Page:A colonial autocracy, New South Wales under Governor Macquarie, 1810-1821.djvu/176

 heavy arrears to make up in 1821, and numbers of settlers were waiting for their land to be surveyed and grants made out.

It was at this time unusual to give leases of Crown lands except in the towns. Occasionally permission was given to pasture sheep on vacant land adjoining an estate, and rights of common had been given to settlers at Richmond in the Hawkesbury district as early as 1804. In 1820 many farms were let by their owners on leases of seven or fourteen years at rents of 20s. an acre if paid in money, and 30s. if paid in grain. These were usually small estates of five to twenty acres.

The land in the townships, in Parramatta and in Sydney, was generally leased from the Crown for periods of seven or fourteen years. Before Macquarie's time it had never been made the subject of grants, but in 1810 he strongly advised that good building should be encouraged by alienating the land outright, and his advice was adopted. On the Hawkesbury the settlers had built their houses on the low lands in the midst of their corn-fields, and whenever the river rose in flood their houses were devastated. Macquarie offered them additional allotments on the high land, to be considered inseparable from their farms, that they might build homesteads above the danger line, but very few consented to move. Probably they were afraid to leave their corn unprotected in the fields below.

The houses in the country were very plain and cheap, costing as a rule no more than £100. The convict servants on large estates built huts of mud and bark, each two sharing one between them. Macarthur had thought of building them large mess-houses, but they had a distaste of living in great numbers, due, he suspected, to the fear of each that plans of mischief, and especially cattle-stealing, would be discovered and betrayed by others.

Riley believed house rent to be higher in Sydney than in