Squatting and the colonial state

This resolution proved difficult. Coincidentally with their squatting march, the leading Sydneyside landowners acquired the magisterial, executive and legislative power to preserve their hold on the land while newer immigrant squatters brought with them the matching political power of family connection and patronage. The regulation imposed in 1831 continued till 1838, when the price was raised to 12s an acre because that was the minimum fixed in South Australia. It was clearly impossible to make a success of that colony if its lands were sold for more than double the price for which land could be obtained in NSW. Ironically, this gave squatters added incentive to preserve their status quo, for at that price most of their land would be unattractive to buyers. The Wakefield Principle was then occupying much attention in England, and it especially affected the judgement of a committee of the House of Commons before which its author gave evidence. This committee and the Land and Emigration Commissioners appointed to advise the British Government on colonial land questions, were of opinion that all land, except town land, whatever its quality might be, ought to be sold at a fixed price of £1 per acre. Instructions were accordingly sent out that this price should be charged. [1]

The British government followed the advice of the Land and Emigration Commissioners but had failed to observe the great difference in value between country lands and lands close to a town. These Commissioners, who had no practical experience of colonial conditions, actually made the regulation that any person depositing £5,120 might have a special survey made of 5,120 acres or eight square miles of land anywhere they chose in specified districts of NSW, except within five miles of a town. A few wealthy speculators, who had a shrewd idea that lands near to Australian towns would become very valuable, at once lodged their applications and £40,960 pounds was paid before Gipps peremptorily refused to allow any more special surveys to be made. Henry Dendy obtained eight square miles in the present Melbourne suburb of Brighton for his £5,120 and was offered £15,000 before he had even had a sight of the land. Another special survey purchaser, Elgar, selected his eight square miles close to the Melbourne suburbs of Kew, Hawthorn, and Camberwell. Lord John Russell, the Colonial Secretary recognised that Gipps had acted rightly in stopping the special surveys even contrary to instructions. In 1842 the Crown Lands Sale Act was brought into force, under which lands were to be sold by auction with a minimum, not a fixed price at £1 per acre. The £1 per acre system continued to be followed until the colonies obtained representative government and were free to legislate for their lands. The Legislative Council of NSW thought the price too high and objected to the provision of the Crown Lands Sale Act that gave to the Governor the administration of the revenue produced by the sales. Half of it had to be spent in immigration, the balance on public works. However, the Council considered that it should have the disposition of the money and not the Governor and the rest of Gipps’ governorship was embittered by his quarrel with the Council on this question but he was well supported by the Imperial Government.

Sir George Gipps

From 1833, Commissioners of Crown Lands were appointed under the Encroachment Act to manage squatting. Governor Bourke therefore devised the mode of dividing the area whither the squatters had wandered into ‘pastoral districts,’ and of granting annual licences to the occupants of ‘runs,’ for which they wore charged a small fee based upon a computation as to the number of sheep which a particular run would feed. The granting of grazing licences suited the squatters, because, while the licence fee was not heavy, it guaranteed them in the occupation of the lands upon which they had entered.[2] However, Bourke’s successor, Sir George Gipps wanted to use other means to curb the chaotic spread of squatting and to introduce permanent settlement for graziers.[3] He believed that ‘the occupation of land should be made difficult instead of easy’, and wanted to use the revenue gained from land sales to squatters for assisting immigration. His plans to make the squatters pay more for their land met with organised opposition. The government, he wrote, ‘would not suffer them to be kept in perpetuity, and at a merely nominal rent, by those who may be the first to seize upon them’.[4]

In April 1844, Gipps made two regulations with the intention of remodelling the squatting system. The first, gazetted on 2 April, permitted squatters to occupy runs on payment of £10 for every 20 square miles. The second regulation allowed squatters after 5 years occupancy to purchase 320 acres of a run and gave purchasers security of tenure over a whole run for another 8 years. 150 squatters gathered in Sydney later in the month of April and protested against Gipps’s changes drafting a petition to the Queen and forming the Pastoral Association of NSW, the first formalising of the identity of squatters as a political group. A large squatting demonstration was held in Melbourne in June 1844 at which petitions were adopted to be sent to the British parliament and the NSW legislature requesting alterations in the law of Crown lands and a total separation from NSW. A new association was formed at this meeting, designated the ‘Pastoral Society of Australian Felix’. By lobbying in London, the squatters obtained much better terms than Gipps had offered them. The Imperial Waste Lands Act of 1846 and the 1847 Orders in Council divided land into settled, intermediate and unsettled areas, with pastoral leases of one, eight and 14 years respectively and squatters were able to purchase parts of their land, as opposed to just leasing it.

By 1847, there were two ways that people could acquire land. They could purchase it at a minimum of £1 per acre under provisions introduced in the 1842 Crown Lands Sale Act. Or, largely in NSW, they could squat on land and obtain pastoral leases that gave their cattle or sheep runs a degree of legality. Given the scale of the squatters’ holding in NSW and, after 1851, in Victoria, they formed a powerful economic and political elite that was resistant to further change in land policy and especially to calls to ‘unlock the land’. By the late 1840s, nearly all the good lands were used for sheep and cattle and arable farming was located in the coastal areas. In eastern Australia not enough wheat was grown to supply local needs and Tasmania and then South Australia were the granaries for NSW. In South Australia, unlike in the east, the coastal lands were suited to wheat and from the 1840s it production was mechanised and transport costs were low since even though wheat-growing expanded northwards farms were still close to the sea. As a result, Tasmania lost out in wheat to South Australia, but diversified into the production of potatoes, oats and later fruit for the mainland.

Before 1856, land disposal and settlement especially in NSW were characterised by several important elements. Successive colonial governments wanted to recreate the colony in line with the social and economic system of land use in England. This position was to a certain extent supported by the Colonial Office’s desire to restrain the spread of settlement despite the development of a widespread desire for land. However, there was a failure to appreciate that the colony’s land resources were different from those in the United Kingdom and that the sheer vastness of the public domain made development control and policing extremely difficult, if not impossible tasks. It was the discovery of gold in NSW and Victoria in 1851 that precipitated growing demands for land reform, something that after 1855-1856 was possible since the new colonial legislatures being given responsibility for the entire management and control of waste lands belonging to the Crown. [5]

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[1] Burroughs, Peter, Britain and Australia 1831-1855: a study in imperial relations and crown lands administration, (Oxford University Press), 1967.

[2] Fletcher, B.H., ‘Governor Bourke and squatting in New South Wales’, Journal of the Royal Australian Historical Society, Vol. 74, (4), (1989), pp. 232-251.

[3] Buckley, K., ‘Gipps and the Graziers of New South Wales, 1841-1846’, Historical Studies, Vol. 7, (1956), pp. 392-407.

[4] Gipps to Stanley, 16 April 1844, cit, Buckley, K., ‘Gipps and the Graziers of New South Wales, 1841-6’, p. 396

[5] Auster, M., ‘The regulation of human settlement: public ideas and public policy in New South Wales, 1788-1986’, Environmental and Planning Law Journal, Vol. 13, (1), (1986), pp. 40-47.

Squatting as ‘policy’

Parallel to the changing policies in the 1820s and early 1830s was the dramatic expansion of squatting.[1] Squatting, originally, in a pastoral context, was the unauthorised creation of stock stations on vacant Crown Land and arose when and where a landowner’s increasing stock numbers out-grazed the land available to him by grant, purchase, lease, or permit. A negative view of squatting remained important through to the mid-1830s. In 1815, a witness before a House of Commons Committee commented

These persons are almost invariably the instigators and promoters of crime, receivers of stolen property, illegal vendors of spirits, and harbourers of runaways, bushrangers, and vagrants.[2]

James Macarthur (the son of John) writing in a similar strain in his book on NSW in 1837, spoke of

....persons denominated squatters [were] mostly convicts holding tickets of leave or having become free by servitude who [carried on] an extensive system of depredation upon the flocks and herds and the property of the established settlers.[3]

Squatting, apart from these alleged dishonest characteristics, was a natural consequence of the absence of a land policy suited to the changed conditions. As long as the Government gave land away to applicants with capital to invest and to others whom it wished to benefit, persons who had not benefited regarded the unoccupied areas beyond the Blue Mountains as available to those who chose to occupy them. It proved impossible to restrain settlement within prescribed limits while there were valuable grasslands stretching for hundreds of miles beyond the official boundaries. Whatever the regulations, NSW Governor Gipps was right when he wrote in 1840:

As well attempt to confine an Arab within a circle traced on sand, as to confine the graziers or wool-growers of New South Wales within bounds that can possibly be assigned to them.

In the 1820s and 1830s it was common for squatters to follow in the tracks of explorers such as Thomas Mitchell and Charles Sturt and grab the best-watered pasture they could find for their flocks and herds. One writer noted that ‘dispersion’, not confinement, was the natural law of settlement. It was not surprising that a theory of ordered settlement and colonisation, propounded by Edward Gibbon Wakefield, gained the attention of the British government. South Australia was settled according to his plan, which married land sales, labour and capital as an enticement to free, respectable British settlers. At Swan River settlement, the attempt to use convict labour and to apportion land by grant met with a host of problems and seemed to indicate that Wakefield’s ideas had merit.[4]

In eastern mainland Australia, the original impetus for squatting in the early 1820s was primarily an expanding Sydney meat market and secondly experimentation with wool production, with added impetus from emancipist and native-born families in search of social and economic freedom.[5] Squatting took on fresh vigour and its actual name of squatting in 1836 with a British wool market that strengthened pastoral diversification and drew new pastoralists from VDL and from Britain. In turn, the creation of Melbourne and Adelaide expanded the meat markets for the ‘Sydneyside’ cattle holders, just as the goldfields populations would do on a grander scale in the 1850s. Despite a pastoral myth that sees wool as the creator of squatting, it is possible that sheep grazed no more land than did cattle in eastern Australia even as late as 1860.[6]

The ‘Nineteen Districts’, 1829

The first steps in establishing wool production in NSW also created an increased demand for land. Squatting activity was often carried out by emancipist and native-born colonists as they sought to define and consolidate their place within society. From the mid-1820s, however, the occupation of Crown land without legal title became more widespread, often carried out by those from the upper echelons of colonial society.  As wool began to be exported to England and the colonial population increased the occupation of pastoral land for raising cattle and sheep progressively became a more lucrative enterprise.  By 1831, Australia was supplying 8 per cent of British wool imports. Nine years later the proportion had risen to 28 per cent and by 1850 to 53 per cent. Sheep grazing stretched out well beyond the hinterland of the first settlement, into what later became Victoria, Queensland, and South Australia, although pastoralists remained in the relatively well-watered districts. Progress was not smooth. The years between 1825 and 1828 were marked by depression, caused initially by falling wool prices in England and made worse by drought in Eastern Australia. Expansion was resumed after 1828 and continued throughout the 1830s; by 1840, however, profits were again being squeezed between rising costs and slightly falling wool prices. The optimism that had characterised the 1830s evaporated, credit was restricted, and serious depression occurred. During this period of pastoral expansion wheat production had failed to keep pace with the growth of the population of NSW. The environment was not generally well suited to arable farming that became the occupation of poor men with inadequate resources. Supplies were imported from VDL, but by the 1840s South Australia began to supply NSW with wheat and during the next half-century emerged as the principal grain-growing region of Australia.

‘Squatting’ had become so widespread by the mid-1830s that Government policy in NSW towards the practice shifted from opposition to regulation and control.  It was clearly necessary to impose some rule in regard to the occupation of these outlying lands. Despite a popular belief that squatting was a general Australian experience, squatting hardly existed in the other colonies. In VDL, where there were few cattle, lax land administration in the 1820s had allowed sheep owners all the freehold land they wanted and the owners found their squatting outlets in the Port Phillip District of NSW. In Western Australia, massively liberal land grants, low initial stock numbers and a tiny domestic market, deferred for many years any perceived need to graze Crown land.[7] In South Australia in 1836, the founders’ Wakefieldian agriculturalist philosophy of settlement, reinforced in the 1840s and 1850s by the province’s emergent agricultural and copper-mining industries ensured that squatting in the province would not become a major activity.[8] In effect, VDL, Western Australia, and South Australia were largely spectators of the eastern mainland’s resolution of squatting.

Sheep, South Australia, c1880

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[1] Weaver, John, ‘Beyond the fatal shore: pastoral squatting and the occupation of Australia, 1826 to 1852’, American History Review, Vol. 101, (1996), pp. 980-1007.

[2] Cit, Roberts, S.H., The Squatting Age in Australia 1835-1847, (Melbourne University Press), 1935, p. 70.

[3] Macarthur, James, New South Wales; its Present State and Future Prospects: being A Statement, with Documentary Evidence. Submitted in support of Petitions to His Majesty and Parliament, (D. Walther), 1837, p. 44.

[4] Oldham, W., Land policy of South Australia: from 1830 to 1842, (G. Hassell & Son), 1917 and Ellis, Julie-Ann, Public land and the public mind: origins of public land policy in South Australia, 1834-1929, (Flinders University Oress), 1995.

[5] Fletcher, B.J., Landed Enterprise and Penal Society: A History of Farming and Grazing in NSW before 1821 (Sydney University Press), 1976, Beever, E.A., ‘The Origins of the Wool industry in NSW’, Business Archives and History, Vol. 5, (2), (1965), pp. 91-106, Ker, Jill, ‘The Wool industry in NSW 1803-1830’, Business Archives and history,Vol. 2, (1962), pp. 18-54, P. Fogarty, P., ‘The New South Wales Pastoral Industry in the 1820s’, Australian Economic History Review, Vol. 8, (1968) , pp. 110-122, Beever, E.A., ‘Further Comments on the Origin of the Wool industry in New South Wales’, Australian Economic History Review, Vol. 8, (1968), pp. 123-128. See also, Abbott, G.J., The Pastoral Age: A re-examination, (Macmillan), 1971.

[6] This idea that sheep were the major reason for squatting was encouraged in ibid, Roberts, S.H., The Squatting Age in Australia 1835-1847.

[7] Forrest, Sir John, Report on the land policy of Western Australia, from 1829-1888: accompanied by various returns, land regulations, and a map, (Government Printer), 1889.

[8] Prest, Wilfrid, Round, Kerrie and Fort, Carol S., The Wakefield companion to South Australian history, (Wakefield Press), 2001, pp. 513-514 provides a succinct summary of squatter activity in the colony. See also W.L.R., Our wool staple; or, A history of squatting in South Australia, (John Howell), 1865.