From grants to sales in the 1820s

When the Blue Mountains were crossed and the value of the lands beyond was appreciated, capital as well as immigration was attracted. The implementation of Bigge’s report paved the way for the settlement of vast tracts of land by British-backed investment companies like the Australian Agricultural Company and the Van Diemen’s Land Company and in the division of land into counties, hundreds, and parishes. The Australian Agricultural Company incorporated by Royal Charter under a special Act of Parliament, in 1824, ‘for the cultivation and improvement of waste lands in the colony of NSW,’ obtained 500,000 acres for nothing.[1] It was even given coal-mines at Newcastle. Part of the company’s estate was selected after 1831, when Governor Bourke energetically protested against the alienation of so huge an area, but was overruled by his official superiors. The company thus richly endowed still carries on its profitable operations. The Van Diemen’s Land Company also worked under a Royal Charter (1825) and secured over 400,000 acres for a trifling quit-rent of £468.[2]

It was not until Bigge’s reports that some English politicians recognised that land had been given away too freely. ‘Large grants of land to individuals have been the bane of all our colonies,’ Under-Secretary Goulburn wrote in 1820, ‘and it has been the main object of Lord Bathurst’s administration to prevent the extension of this evil by every means of his power.’ But, the granting of large areas was continued for some years after 1820. During Governor Brisbane’s term, however, land grants were more readily made.  In addition regulations introduced during Brisbane’s term enabled settlers with his permission to purchase up to 4,000 acres at 5s an acre with superior quality land priced at 7s 6d.[3]  During his four years in office the total amount of land in private hands virtually doubled. Lord Bathurst’s spasm of moderation did not affect his successors. Free grants were made down to the year 1831, when the Colonial Office ordered the substitution of the method of sale by auction. By this time 3,963,705 acres had been granted either freely or at a trifling quit-rent.

In 1825, Bathurst instructed Brisbane to survey the territory to allow for more planned settlement. During the survey one seventh of the land in each county was to be set a side for the Church of England and an educational system under the control of the church. Income from this land was to be managed under the Church and Schools Corporation.[4] When Governor Darling was commissioned in July 1825, his commission extended the NSW boundary six degrees to the west compared with the commissions issued to previous governors. In September 1826, Darling announced the boundaries within which the survey was to be conducted. It would allow the allocation of land grants and the boundaries, known as the limits of location, were used for other administrative purposes including police administration. The nineteen counties were proclaimed by Darling in the Sydney Gazette of 17 October 1829. The boundaries were the Manning River to the north, the Lachlan River to the west and the Moruya River to the south. In some places there were already squatters beyond these ‘limits of location’.

The Nineteen Counties were the limits of location in the colony of NSW. Settlers were only permitted to take up land within the defined area. From 1831, there were no more free land grants and the only land that was for sale was within the Nineteen Counties. The Ripon Regulations were introduced in 1831 by the Earl of Ripon (then Viscount Goderich), instigating a new system for the sale of Crown land in the Australian colonies. Crown land had previously been acquired through grants or sale by tender. The Ripon Regulations standardised the sale process by introducing compulsory sale by auction and by setting a minimum sale price of 5s per acre; this rose to 12s per acre in 1839 and to £1 in 1842. The proceeds from land sales were used to fund the assisted immigration of labourers and servants into the colonies. Despite the uncertainty of land tenure, squatters ran large numbers of sheep and cattle beyond the boundaries. The legitimate allocation of land, whether by grant or sale, in large or moderate areas, was disturbed by the unauthorised proceedings of the squatters.

Parramatta, c1826

Much commotion was caused among the land-owners in 1835, when doubts were expressed as to whether the whole of the land grants made in NSW and VDL since the very beginning of settlement were not illegal. The lords of thousands of acres trembled at the prospect. The point was first raised in Hobart that these grants had not been made in the name of the King but of the Governor. The practice began in the time of Phillip, and had been continued by every successive Governor. When the law officers of the Crown in England were consulted, they gave it as their opinion that the whole of the grants from the foundation of NSW were invalid. The insecurity was removed by the passing of an Act in 1836 (6 William IV, no. 16), ‘to remove such doubts and to quiet the titles of His Majesty’s subjects holding or entitled to hold any land in NSW.’

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[1] See, ibid, Roberts, Stephen, History of Australian Land Settlement 1788-1920, pp. 57-62 and King, Hazel, ‘John Macarthur junior and the formation of the Australian Agricultural Company’, Journal of the Royal Australian Historical Society, Vol. 71, (3), (1985), pp. 177-199.

[2] Ibid, Roberts, Stephen, History of Australian Land Settlement 1788-1920, pp. 62-68 and Meston, A.L. and W.M., The Van Diemen’s Land Company: 1825-1842, (Museum Committee, Launceston City Council), 1958

[3] In 1824, Brisbane approved the sale of Crown Lands in accordance with one of Bigge’s recommendations. Previously only a nominal ‘quit’ rent was required for grants by the crown.

[4] Grose, Kelvin, ‘What happened to the Clergy Reserves of NSW?’, Journal of the Royal Australian Historical Society, Vol. 72, (2), (1986), pp. 92-103 and ‘Scott, Arthur and the clergy reserves of Van Diemen’s Land’, Journal of the Royal Australian Historical Society, Vol. 75, (3), (1989), pp. 153-169.

Macquerie and Bigge

Between 1809 and the Colonial Office’s change of policy in 1817, Macquarie based his land policy largely on free settler immigration and launched a comprehensive policy of settlement in the ‘interior’ rather than on the more dangerous flood plains. Military officers were no longer to receive grants and he vigorously opposed monopolists especially rich settlers such as the Blaxlands who, he argued, having turned their attention to cattle production, had violated their implicit contracts with the government in taking grants to advance arable farming. Macquarie never grasped the potential for pastoral farming but his conclusions were probably right; the rich settlers became increasingly difficult to manage and ‘it seemed as if a military oligarchy were being reincarnated in the form of a civil monopoly’.[1] He concluded that if gentlemen settlers were ‘difficult’ and free settlers still arriving in only small numbers then emancipists should be encouraged to farm land. In 1816, for example, of the 352 people who settled land, only 15 were free immigrants. It was important to keep out poor settlers, who would become a burden on the colony’s resources and land speculators. In 1812, Macquarie included clauses in every grant forbidding their sale for five years and that the land would be cultivated.[2] Supported by Bathurst at the Colonial Office, Macquarie had developed an effective system of land settlement based on nothing more than ‘a Grant of Land and Some assistance of Convict Labour’.[3]

The new system introduced in 1817 had two key features. First, the amount of land granted was to be determined the actual amount of capital possessed by a settler. Secondly, it sought to resolve the question of freeing the market. In 1816, Treasury officials recommended public competition and Bathurst even threatened to import Indian maize if it was cheaper. Macquarie, however, postponed the new system and continued with the old method of government purchase. There were to be no foreign markets leading to a petition in late 1819 by settlers who rightly claimed that ‘the surplus becomes useless for want of a Market’.[4] While Macquarie had embraced the need to expand the settlement of land and had evolved effective strategies to do so, he was far less willing to welcome a free market solution. Increasingly, his land policy was under critical scrutiny. Large farmers opposed the governor because of his failure to open up the market and the graziers joined them because he had neglected their protest against English duties. The Colonial Office was concerned by ever-increasing spending without real returns, a situation increasingly unacceptable in Britain where retrenchment after the French Wars was the dominant economic priority. In addition, Macquarie had been circumspect in his despatches with regard to land policy and for over nine years had not forwarded returns of land grants to London.

The result was the appointment of Bigge as a Commissioner of Inquiry to fill in the details that Macquarie had omitted from his despatches. Bigge arrived in NSW with certain prejudices: he was less than sympathetic to those who had been transported to the colony but leaned towards the interests and values of the large landowners. His analysis of the weaknesses of Macquarie’s land policy was forensic in nature though his constructive proposals were far from original. Bigge found that many of the criticisms of Macquarie’s land policy were justified. Of the 324,251 acres of land granted, convicts held more than a quarter and thousands of blocks of land were held without title. While Macquarie may have granted large tracts of land, settlers preceded surveyors who had little incentive to keep up with the rate of occupation since their profit was barely 2/6 per farm. Even where farms had been surveyed, there was a long delay in completing the deeds because registration barely covered the cost of the parchment. At every level of land policy, there were clear abuses.[5]

Bigge proposed reviving the antiquated system of public farming in the new convict settlements of the north and the establishment of a distillery to use the surplus grain, something that had originally been proposed over a decade earlier. Instead of opening up an export trade, he relied on the building of more granaries and the conversion of the wheat into the arrack of the time. In granting land, he repeated Bathurst’s 1817 programme by recommending that land should be allocated in proportion to capital alone. There was little new in Bigge’s recommendations but they clarified the issues and justified Bathurst’s policy while condemning Macquarie’s administration of that policy.

Macquarie’s belief that emancipists could form the backbone of colonial society was bankrupt by 1820. This was reflected in his arbitrary treatment of settlers in his final years as governor, his refusal to allow any ex-soldiers to settle in 1820 and his notice, in March 1821, banning applications for land. The future that Macquarie did not recognise lay with the small free immigrant and with pastoral farming. Yet, during his governorship, he raised to NSW from a penal colony to a civil society in which there was a large free community thriving on the produce of flocks and the labour of convicts. Between 1810 and 1821, the population of NSW rose from 12,000 to nearly 40,000 cultivating 32,000 acres of land. The problem was that Macquarie’s strengths in 1810 had become his weakness by 1820: ‘a war-trained governor, who subjected lawyers and capitalists to his will, was admittedly suited to a convict settlement, but not for an expanding free colony’.[6]

The first official notion of land settlement was contained in Governor Phillip’s official instructions, in which it was assumed that a self-sustaining rural economy would make its own demand for land. Initially, settlement was linked to the feeding of the population. Grants would be made available for those who applied and small portions would be offered to emancipated convicts as it was believed that rural labour could help redeem fallen characters. The land grant system, under the direct authority of governors, was maintained until the 1820s and formed the only official means of broadening the base of settlement. Initially natural geographical features, such as the Blue Mountains, prevented the westward expansion of NSW and new settlements were made for strategic reasons by Lieutenant Collins at Port Phillip and VDL. Although Collins discounted the country at Port Phillip, VDL was settled and land grants were made at the governor’s discretion.[7]

Under Macquarie the system of grants reached its height. He held the view that rural areas should have towns constructed as service centres and places of government. Moreover, he believed that yeomen farmers should become the backbone of society and policy should be framed for their benefit. Few admitted that the Australian environment was more suited to grazing than intensive English agriculture. Large landowners and wool growers such as John Macarthur, Samuel Marsden and Gregory Blaxland sought to expand the territory available and it was the manoeuvring of private individuals that opened a path to new land in the west beyond the Blue Mountains. The investigations and report of Commissioner J.T. Bigge laid the foundations for altering the way in which land settlement progressed. Bigge, like Macquarie, supported the role of small farmers, but saw that wool could provide valuable export earnings encouraging a new type of settlers prepared to buy land from the Crown that gave them a permanent stake in the country.

Land policy between 1788 and 1821 was based on the granting of land by NSW governors to individuals. It was part of a controlled economy in which the colonial government was the purchaser of produce in which the market forces of supply and demand generally did not operate. While this may have been justifiable in the immediate aftermath of the establishment of a penal colony where survival and basic subsistence were key priorities and where government was by military rule, it was not conducive to territorial or economic expansion. Macquarie may have laid the foundations for both between 1809 and 1821 but there were important limitations to his policies. It is no coincidence that the emergence of a new approach to land policies emerged in the 1820s at the same time that NSW moved from military to civilian rule and gubernatorial autocracy was replaced by limited representative institutions

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[1] Ibid, Roberts, Stephen, History of Australian Land Settlement 1788-1920, p. 21.

[2] This had the effect of reducing speculation in land in contrast to the speculative drive behind farming in Upper Canada.

[3] Bathurst to Macquarie, 24 July 1816, HRA, Vol. 9, p. 151 and Macquarie to Bathurst, 31 March 1817 outline Macquarie’s change in policy.

[4] HRA, Vol. 10, p. 59.

[5] Bigge’s Reports were printed in three volumes. Vol. 2: The State of Agriculture and Trade in the Colony of New South Wales, The House of Lords, (Paper 119), printed, 4 July, 1823, facs ed., Adelaide, 1971 contains his recommendations on farming.

[6] Ibid, Roberts, Stephen, History of Australian Land Settlement 1788-1920, p. 25.

[7] Wheat, barley and oats have been produced in VDL since the early days of European settlement. After starvation conditions in 1805-1807, some was exported by 1812 and in substantial quantities by the 1820s when VDL was regarded as the granary of NSW.