We are willing to admit Gibbon Wakefield's first experiment in colonisation was perfectly legitimate, although the manner in which he hunted down all who ventured to question his views was as inexcusable as the recklessness with which he sacrificed established colonies in order to prop up his model speculation. For like the Bourbons, he forgets nothing and learns nothing, fiercely implacable, he has neither candour, nor truth, nor humility. In 1849, in order to float off his Canterbury colonisation scheme, he published "The Art of Colonisation," a volume of 500 pages, which, as regards the land question, is merely an amplification, in a diffuse style, with the same arguments and even the same illustrations, of the theories so fervidly propounded in 1829. Not a sentence, not a word, does the book contain of Mr. Wakefield's twenty years' experience, during which he had directed the colonisation, with successive variations in detail, but always on the "sufficient price," or "hired labour price" system, of four colonies—South Australia, Wellington, Nelson, New Plymouth, beside planning half a dozen others. Not a hint that the "Wakefield theory" had, in every colony in which it had been attempted, ruined all those who put faith in it, and been acknowledged to be absurd and impracticable by the intimate friends and brothers of the theorist.
In New South Wales the year 1830 was marked by a change from the complicated system of sales at quit rents and free grants to uniform system of sale by auction at 5s. an acre, which, in effect, except for choice lots, was a fixed price of 5s. an acre, for practically there was no competition. Whether this change was brought about by the ventilation of Mr. Wakefield's theories, it is impossible to say.
The announcement of land for sale by auction at the minimum upset price of 5s. an acre soon brought money into the government chest. Those who had occupied land of a superior quality near their grants purchased their occupations; others rounded off their grants, and took in slices of land for the sake of uniformity, for a natural boundary for pasture, or for access to water; others, who had not had either influence or patience, or time to wade through the dreary forms of Governor Darling's land board, indulged in freehold .as soon as it became a mere matter of money. This was especially the case with a considerable section of the emancipist population.
Governor Bourke had distributed a number of ten-acre grants on the alluvial flats of rivers among poor prisoners of good conduct before the sales by auction were sanctioned.
