Governor Phillip's commission, acknowledged the existence of the settlement of Port Phillip, many thousand sheep and cattle were feeding over the finest plains that had yet been discovered in the vicinity of a natural port. These "unauthorised squatters," as they were called in a despatch, poured into the new land with such rapidity that the home government was very unwillingly obliged to sanction the measures for their recognition and settlement which had been taken by Governor Bourke.
At the same time that the Tasmanians were swarming across Bass's Straits, and the pastors of New South Wales were marching overland with their flocks to this and other new lands of promise, in England a commission had been issued, an act of Parliament obtained, and a charter granted for colonising South Australia (the unexplored tract of land, traversed by a river which the adventurous Sturt had descended and ascended in 1829, and named South Australia), on the "sufficient price" principle propounded by Gibbon Wakefield in his "Letter from Sydney."
The history of the origin, rise, progress, fall, and revival of South Australia, will be found duly chronicled in the chapter devoted to that province. We refer to it here in order to show how the speculations of the South Australian colonisers affected the progress of New South Wales and Port Phillip.
Their scheme was floated on the success of New South Wales and the failure of Swan River.
Give us, they said to the legislature and the stock-jobbing public, the territory we mark on the map; the right of imposing a "sufficient price" on the land, and of applying it to the importation of labour; and we will render labour cheap by the exclusion of labourers from the possession of land, concentrate society, introduce agriculture as scientific as that of Great Britain, in addition to the productions of Spain and Italy, reap all the profits that have been reaped in New South Wales and Van Diemen's Land, without the taint of convict labour, or "the dispersion of the semi-barbarous squatter;" and we will produce a state of society so prosperous and so charming, that the neighbouring cheap-priced convict colonies shall hasten to follow our example.
As they desired so it was granted to them; and under "South Australia" we shall tell how bands of youths and maidens, and old men who had not gained wisdom with their grey hairs, went singing in triumph to sit down in a sandy plain and spend two years in gambling for town lots and village lots, with their own and with borrowed paper
