Page:The three colonies of Australia.djvu/101

 enough for one of the best farmed English counties. Those who had little money made use of their credit to obtain consignments which would entitle them to land. Not one of them doubted that the wild land in an unknown country would soon be as valuable as in Bedfordshire, or, at any rate, as on the banks of the River Hunter in New South Wales, and that the labourers would labour as contentedly for the same wages abroad as at home.

The first fleet of Western Australian colonists arrived to find the country not only unsurveyed, but unexplored. They were disembarked on a narrow slip of beach, bordered by thickets filled with hostile savages, who speared men and their cattle on every opportunity. A fine stud of thorough-bred horses perished for want of fresh water; whole cargoes of furniture and agricultural implements rolled on the beach without being unpacked. The labourers repudiated their home engagements, and obtained exorbitant wages. When the country was further explored, the quantity of available land turned out to be extremely limited; the live stock was rapidly consumed for food, while the remoteness of Swan River from the old colony rendered importations of any kind difficult, expensive, and uncertain. The sheep turned out to pasture repeatedly died, poisoned by a plant which, up to this day, the colonists have been unable to discover and extirpate.

In a word, planted in a remote district, far from other ports and out of the track of commerce, with very little land available for agricultural or pastoral purposes—what little there was of the one monopolised by a few hands, much of the other poisonous; with colonists, both high and low, the most unfitted by previous education for a rude, self-dependent life, without leaders or servants of colonial experience, without forced labour—the Swan River settlement failed miserably. This failure would have been confined to the fortunes of the first colonists, however bad the system of colonisation, had there been, as in the other settled districts of Australia, vast plains of sound pasture on which pure-bred merinoes could have fed and multiplied; or coal, or copper, or gold to be had for digging; but there was nothing, and is nothing up to the present hour, beyond the bare means of sustenance; thus, without a single staple export, Swan River, in spite of a series of systems of colonisation, has never been able to rise from the condition of an eleemosynary dependency, supported by the bounty of the parent state. With the failure of Swan River the system of free grants of land ended in Australia.