the so far successful speculations of the South Australian interest, became inoculated with most extravagant ideas of the value of wild lands, and of the necessity of asserting, with the utmost rigour, the rights of the crown to everything worth or supposed to be worth a shilling. There were many excuses for an infatuation which has since cost colonists dear in Australia, New Zealand, and Natal, and induced this country to make expensive wars on the Maories and Boers, besides keeping up expensive colonising establishments at such wretched outposts as the Falkland Islands.[1]
In the new colonies of South Australia and Port Phillip, enormous prices were given by infatuated speculators for town and country lots, and for a time enormous profits, or apparent profits, were realised. A land mania very soon infected New South Wales. This mania was supported by an influx of emigrants from England, with capital and without experience. Into the details of this mania we shall enter more precisely in a future chapter. It is enough for our present information to observe that after a time all ranks and ages were carried away by the infatuation. Everything rose in price; the colonial treasury was overflowing with the produce of land sales. These funds the governor placed with the banks. The banks, over supplied with capital, extended their accommodation, and credit became almost unlimited. Imports rose enormously. To those who did not look below the surface, there were all the outward and visible signs of prosperity produced by the change from grants to sales. In 1837, the last year of Sir Richard Bourke's government, the land sales produced upwards of £120,000.
It was about this time that we see a sign of the fatal idea of the intrinsic value of wild land which had begun to make way in the Colonial Office, in the refusal of the Secretary of State for the Colonies to permit a meritorious pilot, who had rendered essential services, to be rewarded according to colonial custom by a grant of fifty acres. The secretary, Lord Stanley, saw no reason for so bestowing her Majesty's land, the said land being worth nothing to the state, although much to the pilot. From that time forward rigid adherence to a theory substituted ingratitude, or money payments, for the previous convenient payment of fifty-acre grants.
- ↑ By valuing wild land at a farming price, it became easy to put a Governor on the estimates instead of a lieutenant with a file of marines.
