"Familiar in their Mouths as HOUSEHOLD WORDS"- Shakespeare.
HOUSEHOLD WORDS.
A WEEKLY JOURNAL.
CONDUCTED BY CHARLES DICKENS.
| No. 298.] | SATURDAY, DECEMBER 8, 1855. | Price 2d. |
| Stamped 3d. |
THE OLD AND NEW SQUATTER.
THE OLD SQUATTER.
In the year eighteen hundred and thirty-five wonderful rumours spread themselves over the pleasant little island of Tasmania of new regions on the other side of Bass's Straits. At little more than a hundred and fifty miles distance, it was said, there spread beautiful pastures, green and fertile and beautiful woodlands, where the forest trees were so lightly and airily scattered, that the turf grew strong, and fresh, and sweet beneath them, as on the openest plains, or the fairest downs. These park-like expanses, stretching themselves for hundreds of miles in all directions, were here washed by the ocean, and here stretched at the feet of far- off blue-glancing mountains. Rivers and lively brooks wound invitingly through them, and occasional lakes gave thei rrefreshing charm to plains of most luxurious fertility.
Certain adventurous men who had assumed the profession of whalers, it was said, had for some time haunted these elysian shores; now skirting their lofty and more thickly-forested portions, and now anchoring in secluded creeks and bays, where they varied their ocean-life by hunting the kangaroo and the emu through the lovely pastures and the pleasant evergreen woods. So charming had they found this life, that they had resolved to enjoy it continually, and had therefore built huts on the shores of a fine bay, and had stealthily carried over in their whale-boats flocks and cattle, and all that was necessary for a jocund and plentiful Robinson Crusoe life.
But such fairylands, wherever they lie, are too alluring to remain long terræ incognitæ. King Arthur is supposed to have lain hidden some thousand years or more in the Isle of Avalon, waiting for the day when it shall be necessary to turn out and save his country, and as said country appears yet very able to save itself, he may, with our consent and that of posterity, probably stay there another thousand. But that is the only instance in which a man can keep such a desirable country to himself. Little Tasmania having been only inhabited by the white man about thirty years, was already become glutted with his flocks and herds. Fertile as were the valleys of Van Diemen's Land, a great portion of the island was occupied by wild, rugged mountains, and still more by dense and often barren forests. In these thirty years of European possession the population had reached the sum of forty thousand, of whom no less than seventeen thousand were England's expatriated criminals. The little more than twenty thousand free men already found themselves masters of eight hundred thousand sheep, which were palpably becoming too many for the capabilities of the pasturage, especially in summer, when the grass was scorched, and, as it were, dead.
The news of the new regions of fertility and boundlessness, on the other side, as the phrase became and remains, were, therefore, listened to with avidity. Not only did individuals hasten to get over, but companies were formed, to purchase vessels, and large tracts of country from the natives, when they had reached the promised land. First and foremost amongst these adventurers were John Pascoe Fawkner and his associates, who, procuring a ship from Sydney, steered across with their cattle and people from the heads of the Tamar in Van Diemen's Land to the present bay and site of Port Phillip.
But the spirit of enterprise was awake, thousands were on fire to expand themselves over limitless regions of fertility; the cry of the whole island was, to-morrow to fresh fields and pastures new; and others had contrived to outstrip the Fawkner party. As their vessel bearing, as they supposed, the nucleus of a new colony, made its way up the spacious bay of Port Phillip, a man descended from an eminence, now called Indented Head, and warned away those who had hoped to be the first patriarchs of the soil. This was one John Batman, who, with a company of fifteen others, including a Mr. Gellibrand—an eminent lawyer of Van Diemen's Land, destined to perish by the tomahawks of the natives, and give his name to several hills in the new country—had not only outstripped Fawkner, but had purchased a tract of six hundred thousand acres of the natives.
Thus he came down on the people of the little ship Enterprise, not only as a prior arrival, but as a proprietor of the ground. But John Fawkner, who was destined to cut
