During the years between 1831 and 1836, great encouragement to purchase land was held out by the facility for obtaining the labour of prisoners without favour on fixed terms; by the large purchases of produce by the commissariat; and the activity with which the governor prosecuted road-making wherever land was settled. The result was a rapid and annual accession of funds to the colonial Treasury.
The news of the avidity with which both colonists and absentees purchased wild land, which the government imagined it had been giving away for nothing, or for a nominal price, ever since the foundation of the colony, appears to have inflamed the imagination of the colonial department of Downing-street; and very soon the Colonial Office began to think and act as if it had discovered an exhaustless treasure, which could be sold in any quantity and at any price they chose to fix. Just as in 1845, when all the British public was mad on railways, there were parties who believed that because one or two lines paid 10 per cent., all lines would pay 10 per cent., and therefore wished government to buy up and complete the whole net-works of iron roads, and pay off the national debt with the profits.
In like manner, in the course of a few years after the publication of Mr. Wakefield's theories, the whole colonial possessions of Great Britain were surveyed, on maps only, priced, and offered for sale at sums per acre in which intrinsic value formed no element of the calculation.
The one part of the Wakefield theory for which the author deserved credit, was the application of part of the purchase money of land to the introduction of free emigrants in equal numbers of both sexes. Thus, preparation was made for substituting free for convict labour.
The first five years of land sales at 5s. an acre, including the acreage sold by Governors Brisbane and Darling, and paid for in those years, amounted to £176,435, of which the last year amounted to £89,380. During the same period £31,028 only was expended in introducing 3,079 emigrants.
But in 1835 two events occurred which materially affected the colonising fortunes of Australia. A party of stockowners from the Island of Van Diemen's Land, in which the accessible pastures had been nearly all appropriated, crossed Bass's Straits, and established themselves on the shores of Port Phillip Bay, on the River Yarra Yarra; about the same time squatters, pushing on westward over the plains of Maneroo, gradually extended their pastures overland, while whalers settled at Portland Bay in the same district. And before the government of New South Wales, within which this territory was included under
