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Thursday 28 February 2013

History in schools

The purpose of the proposed changes in the National Curriculum is made very clear in its prologue:

A high-quality history education equips pupils to think critically, weigh evidence, sift arguments, and develop perspective and judgement. A knowledge of Britain's past, and our place in the world, helps us understand the challenges of our own time.

A distinction is established between History as a methodology (how do we ‘do’ history and what problems does this throw up) and as a form of Whiggish nationalism (we have to know about the past if we are to understand the challenges that face us at present).  Although students will be expected to ‘know and understand the broad outlines of European and world history’, it is clear that the focus will be on British history and that the development of understanding this should be taught chronologically.  Leaving aside the problematic questions of how history should be taught under these proposals and the  nature of historical methodology, I want to explore whether this is the right approach or not.

Should students have both knowledge and understanding of British history and why?  Few would, I suspect, disagree that students should know about the history of their own country.  While British education has long debated this question, other countries in the EU and globally have little difficulty with the proposition that their students should study the history of their own countries.  This has to do with developing a sense of individual identity within the nation state, it is part of the socialisation role of schooling.  Whether this does, in practice, result in understanding of the history of those states is questionable: research in the United States, Canada, Australia and France suggests that students do not have either knowledge about or understanding of the histories of those countries.  That may be a consequence of poor teaching rather than the general principle that students have a right to study their own histories.  If teaching and learning is, as a student commented to me on one occasion, ‘one damn event after another’, then perhaps that is hardly surprising. 

Although there is a strong argument for placing British history at the heart of the history curriculum, there are two problems with the existing proposal.  Is it about ‘British’ history or ‘English’ history with bits of Welsh, Scottish and Irish history tagged on when those histories impact of what occurred in England?  Given that there are few mentions to history beyond England – the Edwardian conquest of Wales and the failure of a similar project in Scotland, Irish plantation in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the Union of the Parliaments and Irish Home Rule – then using the term ‘British history’ throughout the proposal is pushing the definition somewhat.  This raises the question of what ‘British history’ actually means and what is suggested makes no attempt to do this, merely resurrecting the somewhat worn notion of ‘for British history read English history’.   I would have hoped that we would have got beyond this somewhat archaic definition of British history if only because of the work of Pocock has sought establish a methodology for understand ‘British history’ as a justifiable concept in its own right.  There is also a practical problem that will require teacher development.  The ‘modernisation’ of the history curriculum in both schools and in higher education, evident from the mid-1980s, means that many teachers have little or no experience of history before the nineteenth century and in some cases the twentieth.  Good on Hitler but who was Athelstan or Becket and what was the Heptarchy?  This is a problem especially since the broad span of pre-modern history is to be taught in KS 2 and 3 where non-specialists are more likely.  If learning is to be effective, then teachers need to be confident in their knowledge and understanding and many, I suspect, are not.  You need to be able to tell the story with verve to engage students and if teachers are not confident in their knowledge then the story will lack the bite it needs to enthral the pupils ranged before them. 

Which brings us to the issue of British history being taught chronologically.  It’s how I was taught and means that I, and my peers, are able to place events and people into their context and to see the ways in which British history developed.  Yesterday’s letter in The Times from several eminent historians in which they argued in favour of a chronological approach registered their support for the approach advocated in the National Curriculum proposals.  They complain, with justification, of the paucity of breadth and knowledge among the students they receive from schools.  I remember receiving favourable comments from university admissions tutors because my students took a course at Advanced Level that included medieval, early-modern and modern history but that this was a rare occurrence.  So the eminent historians are right in their conclusions but…These are the same historians who have seen the breadth of the university history curriculum contract so that students can simply study modern history and, though there is an element of self-interest in their pronouncements, don’t forget that the overwhelming majority of school pupils do not go on to university to study history.  So the question ought to be whether a chronological approach is appropriate for all those students who do not enter the hallowed halls of academe as well as those who do?  On balance, I think it should.  Good history is about establishing links and drawing comparisons and without a sound sense of chronology this simply does not occur and students are left with a fragmented, unconnected view of the past.  They may know about Hitler, the Holocaust and the slave trade (and they should) but history is far more than these almost classic studies of good versus evil…without context students cannot made coherent judgements about these events. 

The move away from a fragmented history curriculum in schools is a positive move and calls for a greater emphasis on British history and its place in the European and global past is a defensible one.  If the past is not to be a foreign country, then being able to place individuals in their pasts is fundamental.

Tuesday 26 February 2013

Granting land under Grose and Hunter, 1793-1800

Grose’s land policy was widely and justifiable criticised by contemporaries and has subsequently been called ‘anarchical’.[1] His administration was lax and the widespread lack of deeds and non-transfer of title left many poor farmers officially landless. The provision of additional large land grants, giving numbers of convict workers in excess of official entitlements and food privileges for officers ensured that a fair share of the limited resources of the colony did not flow to the poor and ex-convicts in ways that Phillip had intended.[2] Through his blatant misuse of his discretionary powers in downsizing ex-convict grants while expanding land made available to officers, Grose and then Paterson began translating elitist attitudes of the officers into a colonial reality that marginalised and disadvantaged equally ex-convicts and free poor immigrant settlers.

By 1795 when Hunter arrived, there was again a food crisis in the colony. The value of much land had declined to such an extent that expenditure on seed was no longer justified and the government was no longer using convicts to clear new land for cultivation.[3] Initially Hunter introduced state aid for settlers by fixing prices and promising to buy all their wheat but this had little effect and it was clear that a radical change in land policy was needed. [4] The result was reversion to the policy of public farming that addressed the issue of food shortages but was vigorously opposed by Portland in London.[5] In addition, by trying to evolve a flexible policy for development that satisfied both settlers and government in London, Hunter managed to alienate both. For example, in 1799, he followed Portland’s instructions to lower the price of grain but then withdrew it to conciliate the settlers.

Hunter’s indecision and lack of support from London spawned settler protest that first emerged in mid-1797 when John Macarthur, a captain in the NSW Corps protested against the nationalisation of production. This resulted in the appointment of two commissioners to hear the grievances of settlers in public meetings, the first attempt to mould land policies by the collection of information instead on through generalised assumptions. The settlers’ grievances were real. The government fixed the price of wheat yearly and received the settlers’ produce into public granaries at that artificial price. This situation was made worse by the officers’ crops going directly to the stores while settlers had to sell to ‘dealers, peddlers and extortioners’ at lower prices.[6] As a result, the 1798 Commission found that agriculture was being constricted. Parramatta showed signs of prosperity but many settlers had not remained on the land reducing overall output to such a degree that of the population of 4,955, 3,545 were fed by the government. Of the 388 settlers, seven out of ten supported themselves. This had not prevented Hunter from making 364 land grants, 181 to convicts covering 28,279 acres or nearly twice the area granted by his predecessors. [7]


[1] Ibid, Roberts, Stephen, History of Australian Land Settlement 1788-1920, p. 7.

[2] This is evident in the land grants between 13 December 1794 and 15 October 1795 see, HRNSW, Vol. 2, pp. 350-356.

[3] See, Hunter to Portland, 28 April, 20 August 1796, HRNSW, Vol. 3, pp. 38-42, 76-79 on obstacles to progress.

[4] As, for example, in the general order, 10 March 1797, HRNSW, Vol. 3, pp. 196-198 listing wages to be paid for particular tasks.

[5] See his letter to Hunter, 31 August 1797, HRNSW, Vol. 3, pp. 293-298.

[6] Settlers’ petition to Hunter, 19 February 1798, HRNSW, Vol. 3, p. 369 and settlers’ appeal to Portland, 1 February 1800, HRNSW, Vol. 4, pp. 25-28.

[7] For the list of grants from August 1796 to 1 January 1800, see HRNSW, Vol. 4, pp. 38-48.

Wednesday 20 February 2013

Hymns and the Chartists revisited

It has been two years since the discovery of a possibly unique copy of the National Chartist Hymn Book printed in Rochdale for the National Chartist Association in Todmodern Library raised the neglected question of the significance of hymns and hymn singing and more broadly religion to the Chartist movement. [1] In the interim, Dr Mike Sanders has done further research on the volume and has published his findings in Victorian Studies. [2]
 
The discovery of the Todmorden booklet raises important questions about the importance of hymn singing to Chartists. Sold for one penny, it was obviously aimed at the mass market. So why were hymns important to the Chartists? There had been two earlier attempts at producing a hymn book for the whole movement: Thomas Cooper edited the Shakesperian Chartist Hymn Book published in 1842 and Joshua Hobson’s Hymns for Worship: Without sectarianism and adapted to the present state of the church, with a text of scripture for each hymn published the following year. Cooper’s Shakesperian Chartist Hymn Book gave both the hymn and Shakespeare a new oral agitational and political resonance by attempting to give both Bardic and religious authority to Chartist lyrics. [3] It collects together songs and ballads of the indigenous rank and file ‘Chartist poets’ and demonstrates the importance of orality to the movement. The hymns were meant to be memorised and so even the illiterate could participate in the process of collective worship and agitation. The dominant poetic tradition is, as a result, startled into new meanings or new purpose by using traditional literary forms in differing socio-political contexts and stressing the latent energy and orality of popular lyric forms. The development of Chartist hymns represented an extension of the radical ballad narrative into the religious domain combining perceptions of the intense feeling and vision about the alienation they felt from the dominant middle-class industrial culture with a morality tale that allowed them to articulate in accessible ways both their religious and political solidarity and the identification of their grievances through a populist oral tradition against those who failed to recognise or were unwilling to accommodate those demands. Sanders concludes that the hymn books were designed in an attempt to produce a standard hymn book for the movement, as a Chartist forerunner of Hymns Ancient and Modern.

The origins of the National Chartist Hymn Book can be tentatively identified in the pages of the Northern Star. On 28 December 1844, clip_image001 On 1 February 1845, clip_image002 A month later, on 1 March, the Northern Star included the following, clip_image003 By 23 August 1845, the book was nearing publication or had already been published clip_image004
Finally, on 1 November 1845, it is clear that the Chartist Hymn-Book was in use, though given the reference to the ‘36th hymn’, whether this was the book found in Todmorden is debatable and is more likely to be a reference to Hobson’s 64 page book: clip_image005
Heavily influenced by dissenting Christians, the hymns are about social justice, ‘striking down evil doers’ and blessing Chartist enterprises, rather than the conventional themes of crucifixion, heaven and family. Rather than the crucifixion or Christ’s glory, the focus of the hymns is a cry for liberty. Some of the hymns protested against the exploitation of child labour and slavery. Another of the hymns proclaimed: ‘Men of wealth and men of power/ Like locusts all thy gifts devour.’ Two of the hymns celebrate the martyrs of the movement. Great God! Is this the Patriot’s Doom? Was composed for the funeral of Samuel Holberry, the Sheffield Chartist leader, who died in prison in 1843, while another honours John Frost, Zephaniah Williams and William Jones, the Chartist leaders transported to Tasmania in the aftermath of the Newport rising of 1839. clip_image006

For the remainder of the pamphlet see: http://www.calderdale.gov.uk/wtw/search/controlservlet?PageId=Detail&DocId=102253&PageNo=1

Although the hymns are printed without authors, John Henry Bramwich, a Leicester Chartist and stockinger who also wrote poetry for the Northern Star, is known to have written hymns 1-14 in his friend Thomas Cooper’s Shakesperian Chartist Hymn Book and may have contributed to this collection. [4] There is no music. This came later to hymn books and singers would have fitted the words to tunes they were already familiar with. Each hymn is marked with the metre of the hymn, for instance L.M. for Long Metre and this would have helped them know how the words went with the rhythm. Mike Sanders, commented,

‘This fragile pamphlet is an amazing find and opens up a whole new understanding of Chartism – which as a movement in many ways shaped the Britain we know today.’

Elizabeth Gaskell, especially in Mary Barton seems to suggest that suffering is something that Christians have to accept and she repeatedly insists that the only way people can be happy is to resign themselves to God’s will. During the nineteenth century, the Church of England and those Nonconformist churches that sought ‘respectability’ used to insist on this point as well and it seemed to many Chartists that the Church was an accomplice of the middle-classes by keeping the poor quiet and resigned to their suffering fate. When Mrs. Gaskell insisted on this resignation to God’s will she puts everything under this resignation of suffering, death and poverty. In fact throughout the novel, the protagonist John Barton questions whether poverty is in fact God’s will or whether it was brought about by the incessant greed of the rising middle-class. Distress and unemployment were caused by man’s selfishness not the Lord’s judgement and this was a very different message to that extolled by mainstream Christianity. The ways the working-class is presented in the novel suggests that the only way that the laws that had enriched the middle-class were to be changed it would be by Chartism.
Given that Chartism was a cultural as well as a political movement, it is not surprising that religion and religious belief, whether orthodox or not, played a significant role in determining the character of the movement and that in that process hymns played a major role. A quick search of the Northern Star identified 447 references to hymns ranging from advertisements for non-sectarian hymn books to the singing of hymns at the beginning and often the end of Chartist meetings. The state had politicised the Church and Chartist recognised the practical and symbolic importance of attacking this religious hegemony in their extended campaigns for the vote. For example, during August and September 1839, Chartists in South Wales began attending their local parish churches in large numbers, something many regular worshippers could not understand as the attitude of churches to the Chartists had changed little. The Baptists in their association meetings at Risca deplored the level of disaffection and insubordination shown by Chartists. In June, a Wesleyan minister, expressing broader views in his denomination had accused them of being levellers, thieves and robbers. [5] Nonetheless, on 11 August they marched to the parish church of St Woolos in Newport for both morning and evening services. A week later, at Merthyr, the Chartists peaceably crowded into the parish church where the curate, Thomas Williams, who had been informed of their intentions preached an aggressive sermon from the text: ‘Submit yourselves to every ordinance of man for the Lord’s sake; whether it be to the King as supreme or unto Governors...’ [6] The following week, Chartists listened to a sermon at Pontypool while in Abedare and Hirwaun, Chartists specifically asked John Davis an Independent minister to preach to them. Although he produced a scriptural justification for the doctrine of the rights of man, he begged them to abstain from physical violence and not raise the sword against their fellow man. Was attendance at church, as David Williams suggests ‘a cloak to cover nefarious designs’? [7] This misreads their significance and widespread occurrence. [8]

Religion helped to give Chartists strength, sanctify their crusade and face the possibility of dying in the struggle. For many, millenarian Christianity emphasised historical change brought about by an awakened people. In occupying church pews, Chartists were asserting their moral authority but were also showing their contempt for the Anglican usurpation of Christianity and the Constitution and this was even more the case in South Wales where the church represented an alien culture and government. Christianity was just as capable of being democratised as political institutions. [9] Sanders argues that there was a distinctive Chartist theology that prioritised communal feeling and action over individual subjectivity and conversional relationship with God. This, he suggests, is evident in the politically conscious nature of the hymns in the Todmorden booklet in which there are clear tensions between Chartism’s own religious sensibilities and Chartist attitudes towards religious institutions. What was important was not the visions of heaven and unified nature evident in conventional Victorian hymns but the expression of contemporary political and economic antagonisms. The issue for Chartists was justice in this life not the next.
 


[1] Its discovery was reported widely in the press; see, for example, Lancashire Telegraph, 21 December 2010.
[2] Sanders, Mike, ‘‘God is our guide! Our cause is just!’: The National Chartist Hymn Book and Victorian Hymnody’, Victorian Studies, Vol. 54, (4), (2012), pp. 679-705.
[3] See, Janowitz, Anne, F., Lyric and Labour in the Romantic Tradition, (Cambridge University Press), 1998, pp. 136-137, Roberts, Stephen, The Chartist Prisoners: The Radical Lives of Thomas Cooper (1805-1892) and Arthur O’Neill (1819-1896), (Peter Lang), 2008, p. 78, and Roberts, Stephen, ‘Thomas Cooper in Leicester, 1840-1843’, Leicestershire Archaeological and Historical Society Transactions, Vol. 61, (1987), pp. 62-76, at pp. 70-71. See also, Murphy, Andrew, ‘Shakespeare among the Workers’, Holland, Peter, (ed.), Shakespeare Survey: Writing about Shakespeare, (Cambridge University Press), 2005, pp. 111-112
[4] Cooper, Thomas, ‘Memoir of John Henry Bramwich, The Chartist Poet of Leicester’, Northern Star, 4 September 1846.
See also http://myfamilyhistoryjj.com/TNG/showmedia.php?mediaID=29909&medialinkID=8571
[5] Western Vindicator, 20 July 1839.
[6] I Peter ii, verses 13-17.
[7] Williams, David, John Frost: A Study in Chartism, (University of Wales Press), 1939, p. 187.
[8] Yeo, Eileen, ‘Christianity in Chartist Struggle 1838-1842’, Past & Present, Vol. 91 (1981), pp. 109-139, identified demonstrations in Sheffield over five consecutive weeks as the most protracted but there were others, for example in Stockport, Norwich and Bradford.
[9] Jones, Keith B., ‘The religious climate of the Chartist insurrection at Newport, Monmouthshire, 4th November 1839: expressions of evangelicalism’, Journal of Welsh Religious History, Vol. 5, (1997), pp. 57-71.


























Friday 15 February 2013

Settler Australia, 1780-1880, Volume 2: Eureka and Democracy

JUST PUBLISHED

The second volume, Eureka and Democracy, is also divided into two parts. The constitutional separation of New South Wales and the Port Phillip District in 1851 and the establishment of Victoria as a separate colony coincided with the discovery of large deposits of gold. Although the established colonial administration in New South Wales coped relatively well with the ensuing influx of immigrants in search of success on the gold diggings, developments in Victoria were less auspicious. Coping with setting up the new colony and the rapid growth in population proved difficult for Charles La Trobe, the colony’s Lieutenant-Governor leading to growing protest from diggers who, not without justification, felt oppressed by colonial taxation and the colonial police. With widespread protest in 1851 and 1853, matters came to a head in Ballarat in the final months of 1854 when a combination of colonial mismanagement, locally and in Melbourne, and a burgeoning sense of in justice and tyranny led to the formation of a rebel stockade on the Eureka gold field and its brutal repression by British troops and colonial police. It proved a pyrrhic victory for the authorities that was damned for the heavy-handed nature of its actions during and after the attack on the Stockade and was unable to convict any of those brought to trial for high treason the following year. How far Eureka was responsible for political change in Victoria in the mid-1850s is debatable. The process of establishing responsible government in the colony took place parallel to the increasing intensity of protest on the goldfields and would have occurred whether there were protests or not. Nonetheless, the ‘spirit’ of Eureka played an important role in establishing a new system of colonial government that was aware of and responsive to populist demands and Eureka was and still is regarded as the midwife of democracy in Australia. It became, though initially its memory was ‘whispered’, one of the defining events in the formation of Australian nationalism.

Settler Australia 2

The second section of the book contains five papers linked broadly to the theme of democracy. They explore the different ways in which working people struggled to define their rights within the framework of changing notions of the colonial state and maintain those rights against assault from those who favoured an anti-democratic state and from immigrant labour. Paradoxically, the Australian state that emerged from the 1870s was both inclusively democratic in character and also exclusively racist and ‘white’ in its cultural attitudes leading to the espousal of a ‘White Australia’ policy after Federation in 1901. For most of the nineteenth century, according to Richard White, there was no strong evidence of a distinctively Australian identity: ‘Australians saw themselves, and were seen by others, as part of a group of new, transplanted, predominantly Anglo-Saxon emigrant societies’. It is significant that a sense of national distinctiveness only grew stronger towards the end of the century and that this was accompanied by ‘a more explicitly racial element’, based on being Anglo-Saxon or, as confidence in the new society grew, ‘on being the most vigorous branch of Anglo-Saxondom’. White settlers may have been deeply attached to freedom for themselves but they opposed freedom for others. The result was that to be free, individuals needed to be of British or at least European origins. However, these colonial freedoms were not freely given to settlers who had to extract recognition of their rights by persuasion, resistance and even rebellion from metropolitan and colonial authorities that wished to maintain centralised control over colonial activities. The book ends with an examination of the nature of the colonial settler state.

Wednesday 6 February 2013

Granting land 1788-1794

Governors of NSW were given authority to make land grants to free settlers, emancipists and non-commissioned officers but not initially military officers.[1]  However, in 1788 there was no land policy and little attention had been paid in the selection of men who understood farming for the First Fleet. This combined with the unproductive land round Sydney Cove initially led to food shortages and the need to import food to the new colony from South Africa, India and the Dutch colonies to the north. Phillip quickly concluded that reliance on imported food was untenable and that the colony should, as quickly as possible, become self-sustaining. Early exploration of the immediate area identified two possible sites both of which had good fertile soil: Rose Hill, which later became Parramatta and the valley of the Hawkesbury River.[2] However, by the end of 1788 only twenty acres had been sown, the convicts proved more adept at stealing than producing food and the government farm at Rose Hill produced insufficient grain to feed the population of convicts and marines.

Phillip’s solution was free settlers who, he wrote in 1790, were ‘absolutely necessary’. For Phillip, free settlers meant landed proprietors who could ‘bring with them people to clear and cultivate the lands, and provisions to support those they bring with them’. Effectively he wanted to transport existing English farmers to NSW rather than ordinary settlers who he thought lacked that ‘spur to industry’ provided by the possession of capital. Phillip was hampered by his instructions: his first commission did not mention land and his second dealt only with emancipated convicts who would be allocated 30 acres of land and a further 20 acres if married with 10 acres for each subsequent child. This established the basic allocation of 30 acres. It was not until August 1789 that it was provided that encouragement should be given to marines and free settlers but ‘without subjecting the public to expense’. [3] Marine privates were to be allocated 80 acres (30 acres basic allocation plus 50 acres bonus) and non-commissioned officers were entitled to 130 acres or more if they were married and had children. The regulations did not provide for retired commissioned officers to receive grants and since grants for free settlers were not to exceed non-commissioner officers, the expectation in NSW was that grants around 100 acres became large farms.

Phillip had little choice but to disobey these instructions since he had little faith in the marines as potential settlers and was forced to extend government aid for longer than was intended. In an attempt to deal with the food crisis, Phillip in November 1789 granted James Ruse, a freed convict the land of Experiment Farm at Parramatta on the condition that he developed a viable agriculture and became the first person to grow grain successfully in Australia.[4] However, lack of transport meant that crops, when harvested, would not be readily available for Sydney.[5] Three free settlers, Phillip Schaffer perhaps the most important, soon settled at Parramatta. It is difficult to under-estimate the importance of this early farming at Parramatta since had it failed it is possible that the colony would also have failed. Phillip strictly followed his orders with regard to and grants to emancipists and during 1791-1792 he allocated 63 farms to 64 emancipists around Parramatta. However, he used his discretionary powers to give 60 acre basic allocation to those applicants with low social standing, such as seamen with the additional entitlement of 2 acres for a wife and 10 acres for children. Finally, Phillip allocated a minimum of 130 acres to free immigrants. The system introduced by Phillip ensured that every group of colonists (emancipists, those with low social standing and free immigrants) apart from officers and serving military could receive land grants. By 1791, there were 87 settlers, emancipists and seamen or marines of whom 50 were on Norfolk Island but the focus for cultivation was on the Parramatta. By October 1792 when Phillip left the colony, some 1,700 acres were under cultivation.[6]

This ensured NSW’s survival but the expansion of the original settlement at Sydney Cover had thrown up new problems. Many of the early free immigrant settlers proved to be poor farmers. In addition, there was a problem of officers being granted land on which to grow food but without tenure. By mid-1791, several officers agitated to become official part-time settlers whilst remaining on full pay and doing garrison duty and in November 1791 Phillip wrote to Grenville asking for approval to allow officers to own land whilst on a tour of duty.[7] Although approval did not arrive until 16 January 1793, two weeks earlier Grose had already granted 25 acres of land at Parramatta to Ensign William Cummings.[8] The problem was that Grose was given no indication of the appropriate grant size and his method of calculating this for the officers was unclear. In practice, by the beginning of 1794 almost all of the civil and military officers on the mainland had received grants around 100 acres. Although Portland had spoken decisively of a grant to an officer in the singular, under Grose second grants were also made. Of the 39 grants he issued on the mainland, only 29 officers were involved. Grose provided no explanation to London explaining his decision and this represented the beginnings of a land policy that advantaged officers. Under Grose, at least 157 of the free population including serving officers and soldiers received land. Some were given what the regulations dictated while others received a second grant increasing their holdings. Grose may have been generous to his officers but he also began downsizing some grants without any authorisation to do so. In 1794, only three of the 140 mainland grants to emancipists were over 30 acres, despite many of the grantees being eligible for larger acreages.[9] This applied particularly to the developments on the Hawkesbury where ex-convicts were evidently being reduced to small farmer status.


[1] Roberts, Stephen, History of Australian Land Settlement 1788-1920, (Melbourne University Press), 1924, reprinted 1968 remains, despite its age, the most systematic study of land policy.

[2] Ibid, Barkley-Jack, Jan, Hawkesbury Settlement Revealed: A new look at Australia’s third mainland settlement 1793-1802, is a revisionist study that is valuable on land policy generally in the 1790s.

[3] Phillip’s instructions on land grants, 22 August 1789, HRNSW, Vol. 1, (2), pp. 256-259, HRA, Series I, Vol. 1, pp. 124-128.

[4] An account of Ruse’s methods is given in Tench, Watkin, A Complete Account of the Settlement at Port Jackson, pp. 80-81. Initially Ruse was only give 1½ acres but was promised 30 acres if his experiments proved successful and on 22 February 1792 Ruse was given the first formal grant in NSW. See also, HRA, Series I, Vol. 1, pp. 277-282.

[5] The problem of the lack of artisans and farmers identified by Phillip was quickly acknowledged in London and ‘it is advisable that twenty-five of those confined in the hulks...who are likely to be the most useful should be sent out in the ship [Lady Juliana] intended to convey provisions and stores’: see Lord Sydney to the Lords of the Admiralty, 29 April 1789, HRNSW, Vol. 1, (2), pp. 230-231.

[6] HRNSW, Vol. 1, (2), pp. 540-541 lists the 87 settlers and their grants.

[7] Phillip to Lord Grenville, 5 November 1791, HRNSW, Vol. 1, (2), pp. 532-539. It was approved in Dundas to Phillip, 14 July 1792, HRNSW, Vol. 1, (2), pp.631-632 and reached NSW on the Bellona on 16 January 1793.

[8] HRNSW, Vol. 2, p. 35 lists the grants made from 31 December 1793 to 1 April 1793.

[9] See HRNSW, Vol. 2, pp. 212-213.