the Port Phillip district the increase of flocks and herds had been so rapid as to place the proprietary of squatting runs in great difficulties for want of labourers; and they had consequently formed an association, made a subscription, and imported about two thousand expirees and ticket-of-leave holders from Van Diemen, to supply their urgent demand for pastoral servants. With a view of controlling these whitewashed criminals, the Legislature of New South Wales (which until 1850 extended over Port Phillip) proposed to subject the Van Diemonian importations to a system of registration and surveillance similar to that to which the ticket-of-leave men were subjected who had originally been sentenced to New South Wales.
The home government declined to sanction a colonial legislative act, which would have made such a registration legal.[1]
But although pastoral proprietors, anxious to preserve and multiply their fleecy treasures, were willing to accept the services of convicts, just as some of them had endeavoured to introduce Feejee cannibals, by a new slave trade, and Pagan Chinese, there was a large free population in the towns of Australia which was satisfied to depend on free emigrants for the supply of labour, and determined to resist the return to convictism. With the educated and wealthy opponents of white slavery were banded the labouring classes, who naturally were just as anxious to keep wages up as their employers were to keep them down.
It was then—in the commencement of a contest between that portion of the population resident in towns or engaged in agriculture, which, on moral and political grounds, objected to the renewal of transportation, backed by the labouring classes, who were equally averse to the reduction of wages and to the vexatious police regulations incident to the system of prisoner labour which affected all labouring men, and the squatters, to whom cheap and obedient labour was essential if they were to retain their wealthy and dominant position while the respective parties had scarcely marshalled their forces, that a despatch arrived from Mr. Gladstone, in which he requested the governor "to submit to the consideration of the council whether they would not accept, in part supply of the labour market, a renewal of a modified system of transportation." Mr. Gladstone had already determined to discontinue transportation to Van Diemen's Land for two years, pending the arrangement of a better system; and also to found, on northern Australia, a new penal settlement.
- ↑ One of the first acts of the Legislative Assemblies created by the Australian Reform Bill of 1850, was to pass similar acts levelled against Van Diemonian expirees.
