Chapter 8
The Discovery of Gold and an Immigration Avalanche
In This Chapter
Discovering gold and witnessing the biggest population explosion in Australia’s history
Recognising the assertiveness of Australian workers
Allowing tensions to boil over in Eureka
Welcoming more representative government
Demanding land be made available for all
The Australian colonies emerged from the great economic crisis of the 1840s battered but stronger. Shorn (excuse the pun) of its late 1830s boom-time mania, the wool industry became robust and profitable. And townsmen, traders and the labouring classes had united to stave off the reintroduction of convict transportation in the late 1840s.
By the time the 1850s rolled round, things were looking steady and quietly prosperous, if perhaps a little unexciting. Most people assumed that the Australian colonies would continue to be the wool-source for the British manufacturing industry and not much else — far away from the European centres, and with the United States much closer for prospective immigrants, Australia was a peripheral player in the global scene and, it was assumed, would continue to be so.
But then, in 1851, gold was discovered and the effect was stupendous. Within weeks, every spare ship was re-routing itself to Australia, and men and women from all walks of life were cramming themselves on board, more than happy to endure the four-month trip to the other side of the world on the basis of a glimmering hope that a pot of gold would be found at the end of it.
In this chapter, I cover the discovery of gold in Australia and the wide-ranging effects this had on colonial life — including the Eureka uprising, the expansion of male suffrage and the breaking down of the squatters’ stranglehold on arable land.
You want gold? We got gold!
The impact on colonial society of the discovery of gold was volcanic — it ranks as one of the great ‘game-changers’ in Australian society, and quickened elements already in evidence. A gambler’s ebullient optimism often prevailed in business ventures from the 1850s on, and an almost religious-like faith in progress and what the future entailed was born. The old social hierarchies were overturned and labourers, both on the goldfields and off, found themselves with more power than ever before, and much more than they could have hoped to have gained in Britain, Europe or America.
Discovering gold (and going a little crazy)
For the first 50 years of settlement, colonial governors and governments hadn’t wanted to know about gold. General consensus among the governing administrators was that the effects of the discovery of gold on a convict society would be dire.
In the early 1840s, Governor Gipps of NSW told someone who showed him a recent unearthed piece of the ore to put it away at once — ‘or we’ll all get our throats cut!’ (The authenticity of this line is actually a little doubtful, but it gives you the idea of attitudes at the time.)
Then, in 1849, a gold rush began in California. Before it knew it, the government was faced with men deserting the Australian colonies to get to the new goldfields. The government quickly changed its tune about discovering gold in Australia, and declared a reward for anyone who found any of the precious metal.
In March 1850, William Campbell at Clunes, situated in what the following year would be Victoria, found gold, but kept quiet about it (no doubt hoping to keep all the possible riches to himself). The following February, near Bathurst in NSW, Edward Hargreaves found gold, was very un-quiet about it, and claimed the reward. In May, the government released news of Hargreaves’s find, and by the end of May 1,700 men were concentrated at the site of the find, which Hargreaves had named the Ophir goldfield.
In June, a new rush occurred when news of gold on the Turon River, also in NSW, leaked out, and the Kerr Hundredweight nugget was found by an Aboriginal Australian in nearby Murroo Creek. Containing about 40 kilograms of gold, this nugget was bigger than anything found in California, and when news reached Sydney the town was quickly deserted as men grabbed or bought picks, crowbars, pans, tin pots, wash basins and colanders (and whatever else was handy) and took off up the road through the Blue Mountains to the hinterland.
This, however, turned out to be no more than the preview to the main event.
In mid-1851, Victoria separated from NSW to become a colony, with its own governor and government — and this new government faced an immediate challenge. With men walking off sheep runs in Victoria to go to the NSW goldfields, the Victorian government also announced rewards for local finds to try to coax people back into the colony.
Some false starts occurred, with some small finds in Clunes in early July 1851, then the big ones: Major finds near Buninyong and Ballarat. And then the news got even better. In this part of Victoria, gold could be found close to the surface, just beneath the topsoil — unlike the ‘creek-wash’ gold in NSW, which was buried deeper underground.
Then, just when everyone was probably thinking it couldn’t get much easier, it got easier. In late 1851, gold was found in the scrub beneath Mt Alexander (near what became Castlemaine in Victoria). Here, unbelievably, gold could be picked up by whoever got there first from the very surface of the ground and from out of the topsoil.
If you think this sounds like a fairy tale, you’re in good company — that’s how the rest of the colonies and, when they found out about it, the rest of the world, reacted also. The greatest gold rush yet seen in history had begun, and its effect on people was such as to send the whole country collectively mad.
Introducing order and hoping for calm
In 1852, gold-seekers began arriving from the rest of the world — including Europe, the US, Canada, South America and China. As one English visitor put it, in the ports and towns these new arrivals found ‘wild Backwoods-looking fellows’ striding up and down the streets, in rough coats, dirty boots, broad hats, long wild hair and shaggy beards. ‘Almost every man had a gun, or pistols in his belt, and a huge dog, half hound half mastiff, led by a chain.’ And the ‘rage for gold’ seemed to pervade ‘everybody and everything in the colony’. Clearly there was little time to lose.
In 1853, the Victorian government introduced uniform gold claims — 144 square feet for individuals and 576 square feet for groups. The allocation wasn’t much room to dig in, but with so many thousands of new diggers arriving each week, it was best to ensure that everyone had a fair share. The size meant, however, that an individual’s claim could be quickly exhausted, making mining populations prone to packing up and moving off en masse at the merest rumour of a new find or goldfield being opened up.
Governor La Trobe also introduced licences — if you wanted to dig for gold you had to pay the fee, regardless of whether you found any gold or not. La Trobe liked this idea because he thought it would clamp down on the enthusiasm and quickly force unsuccessful diggers, and those without money, to leave the goldfields and return to sober industry and ordinary jobs.
He had a long wait in store. (And the subsequent governor had trouble to come from the licensing system — see ‘That Eureka Moment’.)
Adding a gambling mentality to the mix
If an entire society can be said to suffer an instantaneous collective seizure, then gold rush times in Australia was it. Everyone seemed to go a little crazy. Gold mining was a lottery, particularly after the first early finds and, like any lottery, the odds were stacked against you. And yet that didn’t matter. The manic search was on.
When in Australia, the English novelist Anthony Trollope described the logic that seized hold of the committed gold-seeker who came out to try his luck. The digger knows most will miss out on the great prize — the welcome nugget, the big fortune — yet ‘something tells him . . . that he is to be the lucky man’. Every man hustling up to the diggings was telling himself that same thing. Yet ‘in truth he has become a gambler, and from this time forth a gambler he will live’.
A distinctive element was being added to the Australian mentality here: The propensity to gamble. By gambling I don’t simply mean the obvious forms — horses, boxing, two flies walking up a wall and so on. I also mean the gambling that was evident in people’s approach to business and life. The reason many people were coming out to Australia was to make a fortune, as quickly as possible. Most of them didn’t make a big fortune, and they stuck around and settled down, but they remained willing to speculate financially on various daring adventures — in mining companies, in real estate, in all sorts of smaller businesses. This kind of gambler’s ebullient optimism meant more failures than in Britain — bankruptcies for individuals and businesses were common events in the 1850s and 1860s — but also a greater number of successes as well. Men who’d arrived in the colonies with very little but who’d then established themselves in all kinds of profitable ventures began to widely populate colonial society and its parliaments. The tenor of the colonies, like these men and women, was brash and ambitious, full of hustle and hustlers rather than deference and decorum.
Working Towards the Workingman’s Paradise
In the early 1850s, Australia acquired the nickname ‘the workingman’s paradise’. It had a great climate (although arguably, compared to Britain, this wasn’t the toughest competition), good work and high wages. ‘Meat three times a day!’ declared migration advocate Caroline Chisholm (see the sidebar ‘Threats of revolution in Britain? Try the Australian safety-valve solution’). Chisholm, and others like her, conjured up an image of prosperity that was both, in strict terms, accurate (in Australia, if you wanted to, you could have meat three times daily), and, for workers emerging still a little shell-shocked from the ‘Hungry Forties’ in Britain, Ireland and Europe, unbelievably luxurious — it was the stuff of ‘land of milk and honey’ dreams.
When gold was found in the Australian colonies, angry radicals and hungry workers didn’t need any more encouraging or assisting. They’d already heard the stories and read the reports about how good life could be in the colonies; the discovery of gold seemed to assure everyone that finally all their dreams could come true.
These radicals and workers flocked out to Australia in their hundreds and, soon, in their thousands, bringing with them their dreams — and their ideals of how society could be reformed.
Visiting English novelist Anthony Trollope observed how gold ‘upheaves everything, and its disruptions are those of an earthquake’. He went on to describe the effect of gold on the 1850s workman: ‘He rushes away from his old allotted task, not to higher wages, but to untold wealth and unlimited splendour, to an unknown, fabulous, but not the less credited realm of riches. All that he has seen of worldly grandeur, hitherto removed high as the heavens above his head, may with success be his . . . His imagination is on fire, and he is unable any longer to listen to reason. He is no longer capable of doing a plain day’s work for a plain day’s wages. There is gold to be had by lifting it from the earth, and he will be one of the happy ones to lift it.’
Plenty of things got transplanted without any great difficulty from Britain to its Australian colonies — language, laws, styles of houses, habits, tastes and customs, ways of farming, institutions of government and authority — but the social hierarchies of the British class system wasn’t one of them. The relatively fluid and open nature of Australian society, the high value placed on mateship and equality (even as everyone busily does their best to make money) was already evident in colonial society before gold was discovered. Its discovery meant these elements were magnified, and this had immediate effects on day-to-day behaviour and on how people acted towards one another.
The ‘social betters’ noticed the alarming lack of deference and respect first, and were not in the least amused. Reverend Polehampton noted ‘the independent manner, and who cares for you? bearing of everybody’. Heads had been ‘completely turned’ among the traders and shopkeepers — ‘sudden riches had the usual effect of making vulgar people insolent’. Servants deserted their masters to go to the diggings. Masters headed to the diggings themselves, and often ended up grateful if they could find work as a cook to their ex-servants! ‘In fact . . . a regular saturnalia [unrestrained revelry] was going on’. But this behaviour didn’t bother everyone — especially not the gold diggers. One traveller described the diggers: ‘They have no masters. They go where they please and work when they will’. Another writer noted ‘a jauntiness of manner and a look of satisfaction’ on people more properly subservient. A third traveller reported ‘Diggerdom is gloriously in the ascendant here . . . every servant in this Austral Utopia thinks himself a gentleman’.
The social world down on the underside of the globe was in danger of being reversed, of turning classes upside down. The coming precedence of the working man in colonial life was widely anticipated.
The assertiveness of working people wasn’t limited to labouring men and shopkeepers. Female domestic servants displayed the same behaviour to dismayed respectable families. Maids attended table not dutifully but as if they were doing their employer a big favour, one resident observed. After luncheon the servant could be expected, ‘if so inclined’, to go out to shop for herself, ‘or make calls without the embarrassing ceremony of asking permission. If mildly remonstrated with for not being home in time to prepare for dinner, it was then the invariable custom for well-bred servants to give immediate notice’. There was, concluded the frustrated writer, no choice but to submit to this ‘menial tyranny’, as finding a replacement could take weeks.
In significant ways the labour market had tilted dramatically (and alarmingly) in favour of the worker.
That Eureka Moment
As more and more people kept rushing to Victoria in search of gold, Governor La Trobe and, after him, Governor Hotham needed revenue to deal with the sudden influx of people, and it seemed fair that the diggers should provide it. La Trobe introduced a licensing system to regulate the gold-seekers, but it became increasingly resented as seasons passed and the gold search became more difficult.
Tensions continued to grow as some miners tried to avoid paying the licence fees, which led to a pretty unsophisticated crackdown from local police. Everything came to a head at the now infamous Eureka Stockade.
Rumblings of discontent
As the first flush of discovery faded in Victoria, and fewer people were finding gold, many people started to question the licence system. In December 1853, tensions were further increased when the Goldfields Management Act was tightened up and a new scale of fees introduced: £1 for one month, £2 for three months, £4 for six months and £8 for a year. Most miners, not finding gold, not flush with funds and optimistically hoping that a month’s digging would be enough to secure a great fortune, went for the one-month fee. This was the cheapest option, but still more expensive than charges in NSW, where the licence fee had been reduced to 10 shillings per month.
By 1854, the easy finds in Victoria were over. Mining shafts needed to be sunk deeper and deeper as the surface alluvial gold began to be exhausted, and deeper reefs were what miners began to hunt for. This wasn’t easy work, and the deeper you went the more dangerous it became.
Not meeting with any luck, many miners avoided paying the licence fee, hiding down shafts or running off through the trees when police made periodic sweeps of the goldfields to check for licences. The police, a pretty rough and raw lot, responded by cracking down. Anyone found without a licence on them — even if they’d left it back in their tent while going down a water-soaked shaft, for instance — was arrested and carted off to the lockup. If no lockup was nearby, they could just be chained up to a tree and left there for hours, or overnight.
To say this infuriated the miners is to understate the case significantly. They figured they were British subjects in a British colony — just because they’d sailed halfway round the world to get there didn’t mean they could be deprived of their rights, and have punishment such as arbitrary imprisonment inflicted on them.
The fact that they were paying taxes to a government while being unable to have a say in the make-up of that government also began to rankle. ‘No taxation without representation’ began to be bandied round as a slogan, something that the large number of Americans on the goldfield would have been familiar with, seeing as it had inspired their own revolution and push to secede from Britain some 70 years earlier.
Tensions boil over
Early in 1854, La Trobe’s replacement, Governor Hotham, made a tour of the goldfields. At the goldfields, many diggers made a point of proudly showing Hotham the success they’d had in their digging, hoping that he’d give them more respect as a consequence. This backfired badly — on his return to Melbourne, Hotham decided the diggers had it too easy and ordered that licence searches be stepped up!
A group of miners, led by ex-Chartists and Irish firebrands, decided they’d had enough. (See the sidebar ‘The Chartists arrive’ for more on this group.) By the start of December, at Eureka lead (a deep lead of gold near Ballarat), they’d built a wooden stockade to retreat into the next time the officers swept through the diggings, had unfurled the Eureka Flag (based on the Southern Cross) and had begun drilling miners in quasi-military formations for self-defence. The leader of the miners was 25-year-old Irishman Peter Lalor (who went on to be elected to the Victorian Legislative Assembly and eventually ended up the Speaker of the House.)
On Sunday morning, 3 December 1854, 152 infantrymen, 30 cavalry riders, and 100 mounted and foot police stormed the barricade. While about 1,000 men and women had been inside the stockade on Saturday night (enjoying themselves and drinking a lot of whisky, chiefly), most had wandered back to their own tents and huts to sleep. No more than about 150 miners, mostly asleep, were left in the stockade when the troops and cavalry swept in. The ensuing struggle was nasty but short. Within 15 minutes the soldiers had taken the fort, and 34 miners and 6 soldiers were dead.
While dramatic enough, the real significance of Eureka lies not in the Sunday morning skirmish but its aftermath. Four days after the stockade was broken, Governor Hotham appointed a Gold Fields Commission to inquire properly into conditions on the goldfields. They reported back within months, recommending that the governor
Abolish the licence fee.
Replace it with an export duty on gold.
Open up the Crown land for diggers to acquire small holdings to live on and cultivate.
Pass an Act to exclude or at least cut down on Chinese diggers on the fields.
These recommendations largely reflected the original demands being made by the Ballarat Reform League, the local Chartist-inspired organisation (see the sidebar ‘The Chartists arrive’). This group had also wanted all (white) men in the colony to be given the right to vote — what they termed ‘manhood suffrage’. While they had to wait for this representation to be granted, it was only for another two years (see the next section). The radicals in the colony seemed to be winning the public fight over Hotham’s (and other’s) insistence that obedience and good order must come before all else.
Then, early in 1855, the ringleaders of the resistance at the stockade (those who had been caught, anyway) were tried for treason in a Melbourne court. The jury refused to convict them. The freed men were received in the street outside the court by a rapturous crowd and carried away.
Hotham may have won the battle, but the longer war went comprehensively against him. The attitude of the colony, and of the period itself, was running in the opposite direction.
The Arrival of Self-Government
The influence of gold fever not only brought a tremendous change in Australian society, it also brought about a tremendous change in Australian politics. New immigrants brought new ideas and new expectations, just in time for a change in British law that gave the Australian colonies more say in their own governments.
Practically all colonial men could vote for the lower houses of the new colonial parliament, while the upper houses maintained a more restricted franchise. This meant that the squatters, who had assumed they would become the new political elite once the governors stopped running local colonial affairs, were in for a rude shock.
Votes for a few men
In the 1820s, a Legislative Council was set up in NSW to assist the governor in governing but it was made up entirely of individuals selected by the governor himself. In 1843, the first voting began when two-thirds of the Legislative Council was opened to individuals voted in by electors. But those given the right to vote (the franchise) were a select minority. Only those owning or renting substantial property qualified, excluding most of the working class. This partly elected council continued to work in conjunction with the governor.
The big money men — the squatters and pastoralists, the merchants, the bankers — were the men who were elected to the Legislative Council in the 1840s and they had fully expected it would be them who would form the governments from colonial parliaments as soon as self-government was granted. But they were swept out of power as soon as they had a chance to gain it, reduced to maintaining surly resistance from the more elitist upper houses, blocking what legislation they didn’t like whenever they could. But the governing went on without them, in spite of them, and often against them.
Votes for many men
In 1852, the British government granted self-government to all the colonies except Western Australia (and Queensland, which hadn’t been separated from NSW yet; that had to wait until 1859). (See Figure 8-1 for the establishment of Australian colonies, up to 1851.) This meant that while the big external questions — who to invade, who to threaten diplomatically, who to strike trade treaties with and so on — were still in the hands of London, all the day-to-day business of running the colonies was now in the hands of the soon-to-be-elected governments. These new governments would be able to make laws on questions of revenue, how to distribute Crown lands, and how much to spend on infrastructure and services such as roads, railways and ports. (The constitutions for these new governments were drafted by the old Councils.)
In NSW, the older hands who’d established themselves in previous decades tried to establish themselves as a political elite. William Wentworth (read more about his influence in Chapter 6) tried to institute a new form of aristocracy in the colony, an aristocracy who would have the major power in government. This aristocracy would be made up of people like . . . well, him: Men with large amounts of property and established wealth.
Figure 8-1: The establishment of Australian colonies, up to 1851.
In a colony where everyone’s fortune had been made in generally quite unaristocratic endeavours, and oftentimes dubious circumstances, it was difficult to see how this would work. The idea was laughed out of favour.
The longer the great gold decade went on, the more impossible the idea of any kind of hereditary aristocracy, or even a limitation on the franchise (right to vote), seemed to be. These kinds of ideas went against the essential mood of the place. In stark contrast to the mood in Britain (see the sidebar ‘The Chartists arrive’), the whole spirit of the colonies was an essentially democratic one.
The idea of universal manhood suffrage became more and more popular throughout the Australian colonies.
While the workers and radicals in colonial Australia were arguing for universal manhood suffrage — that is, the extension of the right to vote to all adult males — they didn’t really mean all males. Manhood suffrage would be granted to British subjects only. Other immigrants would continue to be excluded, as would Aboriginal men in most cases (with Aborigines not being granted the right to vote federally until 1962).
In 1856, the new government in South Australia granted all male British subjects over the age of 21 the right to vote. Victoria followed in 1857 and in 1858 NSW joined these colonies in instituting manhood suffrage. (Women would have to wait a while longer for the right to vote — see Chapter 11.)
Given that in Britain at this time only one in five men could vote, the Australian colonies granting manhood suffrage was a leap into the democratic dark. Much of the politics in the colonies at this time reflected this new democratic and populist turn — suddenly the men forming colonial governments weren’t wealthy landowners like William Wentworth. Liberals, radicals and workers started getting voted into the crucial lower houses — which is where governments are formed. So governments began to be formed by small business people, shopkeepers, auctioneers, grocers and publicans rather than the big money men.
Many working people who had supported the great Chartist cause in the 1830s and 1840s (see the sidebar ‘The Chartists arrive’ for more information on this movement) now saw a chance to push for further changes — such as the enforcement of an eight-hour working day, payment for politicians and the ending of the property qualification needed to run for parliament. They also saw they would be able to push for these changes in a society that didn’t have the ‘drag’ effect of old established hierarchies and outdated institutions. A new radicalism became accepted among politicians, newspaper editors and stump orators alike.
Suffrage goes rogue
After manhood suffrage had been granted in the Australian colonies (see preceding section), it seems the new taste of power went to the heads of the workers, and they began issuing all kinds of ‘outlandish’ demands.
Demanding an eight-hour day — and getting it
During the gold rush and the sustained economic boom that followed, demand for workers was so strong that workers themselves, alongside calls for manhood suffrage, were able to push for improved hours and conditions well in advance of the rest of the world.
Stonemasons at work constructing the university quadrangle in Melbourne in 1856 downed tools and marched to Parliament House to demand an eight-hour working day — a long-held but unrealised Chartist ideal. They got it (see Figure 8-2), and it spread to other skilled trades and other colonies soon after — with a Factory Act in 1873 even going so far as to limit the working hours of women to eight hours too.
Figure 8-2: A banner commemorating the achievement of an eight-hour working day.
The gaining of the eight-hour working day had further ramifications in colonial life. Thanks to the enforcement of shorter working hours, Charles Don, a stonemason, could run for and enter parliament. As parliamentarians still weren’t paid, workers previously hadn’t been able to run for parliament. Now Don was able to work for eight hours until four in the afternoon, then make his way to the Legislative Assembly where he represented the good people of Collingwood in the evening.
Demanding the opening up of arable land
In 1857, and again in Melbourne, a Land Convention was formed as an alternative unofficial parliament, where different Victorian townships and goldfields sent delegates to debate what changes should be made to the colony. Members of this convention began meeting in the Eastern Market of Melbourne to discuss how best to take the land off the pastoralists (who held vast blocks of land leased to them as squatters) and throw it open to all the new arrivals. In 1858 they marched on parliament with a brass band playing ‘the Marsellaise Hymn’ (which had been the song of the French Revolution), waving a banner that declared ‘When Justice is denied, allegiance ceases to be a duty’. A riot ensued. (For more on moves to open up the land to more people, see the section ‘Unlocking the Arable Lands’).
Demanding higher trade protection
In 1859, a Tariff League was born. The league argued against the prevailing laissez faire free trade economic orthodoxy then current in Britain, insisting that in the colonies a heavy customs duty should be used to keep imports out and encourage the growth of local manufactures and industry (and with it, jobs).
The first protectionist tariff introduced in any Australian colony was in Victoria some seven years later (in 1866). The new tariff placed duties of 10 per cent on goods like watches, jewellery, glass and blankets coming into the colony, and added similar rates to various fabrics and textiles. The tariff proved popular — by 1877, Victoria was placing a massive 30 to 40 per cent tariff rate on many goods, and after Federation, tariffs became the dominant policy for Australia, and stayed in place into the 1980s.
Unlocking the Arable Lands
The vast majority of gold-rush migrants didn’t find gold. While many returned to the major cities of Sydney and Melbourne and the old trades and jobs they’d previously had in Europe, America or Britain, they also declared that if they couldn’t get gold the next best thing was a life on the land. A little plot of land, with a small cottage, some livestock, a crop (and maybe even some bees) and they’d be quite contented. But first there was a problem — the arable land was taken up by squatters, who had secured long-term leases in 1847 (refer to Chapters 6 and 7).
Moving the squatters
The 1850s immigrants most enthusiastic about ‘unlocking the lands’ were:
The urban middle classes. The town-based traders, shopkeepers, school teachers and bankers all reckoned that the denser the settlement throughout the colony, the better the opportunities for making money from trading goods and services. The squatters with their (to English eyes) enormous pastoral runs were taking up good land which could be better used by putting far more people on it in smallholdings and closer settlement schemes.
The working classes. These immigrants had arrived in Australia with high hopes for a new life of big fortunes and gold. Not finding these things they turned to another dream they’d long cherished — of owning land, being your own master and growing your own food. Coming from Britain, they’d grown up in the most advanced economy in the world. Agriculture was no longer the mainstay of their lives, as it still was in more traditional parts of Europe and the rest of the world, but it had been for their parents or grandparents (or failing that, great-grandparents . . . a long time ago at any rate). They wanted to recreate a cherished vanished dream.
Before these immigrants could settle, there was the problem of getting rid of the squatters. This never happened fully — wool was the most profitable industry possible on the Australian hinterland at this time, and it was the squatters who controlled this industry. Aside from gold, wool, and so squatters, was the mainstay of the Australian economy.
But the opponents of the squatters also had a couple of other realities to face.
Those who spoke out against the squatters said they were a new pseudo-aristocracy, a tiny elite who got to dominate the Upper Houses of colonial parliaments. But squatters, much as they themselves might try to pretend otherwise, were no landed aristocracy. They were from all sorts of backgrounds, and the properties themselves weren’t sealed off in the hands of one social group or class in colonial society.
Ownership of land held by squatters was fluid — there was high turnover, and many people who arrived in the 1850s and went on to make money (including grocers, publicans and cabinetmakers) found themselves investing in squatting runs as a profitable enterprise.
The next problem was that the dream of being contented small-time farmers was a tad unrealistic, given that the bulk of those trying for it in the 1850s had been townspeople and city-dwellers.
The dreams of being a proud independent yeoman (in English cultural tradition, a yeoman was a self-supporting small-scale farmer, and so was a cut above the peasantry) may have been a reaction to the realities of the modern capitalist, urban and industrial life they’d grown up in, rather than growing out of a realistic knowledge and understanding of agrarian living. These immigrants hadn’t been yeomen before coming to Australia — many of them had never been any kind of farmer. Some very sweet dreams were about to run smack bang into some annoying reality.
Despite being based on unrealistic dreams, the demands for land to be taken off squatters and opened up to selection by more people continued.
Making new laws for new farmers
From the early 1860s in both NSW and Victoria, the 14-year pastoralist leases granted by the British Parliament (refer to Chapters 6 and 7) began to expire. Legislation began to be passed in the new colonial parliaments to assist people who wanted to be small-time farmers. These were the Land Selection Acts, and they were intended to allow people to select small blocks of land for agricultural use. There was a whole series of them because they had the annoying habit of creating more problems for the would-be farmers than they solved — which meant that a new Act would have to be designed to deal with the problems caused by the previous one, which had been brought in to deal with the unholy mess created by the earlier one, which . . . well, you get the idea.
In NSW, land was made available for ‘free selection’ with the radical Robertson Land Act of 1861. Amazingly, this Act meant people could just wander onto a pastoralist’s holding and stake out their claim, much like when digging for gold, and there was nothing immediate the squatter could do about it. The selector had to pay a deposit to the Lands Department, and then could buy the land over a three-year period. There was no need to wait for surveyors to mark out the land first — the selector could just turn up, peg some land, pay a bit of money, and become the owner-in-waiting. The squatters didn’t take this super-well, and resorted to all sorts of ruses and tricks, such as buying select pieces of land (those with water access, for instance) and so making the surrounding land not worth having, and paying ‘dummies’ to select on their behalf.
In Victoria, the land-selection movement was more powerful and radical than in NSW, thanks to all the Chartist radicals turning up for the gold rush (see the sidebar ‘The Chartists arrive’ for more information about these revolutionary immigrants). But the Upper House of the Victorian Parliament, the Legislative Council, had a very restrictive franchise, and members of this house managed to find loopholes and hobble much of the early legislation. This meant it was only in 1869 (with the Grant Act) that Victorians were finally granted free selection before surveying.
Dealing with squatter problems
On the face of it, the life of a squatter would appear to be not that great in the colonies in the 1850s and 1860s. Holding leases that were about to expire, in colonies where universal male suffrage had been granted and where the majority of voters overwhelmingly approved of the idea of setting up small-scale farms on land that the pastoralists had held previously, you’d expect most squatters to be getting a little worried.
But the first selection Acts passed in NSW and Victoria (see the preceding section) generally had the opposite effect of what the mass of legislators and voters had intended. Squatters actually used the new laws to strengthen their hold on the land.
Squatters did this by:
Creating as many loopholes in the Acts as they could (made possible via their control of the Upper Houses in colonial parliaments), and then exploiting every loophole available.
Employing ‘dummy’ selectors. These were men and women who were paid off by the pastoralist to front up and select the land before anyone else, live on it for however long the minimum occupancy period required by law was (generally three years), and then ‘sell’ it to the squatter in question.
Purchasing land at public auctions themselves. Public auctions, which often forced the price of land beyond the reach of new immigrants, were being held at the same time as the Selection Acts were coming into effect.
Arranging for public reserves to be declared on crucial areas of land — say, areas with river frontage — so they could continue using it for their stock but selectors weren’t able to settle on it.
But many of the pastoralists got their comeuppance by the end of the 1860s. Not only did the Selection Acts tighten up considerably, as legislators ironed out the flaws, but the squatters had overextended themselves financially. They had often borrowed large amounts of capital to buy up all the land they felt was at risk of selection, and they were then hit by a bad drought in the second half of the 1860s.
Facing up to non-squatter problems
Most selectors came from the major towns and cities of a highly industrialised Britain, and lacked a background and expertise in rural pursuits. Without enough capital to establish a viable and profitable farm in the modern, industrialised, sense, yet lacking knowledge and expertise in the traditional practices required to make a successful self-sustaining non-profit venture, many failed in these early years, walked off their selections and returned to the towns and cities.
Selectors would have a much better chance in the 1870s. New Selection Acts finally ironed out a lot of the previous loopholes and problems and, most important of all, the railway lines began to penetrate the hinterland. For the first time it became possible to freight goods and produce from farms direct to the big markets in the towns and cities. (For more on the introduction of train networks in the colonies, and the effects this had, see Chapter 9.)