Page:The Boy Travellers in Australasia.djvu/560

536 "The latter half of your query," he continued, "compels me to speak of something which the most of us wish to forget. In the first place, when the colony was formed, in 1829, enormous grants of land were given to a few individuals of capital and influence who were to bring out colonists and otherwise develop the country. The grants were all the way from one hundred thousand to two hundred and fifty thousand acres, and the system proved a bad one. The capitalists came here to live on their estates, and not to work, and the colony was the reverse of prosperous. The stories of the old colonial days would be ludicrous if they were not saddening; of fine gentlemen and ladies, blooded horses, pianos, carriages, packs of hounds, and other belongings of old countries landed on this desolate coast, and nobody knowing where his allotment of land could be found. These kid-gloved colonists ate up all the provisions they had brought, came near starvation, and then returned to England, or went to Victoria and New South Wales to seek new homes.

"In the languishing condition of the colony it was sought to galvanize it into new life by allowing the Government to send convicts here under the stipulation that there should be an equal number of free colonists brought out at Government expense.

"The system was continued until 1868. It was stopped in that year, partly because no free emigration could be induced to come here as long as the colony received convicts, and partly because of the opposition of the other Australian colonies. One of the Governments of the eastern part of the continent proposed to exclude from its ports all ships that came from ours, through fear that our convicts would escape to their shores. Every free immigrant shunned us as he would shun the cholera