Page:The three colonies of Australia.djvu/111

 follows that they will be sold at a higher rate. The result may be to retain them for an indefinite time unsold, a result more certain in consequence of the alternative at the settler's command of wandering over the vast tracts of the interior. A facility for acquiring land at a low price is the safest check to this practice. The wealthiest colonists are continually balancing between the opposite motives presented by the cheapness of (then) unauthorised occupation on the one hand, and the desire of adding to their permanent property on the other. The influence of the latter motive must be weakened in proportion to the augmentation of the upset price.

"It is possible that the augmentation of the minimum price would have the injurious effect of checking the immigration of persons possessed of small capital, desirous of establishing themselves upon land of their own"

"We shall hereafter show that all Sir Richard Bourke's predictions were realised. To this hour, in the midst of settled districts, large tracts of land remain the haunt of wild dogs and vermin, which are no more likely to be worth 1 an acre in twenty years to come than they were twenty years ago, unless they turn out to be gold fields.

Parallel with the new arrangement, which enabled every man with money to buy a farm, and filled the colonial treasury to overflowing, the pastoral system, which, at the least possible expenditure for labour, raised a vast exportable produce in wool, was extending itself both east and west, daily discovering new pastures, and driving the emu, the kangaroo, and the aborigine before armies of soft-fleeced merinoes.

In the early days of the colony, landowners grazed near their grants without paying anything for what in fact was valueless except to them. As the population of Sydney increased a charge of 2s. 6d. per 100 acres was imposed on wild lands, conveniently situated for pasture.

No instance occurred of refusing- this privilege at this rent on unoccupied land until the time of Governor Darling, who refused to permit the editor of a paper which had ridiculed his government to rent additional land for his increasing herds.

Beyond the boundaries of settlement—colonially "the bush"—no rent was charged, and until Governor Bourke took the matter in hand, club-law prevailed. It was not unusual for a great squatter to drive a small one out of a district of peculiar richness in grass or water by what was called "eating him out;" that is to say, sending such a flock as would, in four-and-twenty hours, devour every blade within many miles of the small settler's hut, until Sir Richard Bourke, to a certain extent,