risk." That trial established a precedent and checked the abuse.

By the end of 1842 Mrs. Chisholm had succeeded in placing comfortably two thousand emigrants of both sexes, and then, when slowly recovering from the effects of a serious illness brought on by her exertions, she published the remarkable report to which we have before alluded.^[25]

It is a collection of notes and memoranda, interspersed with pithy remarks and pathetic and comic sketches from real life—a valuable contribution to the art of colonisation, and a literary curiosity. It was an outspoken book; it did not mince matters—as, for instance, in the following passage, which went far to kill the bounty system, and so, although people were shocked, the evil was abated:—"One girl, long known at Liverpool as the Countess, arrived per ship; the last time I saw her was on a Sunday; she had evidently started in the morning, with an intention to look interesting at either St. James's or St. Mary's, for her book was in her hand; but she had taken a glass by the way, and was so far aware of her state that she retired to the domain. I saw her fall twice. Now people express their astonishment 'that English girls are not sent out.' We will suppose that some Liverpool families are meditating this step, and, in their anxiety to obtain all information, they learn that the Countess is missing—has left for Australia (by a bounty ship). They condemn all for one—they shrink with horror from sending their daughters where the Countess is received—they are strangers to all on board, therefore all suffer for one. I wish particularly to call attention to the injustice done to girls of good character by a case of association, and not a solitary one like the one I have stated. Again, in Sydney, the character of the Countess is known in less than two hours, and the girls of good character in the same ship suffer."

In this "Countess" story was the germ of one great feature of ​Mrs. Chisholm's Family Colonisation—Society protection for single girls.

In the same effective manner the letter exposes all the tricks practised on the Bounty Board and on the government agents. The following illustrates a class still plentiful:—

The following is in a more serious strain:—

This strange little book concludes with the following recommendation:—

The appendix contains answers to a circular from ten magistrates and clergymen, stating that "not one of the girls sent through Mrs. Chisholm's name had lost character as regarded honesty and morality;" and a letter to the "Sydney Immigration Board," with hints not without value, even in 1853.

"The present mode of selecting emigrants must be faulty, as it allows so many bad bargains to creep in. I have heard that this evil is to be remedied by getting the parochial clergy of England to select emigrants for you. The idea amuses me, that you should suppose you can get people to do for you what you ought to do for yourselves." "There are poor rates in the mother country, and to suppose that the clergy and magistrates will send you their best, and keep their worst, is to give them credit for an extraordinary share of kindness." And again, after some comic pictures of pauper hard-bargains, who were "too sick to work, but not sick enough for the hospital," she says—referring to the fall in wages that took place betweeen the time when the crimps published their glowing placards, and the arrival of the ship in the colony:—

"From the opening of the office I had the confidence of the emigrants.^[27] In a short time they requested me to fix the wages they should accept. Disappointed, as many of them were, in their expectaations, they never doubted my endeavours to serve them.

"Feeling the responsibility and confidence, I exerted myself to obtain, as far as was possible, an accurate knowledge of what rate of wages the flockmasters could pay their shepherds.

"I first inquired of the wealthy men whose flocks cover the mountains, and whose cattle crowd the valleys. They agreed on £15 and £16 per annum as the most that could be paid. These gentlemen said they acted on principle, and did not care for the money.

"I then inquired of those respectable, but less wealthy settlers who have one sheep and one cattle station, and live retired at a convenient distance from both. They thought from £18 to £20 a year; the latter doubtful. I went lastly to the third class, who, having two stations, ​instead of employing servants only, live always at one or the other—farm their own farms, in fact. These could afford to pay £20—never wanted, or wished, to see wages less.

"There is nothing, perhaps, that injures a colony more than giving the working population a bad character. Respectable people of capital get alarmed: yet many charges have been brought against servants which I consider unjust."

This plain speaking and unusual style of colonial publication - hard truths without acidity—did its work. A considerable reform was introduced. Government protection was granted to friendless young women; an agent appointed to superintend and witness the agreements with men on board ship; and the colonial press, when furnished with the materials, did good service to emigration reform. The whole cost to government of the guarding and distribution of the emigrants was little more than £100. The other expenses were borne by Mrs. Chisholm and the friends whom her honest, clear-sighted policy had made among persons of all politics and various religious views.

In 1843, before a committee of the Legislative Council, which was appointed to consider the condition of the "distressed labourers," and especially of three hundred parties with large families whom, in the depressed condition of the colony, the settlers could not afford to engage, Mrs. Chisholm took another step forward. She proposed, and entered into, the details of a plan which, at a very trifling expense, would have placed these three hundred families in a self-supporting position on land, instead of continuing to receive 3s. a day for nominal labour on government works.

Sir George Gipps's instructions precluded him from granting or leasing of crown land for this valuable, or any other purpose, except feeding sheep. As he expressed it, "he was sent out to carry out the Wakefield system," and could turn neither to the right nor to the left, Nevertheless, on private property, on clearing leases, Mrs. Chisholm succeeded in placing some families of mechanics.

In the course of her examination it appears that the government had then expended £2,500 in casual relief. For £1,000 she considered the whole distress could be extinguished, and the people not only removed, but placed where they could do some good for themselves. "The distress will increase unless proper measures are taken, but if they are promptly taken it will not be very serious." There are several "trades mentioned in the list that .are not required; for instance, I have only had two applications for shoemakers; for tailors four. The number stated to be unemployed is forty-seven. About twenty months ​ago forty tailors came to me out of employ. The flockmasters refused to take them as shepherds. With a great deal of trouble I scattered them through different parts of the country as domestic servants, and in other capacities; and it is remarkable that nearly all thus scattered have been able to find work at their own trade. With respect to tradesmen and labourers with large families, there is no way in which they could provide for their families so well as on a piece of land.

"My first arrangement would be to select from fifty families one who was a good judge of land, and one of the women, as women would require to know what kind of a place they were going to, whether the children would be comfortable, &c. I should also require two or three good bush hands [prisoners] from Hyde Park Barracks. With these, as soon as arrived on land, I would set to work to clear half an acre, in order that the people might see what could be done in a given time. There must be some tents provided until more substantial buildings could be erected. One allotment must be set apart as a family allotment, to be first cleared and cultivated, to supply food for the whole community. Then the land must be divided and apportioned to the different families. A schoolmaster will go with the party, to have land rent free. The parents of the children have agreed to pay for the education of their children, the terms settled by me. One day's labour per quarter for each child, and for the whole family 1 cwt. of potatoes and one bushel of wheat.

"I have worked this plan on a small scale for the last three years, where there has been a large family. The eldest girl has, in some instances, gone to service, and given up a portion of her earnings to support them. Upwards of one hundred small settlers have thus received assistance from their relatives. Many have half or a third share in a dray.

"I should advise limiting these people to twenty acres, with a lease of not less than ten or fifteen years. On a less term the tenant works for the proprietor. … The plan is before you to accept or reject. All I ask is that, if you approve it, you will let me work it out my own way. Appoint the government emigration agent treasurer, and two gentlemen to examine and control the expenditure. You will bear in mind, in forming an opinion of my statements, that mine is not a plan of to-day. The working it out will be attended with much trouble and responsibility to me; at the same time I am certain the people will work with me. The distress will be removed, and those persons who are now suffering in Sydney will, if my plan is carried out, within three years, become the employers of labour."

​At this last sentence one of the committee allowed his fears of the bugaboo—ever present to the imagination of the Australian capitalist to escape him, a terror carefully nourished by the Colonial Office, and guarded against with endless folds of red tape of the true Wakefield hue. He exclaimed, "I am afraid we should find that these people, becoming employers of labour, would do us mischief!"

Not a word, not a thought of the benefit conferred upon three hundred destitute families, converted from costly paupers to independent peasant proprietors, but only terror lest they should become so well off as to give wages at £20 a year instead of £16.

Mrs. Chisholm answered, "I do not think so, but rather that you would be able to obtain in the children of these people brought up in sober, industrious, and frugal habits, a most valuable description of labourers; this class of persons prefer sending their children at a certain age (and for a limited period) into service with respectable families."

Mrs. Chisholm's plan was rejected, and she was left to work it out as well as she could with private assistance on the land of a speculator; and to go on laboriously registering agreements and distributing emigrants from farm to farm, as we shall presently describe.

The committee in their report recorded "their grateful sense of the valuable services of a lady to whose benevolent exertions on behalf of the unemployed, as well as of free emigrants of the humbler classes generally, this colony is under the highest obligations,—Mrs. Chisholm, whose name is so well known for her disinterested and untiring exertions."

The chairman of the committee was Dr. Lang.

In August, 1844, the distress amongst the labourers and mechanics of Sydney had not ceased. A committee was reappointed to consider it. There was a great clamour in favour of undertaking bridges, roads, and other public works, with public money. The mob and officials were favourable to the scheme. The government emigration agent was examined before this committee. "His knowledge," he states, "of the emigrants who arrived in past years was merely general, of the present year tolerably accurate;" "had no knowledge of the number of destitute families then in Sydney;" had no detailed information, but thought a certain detailed statement delivered in by a former witness exaggerated. This was a gentleman paid for his services, who, according to colonial custom, considered it his duty to perform his strictly office duties, and think and know no more,—a very natural view, considering the ill reward that any zeal obtains, except zeal for the views of the Colonial Secretary of State.

​Mrs. Chisholm, being called before this committee, produced a complete statistical statement, exhibiting the numbers, ages, sexes, characters, and trades of the unemployed (in all 2,034 souls), the number of weeks and average number per man they had been unemployed. These tables show some curious particulars: 59 carpenters and 25 joiners, 10 butlers and 10 coachmen and grooms, 15 cabinetmakers, 26 brickmakers, 10 quarrymen and 19 bricklayers, 2 surgeons, 2 hairdressers, and 1 tailor; 244 farm labourers—in all 572. "The large number of children made it difficult to provide for many of these families." *  * "The system of relieving distress has now been in operation for a year; we have been consuming capital, we can only remove distress by producing it." "Last year I settled some families on land, and, considering the many difficulties thrown in my way, they have succeeded remarkably well on private land. I wished to try the system of leasing, in order to see whether the people were industrious, and could subsist on land; and I have satisfied myself that, although any gentleman would lose a large fortune if he were to commence as a farmer, where the family are all workers an industrious man cannot do better than get on land. The great difficulty with me has been that I have never had an opportunity of putting a sufficient number of people together; and where they are only a few they have no team, no set of tools, and there is a constant struggle; yet they do succeed."

Now, this in a few words is the true art of colonisation. Locate poor men on waste land in England or Ireland and they sink under the multiplicity of money payments or debts, having to compete with a fund of cheap labour, and inferior land against superior land and skilled cultivation. Locate the same men in a colony, and they rise buoyed up by a surrounding dear labour market, which enables them to barter their chief possession, labour, for seeds, tools, stock, or whatever they may need; a virgin soil, and the absence of money payments for rent or taxes, and of competition of agricultural skill, compensating for the want of capital and rural experience. Thus, a day's labour from time to time with a neighbouring farmer will buy a yoke of bullocks, a dray, a quarter of wheat or maize, and assist both. In England and Ireland a poor man clings to land in hopes of making more than bare wages by extra toil; in a colony a man desires land to keep his family together, even at some sacrifice of money wages. In old countries the little freehold must be divided with sons and sons-in-law; in a colony the full-fledged brood can always, if idle "protective" laws do not impede, go further afield, and find a new site for a nest. So argued in other words Mrs. Chisholm; and many a flockowner, now ​contemplating his flocks spreading wildly unshepherded over his run, and the deserted huts of his single men shepherds on their way to the diggings, wishes he had followed Mrs. Chisholm's advice, and encouraged children as well as sheep.

Not being able to induce the governor and the influential colonists to go heartily into her land-colonising plans, Mrs. Chisholm continued to employ herself in dispersing the people through the interior, and in teaching the government and the colonists, by example, how the colonial part of colonisation should be conducted. She worked hard for six years, warmly supported by some of the first among the colonists, the Wentworths, M'Arthurs, Bradleys, Fitzgeralds, Suttors, and Dr. Nicholson, the present speaker of the Legislative Council, and by the unanimous confidence of the working classes, but subject to much obstruction and annoyance in official quarters.

Sir George Gipps, who was capable of noble sentiments when his evil temper or home instructions did not override them, took a public opportunity of expressing his sense of the merit and utility of her plans saying, "I think it right to make this public acknowledgment, having formerly thrown cold water upon them."

A characteristic anecdote is circulated in the colony in reference to the privilege of franking letters, which Sir George had given to Mrs. Chisholm. A few days after the permission had been granted, the governor sent for her in a great hurry. She found him much excited, and the table covered with her own letters. "Mrs. Chisholm," he exclaimed, "when I gave you the privilege of franking, I presumed you would address yourself to the magistrates, the clergy, and the principal settlers; but who, pray, are these John Yarleys and Dick Hogans, and other people, of whom I have never heard since I have been in the colony?"

"If," replied Mrs. Chisholm, "I had required to know the opinions of those respectable gentlemen on the subject of the demand for labour, and the rate of wages they could afford, I need not have written; I can turn to half a dozen blue books and find there ' shepherds always wanting, and wages always too high;' besides, to have answered me they must have gone to their overseers, and then answered me vaguely. I want to know, as nearly as possible, what number of labourers each district can absorb, and of what class and what wages. If your excellency will wait until I get my answers, you will admit that I have applied to men humble but intelligent, and able to afford exactly the information I require."

Sir George Gipps was satisfied with the explanation, and still more ​with the replies of the bush settlers; so the sub-officials were on this occasion discomfited.

By Mrs. Chisholm's exertions, applied to the elastic resources of Australia, before 1845 the distress of 2,000 souls was so far removed that some parties were ready in a few years to assert, forgetting that a detailed list was on record, that it had never existed; and in 1845, as Mrs. Chisholm, in her evidence before the committee of 1844, prophesied, the demand for labour was more vigorous than ever, and has never since been checked, even for a moment; on the contrary, the supply has always been under the demand, both in quantity and quality.

It was while making forced marches at the head of armies of emigrants, as far as 300 miles into the far interior, sometimes sleeping at the stations of wealthy settlers, sometimes in the huts of poor emigrants or prisoners; sometimes camping out in the bush, teaching the timid, awkward peasantry of England, Scotland, and Ireland, Protestants and Roman Catholics, Orangemen and Repealers, how to "bush it;" comforting the women, nursing the children, putting down any discontented or forward spirits among the men; now taking a few

​weary children into her covered tandem-cart; now mounting on horseback and galloping over a short cut through the hills to meet her weary caravan, with supper foraged from the hospitable settlers; it was in the midst of marshes in which she managed the discipline, the route, the commissariat, the hospital, and the billetting, all herself, with such aides-de-camp as each army happened to furnish, that she commenced another great work subsidiary to colonisation, the "Voluntary Statements of the People of New South Wales," for the use of the home country. These were statements in answer to the series of printed questions, taken down in the words of the informant, of which we shall give some examples at the end of this chapter.

They were written down in all manner of dwellings, but chiefly among the humbler; in cottages and bark huts; on the roadside; on the top of a hat; in the field, on a plough; in the forest, on the first log of a frugal bush servant's first freehold.

There were nearly eight hundred of these statements from natives of almost every county of the United Kingdom, from emigrants, from "old hands," and from ticket-of-leave men.

These records proved incontestably that Australia was a country in which any industrious man could thrive; that there was ample verge and room enough for millions; that land which squatters then and now assert to be only fit for sheep pasture would support yeomanry in comfort and independence. They laid bare much injustice, exhibited in a striking manner the demand and necessity for an increased female population, and presented a more perfect, truthful, and valuable picture of bush life, painted by servants and settlers, than had ever been drawn in travellers' tales or parliamentary blue books.

It was in consequence of the habit of collecting these statements that Mrs. Chisholm was able to tell the committee of the House of Lords in 1847:—"I never returned from a journey to the interior without gaining information which would enable me to provide for a second number; and it was frequently unnecessary to go into a district more than once; then I knew the character of the people and the sort of servants that would suit them, and it enabled me to advise people when they called at my residence to say, 'You go to such a place and I can guarantee you employment.' My first object was always to get one female emigrant placed: having succeeded in getting one female servant in a neighbourhood, I would leave the feeling to spread among this class. These girls eventually married best, for the parents were thankful if their son married her.

"One of the most serious impediments to transacting business of ​hiring servants in the country were the applications for wives. Shepherds left their sheep and would come for miles for this purpose, with their certificates of good character, and of money deposited in the savings banks, and list of their stock, and even bank notes. I had more than forty applications of this kind in two years. One man, according to a note in my register-book, who came down to Sydney for a wife, was very anxious to know 'when we should have a new governor who would attend to matters of consequence like that."

The governor took a different view of the subject, for when, in the early days of the "Home Protection," it was suggested to him that many of the forlorn girls if sent into the interior would marry well, "His excellency drew himself up to his full height, and exclaimed indignantly, 'What, Mrs. Chisholm! is it my business to find wives for bush servants?'" He might have done worse.

In 1845 Mrs. Chisholm was examined before a committee of the Legislative Council, on the best means of promoting emigration, the whole distress having been absorbed, and the demand for labour being urgent. She then produced a few of the "Voluntary Statements."

In the same year she published a "Prospectus of a Work to be entitled 'Voluntary Information from the People of New South Wales, respecting the Social Condition of the Middle and Working Classes in the Colony/ with the view of furnishing the labourer, the mechanic, and the capitalist with trustworthy information, and pointing out obstructions to immigration that ought to be eradicated." She writes:—

"Few persons, if any, are more intimately acquainted with the actual condition of the working classes than I am. Silence, therefore, would be culpable. The servant in Sydney, the shepherd, and the small settler in the bush are known to me; I have visited their homes and witnessed their trials and deprivations; I have the satisfaction of laying before the public proofs of their importance as a body and their merits as individuals: their virtues far exceed their failings their language may be rude, but their hearts are kind and true. To improve the condition of these people is my object; to break up the bachelor stations my design; happy homes my reward. To supply flockmastera with shepherds is a good work: to supply those shepherds with wives a better. To give the shepherd a good wife is to make a gloomy, miserable hut a cheerful, contended home; to introduce married families into the interior is to make squatters' stations fit abodes for Christian men.

"If I meet with the co-operation I expect, it is my intention to submit to her Majesty's commissioners of emigration a plan for female ​emigration, which will secure the young women the protection which they so essentially require on the passage and on their arrival. If protection is extended to the helpless if Britain's moral banner is to be unfurled in the far interior civilisation and religion will advance until the spires of the churches guide the traveller from hamlet to hamlet, and shepherds' huts become the homes of happy, virtuous men and women.⁠*⁠*⁠*⁠*⁠*⁠*⁠*

"I feel that a judicious circulation of these statements will promote the best interests in the colony. Personal interest in the labour market I have none. I hope to enjoy the proud satisfaction of laying before the British public several thousand proofs of the good character and persevering energy of her Majesty's subjects in New South Wales."

In the following year, 1846, Mrs. Chisholm left the colony with her family for England, charged with the following missions from the humbler classes:—

Firstly, From a number of freed prisoners, who had been promised by the government that if well conducted their wives and children should be sent to join them. This promise had been forgotten. A return made to the Legislative Council showed that these claimants numbered several hundreds.

Secondly, From successful emigrants, who desired to pay the passages of their wives, parents, and other near relatives.

Thirdly, From parents who, to comply with the regulations of the emigration commissioners, had left young children beyond the standard number to the care of poor relatives or the parish.

In the first and last cases, armed with the facts and proofs necessary, without which she never makes a claim, Mrs. Chisholm succeeded. The other formed the foundation of the Family Colonisation Loan Society.

Before Mrs. Chisholm sailed for England a committee, which included eight members of the Legislative Council, magistrates, landholders, and others of all shades of opinion, raised a subscription for a testimonial to that lady, and presented an address, in which they said:—

"We beg to offer you, on the occasion of your departure from this colony, the expression of our thanks for your active and zealous exertions on behalf of the emigrant population during the last seven years. In establishing emigrants' homes, in establishing great numbers of the emigrant population in the interior as servants and occupiers of small farms, your exertions have proved of signal advantage to the community. In the large collection of 'statistical facts' and 'voluntary information,' derived from the labouring classes, you have accumulated ​materials for establishing the great advantages which New South Wales possesses as a favourable field for the emigration of British settlers."

In the course of her reply, Mrs. Chisholm said:—"It is my intention, if supported by your co-operation, to attempt more than I have hitherto performed."

During the six years and eight months which she spent in Australia, Mrs. Chisholm, without wealth or rank, or any support except what her earnest philanthropy gradually acquired, provided for eleven thousand souls.

Yet since her sojourn in England she has redeemed her pledge, and done much more. With less than two thousand pounds, between 1850 and 1852, she personally sent out more than one thousand emigrants of the best class, and has advised, corresponded with, or otherwise assisted tens of thousands.

We have devoted thus much space to the colonising career of Mrs. Chisholm, because with her exertions the colonisation of the interior commenced. Before her time, emigrants were merely tumbled out on the shores, like so much live stock, to find their own way to market—to service, marriage, sin, or death.

Mrs. Chisholm first taught the Australian squatters that property had its duties as well as its rights. She tapped the springs of spontaneous self-supporting emigration, and showed how closely the extension of national power was connected with the social and domestic virtues inseparable from family colonisation.

BESIDE the questions involved in the price of land, the tenure and tax on pastures, the abolition of assignment of prisoners, and cessation of transportation on all of which the governor and his chiefs were at issue with the colonists, from the day of the opening of the Legislative Council, when the word "humble" was struck out of the motion for an address in answer to the governor's speech certain constitutional questions of great importance were at issue between Sir George Gipps and the Legislative Council.

The Colonial Parliament was justly incensed at finding that the new constitution gave them nothing more than the liberty of talking and taxing themselves. Three schedules appropriated upwards of 80,000 to the payment of officials, over whose appointment, from the colonial secretary down to the prothonotary, they had no sort of control. The council attempted to regulate the distribution of the funds secured by the schedules, by taking from those who did nothing to give to those who worked hard. The governor successfully resisted the attempt, and in other words told them, as Lord Ellenborough told Hone, "to protest and go about their business." Whereupon the Colonial Parliament being unable to cut down the sinecure salaries included in the schedules, retaliated by refusing to vote the estimates for the sums required over and above the estimates. The governor responded by cutting down that part of the public service which was most needed by the colonists. For instance, he retained the Prothonotary and Master in Equity, and closed the office of Registrar of Deeds, who regulated all the titles and mortgages in the colony. From that time forward the struggle between the governor and that part of the council which was not official, became relentless. Evil breeds evil—so in proportion as Sir George Gipps was despotic and insolent, the opposition became virulent and factious. Between both it was war to the knife.

​ A great battle was fought upon the "District Councils." The idea of district councils made Sir George Gipps Governor of New South Wales. He had had influence enough to have the scheme embodied in the Act of Parliament (5 and 6 Vict. cap. 79, sect. 47), which gave the colony representative institutions. The theory was plausible: it might have suited Canada, it may suit England. It met the high approval of Lords Stanley and John Russell. To this day Earl Grey believes it failed through the spiteful obstinacy of the colonists. Sir George Gipps, during the few years of his administration, postponed measures for establishing schools, for repairing and constructing roads, and other practical works of the utmost importance to the colony, at first in order that "his district councils" might reap a harvest of glory, and afterwards to spite the scoundrels for rejecting so admirable an institution. And so it was admirable on paper, but perfectly impracticable in a pastoral colony. Had any other than himself originated it, the governor would have seen its fallacy in a month, and dissected it in a masterly despatch.

According to Sir George's plan the inhabitants of each district were empowered to elect, and if they neglected to elect, the governor had power to appoint a council, which should decide on the sum required for a year for the district. Half such sum was to be contributed from the colonial treasury, and the other half to be levied on the property in the district. If no local treasurer was elected, the colonial treasurer could issue his warrant, and sell up as much of the property of the district as would raise the requisite sum. But the scheme would not work.

In the first place, there was no population sufficiently dense to work such a system, there were very few electors, and no councillors; in the second place, there was no ready money to pay the taxes.

In a pastoral colony like Australia wages are high, consumption is large, and by taxes on consumption, levied at the ports, a considerable revenue may be raised, but by direct taxation very little. The colonists have, or rather had—for it is impossible to say what changes a gold currency may effect—sheep and cattle, which they exchanged, in meat, wool, and tallow, for what they needed in tea, sugar, tobacco, and clothing, but very little money.

When Sir George Gipps attempted to introduce his district councils he found the colonists unprepared to travel for miles to elect a councillor, or pay five or ten pounds per annum for roads over which they never travelled, and bridges a hundred miles from their farms, and indignant at suddenly finding their property at the mercy of the colonial treasurer, the irresponsible officer of the governor. The colonists determined to ​resist the district council scheme. The governor was determined to enforce it. It was his darling child; he had conceived it while looking out from his study on the dense population of a different state of society, and he was not the man to be beaten by circumstances. Like the Abbé Sieyes, and other celebrated manufacturers of constitutions and governing machines, he was blind and deaf to all facts which militated against his theories,—prepared that everybody should suffer so long as he maintained his character as a legislator. Thus he answered a deputation of the Legislative Council, and other influential colonists, who waited on him to point out the practical difficulties in the way of executing his district council scheme: "Whether it ruins the colony or not, an Act of Parliament must and shall be carried out."

On this question the battle began. The inhabitants, except in one district, neglected to elect committees. The governor appointed them. Then came the question of levying, after assessing, a rate. A flaw was discovered in the Act of Parliament. It was decided that the word "levy" did not empower the council to distrain. The governor applied to the Legislative Council for an Act to amend the flaw. The Legislative Council refused to help him. He was thrown back on the powers vested in the colonial treasurer; the "Algerine clause," as it was called in the colony, he threatened, but he dared not put in force. The struggle was carried on for years. The governor was supported by the approval of the home authorities; but the passive resistance of the colonists was too much for him. At length, in 1846, Earl Grey called for a report from the principal officials, including Mr. Deas Thomson, the colonial secretary for New South Wales, and Mr. Latrobe, the lieutenant-governor of Port Phillip, and they reported in a manner which effectually, and for ever, shelved Sir George Gipps' district councils.

In 1844, before the district councils had been shelved, a select committee of the Legislative Council investigated "grievances unconnected with land," and drew up a report, which was a kind of Australian declaration of rights.

These grievances, of which the following is a summary, remained unredressed until the advent of Sir John Pakington and the Duke of Newcastle to the Colonial Office opened up "unrestricted competition" in colonial concessions.

The colonists' committee complained of "being saddled with taxation for a civil list which they were not empowered to discuss, to the extent of 81,000." By the Act of 1850 this civil list was increased.

Of the total failure of the "District Councils, which created municipalities where the sparse population render popular election and local ​taxation impossible, and which placed in the hands of the governors the nomination of an officer with powers of taxation."

Of the want of a "responsible government," the governor being, in fact, merely a subordinate officer of the Colonial Secretary of State for the time being; and the governor's official advisers in a position which made them practically as independent of the Legislative Council as if they had been merely his private friends. Thus, so long as the governor and his official advisers satisfied the home authorities, the colonists were without remedy for any illegality committed by the colonial government, however flagrant. As an instance of the working of the system, the report cites £127,000 applied to various illegal (not fraudulent) purposes by the governor in the course of seven years; "and a sum of £30,743 15s., which was not only expended by his excellency without any authority of the Legislative Council, but applied, by the governor's mere fiat, to the payment of debentures and other purposes to which the ordinary revenue was not applicable by law."

They further protested against the expense in police, gaols, and judicial expenditure inflicted upon the colonists in consequence of New South Wales being made a receptacle for the felons of England, after it had ceased to derive the profits of their labour on the assignment system; and of the violation of the [alleged] compact by which the surplus land revenues and other casual revenues of the crown had been ceded to the colonial treasuries. Under this head the committee claimed a large sum—£831,742 3s. 7d., and for the future an annual payment towards police, gaols, and courts of assize of £74,195 6s. 8d.

And finally, they requested that persons having claims of any description against the local government should, by special Act of Parliament, be enabled to sue a public officer as nominal defendant, and that the judges of the Supreme Court should be placed in the same position as to tenure of office and security of salary as the judges of the mother country, and no longer be liable to be suspended by the fiat and removed by the report of the governor.

But it would be impossible within any reasonable space to detail the series of overt acts which characterised the sedition-breeding policy of Sir George Gipps.

Nominally, a portion of the land revenue was set apart for the benefit of the aborigines; but when application was made for curing a native of a dangerous infectious skin disease, the governor "had no funds for such a purpose," and poor Jemmy Nyrang was pushed out of the government hospital.

Session after session it was a game at cross purposes and crooked ​answers between the representatives of the colonists, the governor, and his patrons in Downing-street.

For- instance, the colonists proposed to reduce the salaries of certain colonial custom-house officers; in the next session of the British Parliament, it is presumed at the instigation of Governor Gipps, the British Colonial Secretary passed a special Act, taking that department from the control of the newly-created colonial Parliament. The colonists proposed to spend £9,000 of their own money in building a lighthouse in Bass's Straits; they were informed that they must first consult the home government on its situation—a matter of two years' delay. The colonists passed an Act, establishing mortgage and register for mortgages on wool; the Colonial Secretary of State, without consulting the colonists, disallowed the Act, as "repugnant to the laws of England." See p. 164. But after long delay and great loss of property, the home government was obliged to yield and sanction a measure indispensable in a pastoral country. The colonists examined and unanimously protested against the land system established by the Imperial Parliament, arid still more unanimously against the ordinances affecting pastoral occupation. Lord Stanley, without regarding petitions which, as Sir George Gipps admitted, expressed the almost unanimous opinions of the colonists, hastened to pen in a despatch "his determination to uphold the land system, and his perfect approval of the arbitrary powers exercised by the governor against the squatting interest." A bill was introduced into the British Parliament for establishing the new system of pastoral occupation—the ex-governor was consulted—the Legislative Council were left in ignorance of the provisions of the bill.

In fact, the records of the Legislative Council are largely occupied with discussions between the governor and the elected members on every possible subject, the governor constantly adopting a line of defiance, always treating the opposition as if it were rebellion. On the one side were the colonists, on the other the governor, backed by the home government, concentrating in his own person all power and patronage, supported by the official members, and the nominees, who were plainly instructed that, unless prepared to support the governor, "right or wrong" (if a governor could be wrong), they must resign.

The ability and integrity of the colonial secretaries of state during the administration of Sir George Gipps, and of Sir George himself, are indisputable; but they obstinately insisted on knowing whether shoes fitted or not better than the people who wore them, and insisted too, that they should wear them, whether they pinched or not. Fortunately the prosperity of the colony did not entirely depend on the ​crotchets of a colonial minister, or of a governor, although both could, and did, seriously retard its progress.

But while the Legislative Council were contesting, inch by inch, the "elementary rights of Englishmen," the grass was growing, the sheep were breeding, the stockmen were exploring new pastures, and the frugal industry of settlers was replacing and increasing the capital lost by wild speculations. And in 1845–6, Sir George Gipps was able to announce that the revenue exceeded the expenditure, and the exports the imports, while the glut of labour which followed his arrival had been succeeded by a demand which the squatters termed a dearth.

In July, 1846, Sir George Gipps retired from the government of New South Wales, and embarked for England, worn out in body and mind by the excitement of perpetual contests with colonists as unscrupulous in their attacks as he was obstinate and haughty in maintaining his opinions and position. It was a war to the knife on both sides. The last measure he presented to the Legislative Council (a bill to renew the border police) was rejected, and an address voted, by a large majority, after two nights' debate, which was virtually a vote of censure on his government, after which the council adjourned itself for a month.

During an administration of eight years, distinguished by unusual official and literary aptitude, Sir George Gipps succeeded in earning the warm approbation of the Downing-street chiefs, and the detestation of the members of every colonial class and interest, except his immediate dependents. The squatocracy, the mercantile, and the settler class were equally opposed to him. Yet even with the same political and economical views, erroneous and baneful as many of them were, with much less talent, but with a more conciliatory temper, he might have been a happy, a popular, and a really useful governor. The value, as well as the popularity, of a colonial governor depends more on the manner in which he conciliates and advises the people under his charge, than on the manner in which he pens a despatch or delivers a speech from the vice-throne.

We have dwelt on Sir George's unhappy career - unhappy for himself and for the colony under his charge—to show what manner of policy was approved and rewarded by the Colonial Office of Lord Stanley and Earl Grey, and why discontent has been chronic in New South Wales for so many years.

Had he been a man of less mark, or a governor of less power, his faults and foibles should have been buried with him; but unfortunately they form an important part of the history of the colony he misgoverned. We may yet have to reap a bitter harvest from the seeds he sowed. Imperfectly as our task has been performed, we have said enough to ​show that his administration must always be considered one of the most important epochs in the history of Australia.

The permanent infliction of the £1 an acre monopoly—the consequent triumph of the great pastoral over the freehold interest—the development of the wonderful pastoral resources of Australia—the abolition of assignment and transportation of criminals—the rise of a free population—the introduction of the elective element into the legislature—the commencement of a legitimate parliamentary struggle for the establishment of responsible government, and a crowd of events of great local but minor national importance,—all these date back to the period during which Sir George Gipps "reigned and governed too," contesting every possible question with the Legislative Council, with the judges, with the crown land commissioners, with the clergy of all denominations, with squatters, with settlers, with every colonist who dared to have any other opinion than the opinion of the Governor.

AMONG the "signs of the times" during Sir George Gipps' government, we notice a decided progress in the literature of the colony: verse as well as prose of no mean order was called into existence by the fierce contest between the colonists and their governor. We give a few extracts from the colonial newspaper of 1845. They may be received as evidence of some value by those who do not care to dive into any of the reports we have quoted on important but not very amusing questions.

1. ↑ George Canning.
2. ↑ Melbourne stands on the Yarra Yarra River, navigable by steamers of two hundred tons, Larger vessels lie off its mouth, in Hobson'e Bay.
3. ↑ The author of the narrative of Cook's first voyage says:—"It was on account of the great quantity of plants which Mr. Banks and Dr. Solander collected in this place that Lieutenant Cook was induced to give it the name of Botany Bay. In cultivating the ground there would  e no obstacle from the trees, which are tall, straight, and without underwood, and stand a sufficient distance from each other."
4. ↑ Lingard, xi. 143.
5. ↑ Roberts "Duke of Monmouth," vol. ii. p. 248.
6. ↑ Reading Gaol, Berks.
7. ↑ Portsmouth, May; the Nore, June, 1797.
8. ↑ The Charter of Justice was not formally promulgated until the 17th May, 1824.
9. ↑ Major Grose was a son of the celebrated antiquary.
10. ↑ Extracted from the MSS., Voluntary Statements of the People of New South Wales, collected by Mrs. Chisholm.
11. ↑ J. Bennet, a youth 17 years of age, was convicted and immediately executed for stealing to the value of 5s. out of a tent Collins, p. 27, History of New South Wales.
12. ↑ He came out as a political exile for having been concerned in Irish treason, and was appointed surgeon to the Norfolk Island settlement. He took an active part in the Bligh rebellion. Was afterwards a magistrate. A man of great ability and eloquence, but by no means popular, being of the old fierce republican school of politics of the last generation.
13. ↑ William D'Arcy Wentworth, barrister-at-law, author of a description of New South Wales, published in 1819 a work, or rather large pamphlet, chiefly political, written with great power and eloquence, which first called the attention of the reading public to the resources of New South Wales. The emancipation of New South Wales is in a great degree due to Mr, Wentworth's exertions.
14. ↑ The Goodwood Park of New South Wales, where races ranking colonially with our Ascot are held annually, about eight miles from Sydney.
15. ↑ The MS. Journal of this Expedition is in the possession of Mrs. Petrie, the daughter of Captain Flinders.
16. ↑ "The situation of the Investigator when I hove to for the purpose of speaking Captain Baudin was 35° 40' south and 138° 58' east. At the above situation, the discoveries by Captain Baudin upon the south coast have their termination to the west, as mine in the Investigator have to the eastward; yet Monsieur Peron, naturalist to the French expedition, has laid a claim for his nation to the discovery of all parts between Western Port, in Bass's Straits, and Nuyts' Archipelago; and this part of New South Wales is called Terre Napoleon; my Kangaroo Island, which they openly adopted in the expedition, has been converted into L'Isle Decres; Spencer's Gulf is named Golfe Bonaparte; the Gulf of St. Vincent, Golfe Josephine; and so on along the whole coast to Cape Nuyts, not even the smallest island being without some similar stamp of French discovery." Monsieur Freycinet, First-lieutenant of the Geographe, said at the house of Governor King, at Port Jackson, to Flinders, "'Captain, if we had not been kept so long picking up shells and catching butterflies at Van Diemen's Land, you would not have discovered the south coast before us.' I believe M. Peron wrote from overruling authority, and that it smote him to the beart." Flinders' Voyage to Terra Australis.
17. ↑ Mr. Williams, the third mate of the Bridgewater, kept a journal, from which the following particulars of this unparalleled piece of cowardice on the part of Captain Palmer are taken. After describing the situation of the Porpoise, he says:—"Though the noise of the surf was so tremendous, the voice of the unfortunate Captain Flinders was heard, by the fifth officer, to say, 'For God's sake, Captain Palmer, assist me!' I now volunteered my services to proceed in the cutter if Captain Palmer would consent, to the aid of the Porpoise: he did consent, but, while getting ready, he changed his mind … The boat was promised in the morning, for which I had every refreshment that could be procured for the relief of my unfortunate companions. We again stood off: at 7 a.m., from the mast-head, we saw the reef off the two ships, and to leeward of them a sand-bank … We all rejoiced in the prospect of affording assistance to our companions; but the captain ordered the ship to be put on the other tack, and, sailing away, left them to their fate! I was sent on shore at Tellicherry with the account of the loss of the Cato and Porpoise. In giving this account, I did, for the first time, disobey orders, and gave a contrary account; for I was convinced that the crews of those ships were on the reef, and that the account of their loss was given by Captain Palmer to excuse his conduct. I wrote out the account and left it behind, after having related it as differently as possible. This caused many words, and ended in my leaving the ship, forfeiting my wages and part of my clothes." So far young Williams: Palmer and his ship were afterwards lost at sea—In fact, they were never afterwards heard of; Williams, by his honourable quarrel with his captain, escaped this singularly retributive fate.
18. ↑ Bligh asked Flinders to dedicate his "Terra Australis" to him, but Flinders, who had formed a most unfavourable opinion of his character while serving under him in the Reliance, politely declined.
19. ↑ Mount York Road has since been abandoned in favour of an easy descent by Mount Victoria executed by Sir Thomas Mitchell.
20. ↑ It is now extinct in that part of the colony.
21. ↑ A son of the Rev. Mr. Cowper is one of the most respectable and influential men in the colony, and a valuable member of the Legislative Council.
22. ↑ The great flockowners had not at that time appropriated the term squatter to themselves, &s they did soon afterwards. Before Bourke's time they chiefly fed their flocks on grants.
23. ↑ By valuing wild land at a farming price, it became easy to put a Governor on the estimates instead of a lieutenant with a file of marines.
24. ↑ ^{24.0 24.1} Mr. Foster has recently been appointed Colonial Secretary of Victoria.
25. ↑ "Female Emigration considered in a Brief Account of the Sydney Emigrants' Home. By the Secretary. Sydney: James Tegg, 1842."
26. ↑ Mr. Benjamin Boyd's Club of Squatters the aristocracy of wool.
27. ↑ This is the secret of successful colonisation which none of our squatter and capitalist or church colonising societies have yet learned.—S. S.
28. ↑ The author of this fierce poetical summary of Australian wrongs was a young gentleman born and bred in the colony. We give it, therefore, nearly at length, not only as evidence of colonial feeling, but of colonial talent.
29. ↑ In consequence of this decision, a hundred people were drowned in this same township in 1851.
30. ↑ One of the first acts of the Legislative Assemblies created by the Australian Reform Bill of 1850, was to pass similar acts levelled against Van Diemonian expirees.
31. ↑ Colonial Policy, by Earl Grey, vol. 2, p. 47.
32. ↑ We do not consider that the secretaries of state are by any means extravagantly paid, but it is very likely that a colonist might. And we do not agree -with Earl Grey that the wages of colonial labourers are to be measured by a Northumberland standard, for what is extravagant in England is moderate in a new country.
33. ↑ Vol. I., p. 314, Earl Grey's Colonial Policy.
34. ↑ Lieutenant Tuckey's Voyage in H. M. S. Calcutta, to found a Settlement in Bass's Straits. 1803-4."
35. ↑ Colonel David Collins was the grandson of Arthur Collins, author of the Peerage of England, which was afterwards continued by Sir Egerton Brydges. He was a Lieutenant of Marines in the Southampton frigate in 1772, when Matilda, Queen of Denmark, took refuge on board. He afterwards fought at the battle of Bunker's Hill, under his father, General Collins; he died in Van Diemen's Land.
36. ↑ The association consisted of Messrs. S. and N. Jackson, Fawkner, Marr, Evans, and Lancy.
37. ↑ Buckley was six feet seven inches in height.
38. ↑ Mitchell's "Australia Felix."
39. ↑ Letter from John Lefevre, Esq., to W. W. Whitmore, Esq., M.P., dated Downing-street, 17th March, 1834.
40. ↑ The most serious evils that befel the South Australian colonists arose from the precipitancy with which emigrants were sent out, before the surveyor-general had reported whether the country was fit for settlement, and before any preparation had been made, by roads, wharves, barracks, conveyances, surveys, and importation of live stock, for employing or feeding emigrants, But it seems part of the system to care rather for producing a sensation of doing business in England than for the welfare of the emigrants. The same error was committed at Wellington, in New Zealand, where, with a shipload of colonists going they knew not where, Colonel Wakefield was obliged to settle at Wellington a fine harbour shut out by inaccessible mountains from the adjoining country. Even expensive military roads have not yet opened out land enough to feed the town population; and two secondary settlements at Wanganui, distant 100 miles, and New Plymouth were formed in order to obtain the quantity of land sold in England. On a second occasion Nelson was chosen without proper survey, where, in order to find land enough, two thousand colonists are obliged to spread over 150 miles of coast. Even in founding Canterbury, Mr. Wakefield had influence enough to persuade the directors to send out, at an enormous useless extra expense, a fleet of four large ships half filled, to the great inconvenience of the first colonists, in order to make a sensation in the English newspapers. The expedient failed.
41. ↑ This, true when written, has ceased to be true in 1853, since the failure of Canterbury colony—a failure predicted by the author.
42. ↑ Report of House of Commons on South Australia, 1841, p. 146.
43. ↑ We give the statistics of 1850, because since that period the colony has been disturbed by temporary emigration to the gold mines of New South Wales and Victoria.