Hard-working small landholders as heroes saving South Australia colony in 1840s after land speculation crunch
S.T. Gill's view of Rundle Street, Adelaide, looking east from King William Street, in 1845, portrays some of the hard-working elements of South Australian society who succeeded by effort not by wealth or big land holdings.
Image courtesy Art Gallery of South Australia
The heroes of 1840s European settlement of South Australia were hardworking frugal men and their families – not the land speculators who bought preliminary orders in England for land in South Australia, and the special survey system that enabled so much of the best land to be monopolised by the proprietors of the South Australia Company and other absentee capitalists.
That was he view of English lawyer and journalist Samuel Sidney in his 1852 book The three colonies of Australia, (1852). Sidney, neither “an ivory-towered theorist, nor an investor”, didn’t join the publicists who puffed up colonisation or “hoped to gain by perpetuating the artificial boom in land sale”.
Sidney disagreed with the theorists following Edward Gibbon Wakefield that each colonial landowner needed large wealth. Middle-class emigrants to South Australia came under Wakefield's advice “to labour with their heads, not with their hands”.
Sidney’s heroes, instead, use their muscles. These were the hardworking frugal men, who, landing in South Australia without a penny, accumulated enough by labour to buy a good 80-acre section. By growing vegetables and wheat, rearing pigs and poultry, with the help of their wives and families, steadily thrived. They made money, in spite of the Wakefield system that intended to retain them for an indefinite time as labourers at three shillings a day.
Ironically, these people often benefitted rom being able to pasture their livestock on land belonging to absentee landlords. Where labourers couldn’t afford to buy a whole section, they clubbed together and divided one. These cotter farmers and a few sheep squatters saved the colony from being “totally abandoned when the inevitable crisis came” from the collapse of land speculation.
Sidney's special value was his vignettes of private individuals who came to South Australia with little wealth. One example was the owner of a 80-acre section, with 12 children. He arrived with a little furniture, a few Scottish highland implements, “a gun or two, a very little ready money, and several barrels of oatmeal and biscuit.” His pre-selected section was on the side of steep hills, with no road and 10 miles from the town.
Fellow Scots lent him oxen, dragged his goods over the hills to his land, and camped the first night on the ground, under a few blankets and canvass. The next days the family cut trees for timber to build a house of one long low room, surrounded by a dry ditch to drain off the rain, and divided into partitions by blankets. Water from the river below was fetched in a bucket by a daughter. A garden of vegetables, including tobacco and water melons, was laid out almost as soon as the house. Until their poultry gave eggs and chickens, the sons’ guns supplied plenty of quail, ducks, and parrots. In idle time, maize, wheat, and oats was cropped and eggs, chickens, potatoes, kale, and maize gave sustenance and something to send to market.
Sidney noted: “Labour cost nothing, fuel nothing, rent nothing, keeping up appearances nothing; no one dressed on weekdays in broadcloth – except the head of the house. First a few goats, and then a cow, eventually a fair herd of stock, were accumulated. Butter and vegetables found their way to Adelaide; and, while the kid-glove gentry were ruining themselves, the bare legged boys of the Highland gentleman were independent, if not rich. The daughters, who were pretty, proud, and useful, have married well. In another generation families like this will be among the wealthiest in the colony”.
While two thirds of the revenue from South Australian land sales were “frittered away in London on publicity and less worthy purposes", Sidney believed “that every shilling taken from industry of settlers like this Scotch family, under pretence of supplying labour, was money very unprofitably invested, as it would have fructified more rapidly in their own hard hands”.