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Thursday 7 March 2013

Land policy under King and Bligh, 1800-1810

When Philip Gidley King, Hunter’s replacement arrived, he found depressed settlers, flourishing middleman, labourers demanding high wages and farming devastated by a combination of flood and bush fires.[1] His immediate aim was to reverse Hunter’s policies by treating all settlers equally, by reducing the number of assigned servants to two per settler and introducing a more competitive market for grain by allocating government orders among the settlers in proportion to their crops.[2] Convict labour was also made profitable by making them work for the state rather than clearing land for settlers. Instead of dispersing labour, King concentrated it on a large government farm at Castle Hill. This resulted in a revival of individual enterprise and by 1802 cultivated land had increased by a quarter and the colony was self-sufficient. Although this resolved the immediate threat of famine, it was not a solution to the inadequacies of many settlers who were ‘without either property to employ others or abilities to work themselves’. He urged that instead of sending labourers to NSW, farmers with capital should be encouraged to come to the colony believing that they could revive effective and efficient private farming. However, this faced sustained opposition from Macarthur and the officers of the NSW Corps.

Philip Gidley King

The system of public farming, originally introduced by Hunter, proved remarkably successful under King to such an extent that by 1802 it was producing a surplus of grain.[3] A simple solution would have been to export any surplus but King had prohibited this. If public agriculture was efficient but settlers could not sell their surplus outside the colony, free colonisation was doomed. In 1804, Hobart ordered that government farming should be curtailed and government herds dispersed.[4] The focus was now on settlers and it was the central element of the new economic policy to aid them as much as possible. More bond labour was to be allowed, stock was to be given to successful settlers and the government was to advance loans to stimulate enterprise. This was combined with an ending of the closed market with the ending of guaranteed prices, the operation of supply and demand and the introduction of a system of tenders with safeguards against the monopolists. This represented a shift away from government activity towards free enterprise. While control of the minutiae of life especially leading agrarian change in NSW by the governor may have been justifiable during its struggle for survival but there were limits to what government alone could achieve. By giving special terms to men with capital who could develop the colony, such as the Blaxland brothers[5] who obtained grants of 8,000 acres in 1805 on condition that they spent £6,000 and by the development of an export trade for surplus products, Hobart and King moved NSW towards a market economy in which individual enterprise would be rewarded. This resulted in a change in land policy that was for the first time linked to expansion rather than static subsistence. The NSW government wanted to group settlers round ‘townships’ or shires of up to 30,000 acres with farms radiating from centrally placed ‘towns’. This would have the effect of gradually colonising the interior and as these lands were not retained by government but vested in certain ‘Resident Trustees’, chosen by settlers and other farmers in the district stimulate further growth. [6]

Under King, there was a radical transformation in land settlement. When he arrived in 1800 there were 401 proprietors with grants for 43,786 acres of land; when he left there were 646 with 84,466 acres. The settled districts had increased to below Windsor and the intervening land had in general been occupied. The area under cultivation had almost doubled and the population of the colony had increased by 4,936 to 7,052. King had played a central role in furthering these changes despite the opposition of the NSW Corps. It was, however, not until after the Rum Rebellion against King’s successor William Bligh that these soldiers were demobilised and the greatest obstacle to sustained expansion was eliminated. [7]

While Bligh’s land policy had been moderate and progressive, following his deposition there were two years of retarded development as first Johnston, then Foveaux and Paterson endorsed different policies.[8] Johnston was moderate in his approach; Foveaux made few grants[9] while Paterson, revived the unstructured grants associated with Grose issuing 413 grants of 64,475 acres in a year. There are grounds to support Bligh’s later assertion that the administrators gave land to individuals who they believed would support their interests. Their grants were rendered void when Macquarie took over although the Colonial Office gave him discretionary powers to confirm these grants as he deemed fit.[10] By 1809, there were 737 settlers out of a total population of 10,482 holding 95,637 acres (an average of 128 acres each) with 7,615 acres under cultivation and 74,569 acres of pasture.


[1] See King to Portland, 25 September 1800, HRNSW, Vol. 4, pp. 177-186.

[2] Government and General Orders, 1 and 2 October 1800, HRNSW, Vol. 4, pp. 220, 222.

[3] King to Hobart, 9 November 1802, HRNSW, Vol. 4, pp. 899-900.

[4] King to Hobart, 1 March 1804, HRNSW, Vol. 5, pp. 329-330.

[5] See, Gregory Blaxland to Under-Secretary Cooke, 24 October 1804, HRNSW, Vol. 5, pp. 479-480 and Gregory Blaxland to Under-Secretary Chapman, 1 March 1805, HRNSW, Vol. 5, pp. 568-569.

[6] The Colonial Office approved of this and included it as part of Bligh’s instructions, 25 May 1805, HRNSW, Vol. 5, pp. 640-641.

[7] King to Camden, 15 March 1806, HRNSW, Vol. 6, pp. 34-40, 43-45 provides a summary of King’s achievements.

[8] The decline in agriculture is evident in Civil Officers to Bligh, 18 February 1809, HRNSW, Vol. 7, p. 36 and in Foveaux to Castlereagh, 20 February 1809, HRNSW, Vol. 7, pp. 39-40.

[9] See, for example, Foveaux to Castlereagh, 20 February 1809, HRNSW, Vol. 7, p. 41.

[10] Proclamation, 4 January 1810, HRNSW, Vol. 7, pp. 256-257.

Friday 1 March 2013

The Eastleigh by-election 28 February 2013

By-elections are an important feature of British politics and a few have had a significant impact on national politics.  Whether Eastleigh falls into that category only time will tell.  But it was a significant election called in the wake of Chris Huhne’s admission (finally) that he had perverted the course of justice and during the changing ramifications of the ‘sex scandal’ in the Liberal Democratic Party and six days after Britain lost its AAA credit rating.  That the Liberal Democrats retained the seat, albeit with a significantly reduced majority was a victory ‘against the odds’ but hardly ‘stunning’ as Nick Clegg maintains when there was a 19.3 per cent swing to UKIP and its share of the vote fell by 14 per cent since the 2010 general election. For the Conservatives this was fair more than the ‘disappointing’ result, David Cameron’s verdict, it was a humiliating defeat in a constituency that it must win in a general election to secure a majority government.  As for Labour, yes Eastleigh is its 258th target seat and it has never come close to winning it, but it failed to extend its appeal beyond its core voters despite the current unpopularity of the government.  Yes, it will say that the anti-government vote went to UKIP but that neglects the point that Ed Milliband’s One Nation Labour made no inroads in a southern English seat.

The real winner at Eastleigh was UKIP.  Although it came second, it was, according to some commentators,  a victory in all but name.  Let’s be clear, Eastleigh may have been their best by-election result but they did not win.  However, what the result demonstrates is that UKIP’s stance on issues such as EU migration resonates with the public and that David Cameron’s offer of a referendum on Europe did not benefit the Conservatives at all.  The problem for the Conservatives (and incidentally Labour) is that they have promised referendums in the past and then reneged on the deal and that the public, when faced by a political establishment that is pro-Europe in its attitudes, vote UKIP not as a protest vote against that establishment but out of frustration at the failure of that establishment to give the people the referendum they want because they think they might/will lose.  All the major political parties are divided over Europe though there is an unbridgeable chasm at the heart of Conservatism that has poisoned its electoral prospects for the past two decades.  They have not won a general election since 1992, whatever the party rhetoric about 2010, an election that Labour lost rather than the Conservative won.  What the public recognise and the Conservative leadership does not is that re-negotiating our position in the EU is effectively a non-starter—why should a Europe of 26 countries negotiate with the twenty-seventh?  David Cameron’s dilemma is that he supports the EU if it acts in Britain’s interests while those in Brussels look at issues from a Europe-wide perspective.  The public pragmatically takes the view that we will never get what we want through negotiation and that, as a country, we need to decide whether we want to be in the EU or not.  UKIP recognise this and this helps to explain why their candidate did so well in Eastleigh.

The difficulty for the political establishment, a point well made on Question Time last night, is that it sits in the ‘Westminster bubble’ and is not only completely out of touch with the concerns and fears of the general public but appears indifferent to them.  That’s the message from the by-election and explains why UKIP did so well and the other parties so badly.