Page:The three colonies of Australia.djvu/75

 This report, which also entered at considerable length into the treatment of convicts, directed a little of public attention to the antipodean colony, and the result was to induce the Government to appoint a judge, with two magistrates chosen in rotation, who composed a supreme court in civil and criminal cases; and in Van Diemen's Land, as well as New South Wales, a fifty-pound civil court, with appeal, was formed, with the judge-advocate as sole judge.

This was the first step toward meliorating the absolute despotism under which the free settlers had hitherto lived. Measures were also taken for removing the restrictions on commerce with Van Diemen's Land, and abolishing trade monopolies: but Governor Macquarie's protests against the interference or assistance of a council prevailed, and he was enabled to pursue his plans with that concentrated vigour which is the one advantage of an enlightened despotism.

To enumerate all the public works which, with no mean amount of skill and at great cost to the parent country, Governor Macquarie executed, would be neither useful nor amusing. It is sufficient to state, that, while he erected many substantial if not elegant buildings in the town of Sydney, he took care, by well-devised roads, to render available all the cultivable land and pastures to be found within as much of the territory as had been explored. The settlers imbibed his spirit of progress, and imitated his energy; flocks and herds increased to a great extent, although the sheep were for the greater part of an inferior breed, a mixture of the hairy Bengal and heavy-tailed Cape, whose wool was worthless for export. But M'Arthur, whose efforts had been neglected and repressed by previous governors, was steadily pursuing his great idea of naturalising the "noble race," or Spanish merino, on the plains of Australia. In December, 1812, the Sydney Gazette reports that ten rams of the merino breed, lately sold by auction from the flocks of John M'Arthur, Esq., produced upwards of 200 guineas; and that "several coats made entirely of the wool of New South Wales are now in this country, and are of most excellent quality." In 1852 a whole fleet of ships were required to convey the wool of Australia to the manufacturers of Yorkshire.

In 1813 occurred one of those droughts, the one drawback on what would otherwise be a course of unvarying prosperity, which are periodical in Australia. On this occasion it was not only the crops that suffered; the numerous flocks and herds were unable to find sufficient pasturage on plains which, when first discovered, were overspread with luxuriant herbage many feet in height. Necessity forced upon the colonists the idea of again searching for a passage across the Blue