and afterwards reduced to £2 an acre. And all this was done repeatedly against the advice of the official surveyors, on the principle that it was the duty of the governor to wring the uttermost farthing from the settler.
The land mania was followed by a crash of universal insolvency. Land became unsaleable; live stock fell to nominal prices; and the importers of British and foreign luxuries had nothing better to offer their creditors than the dishonoured bills of their customers.
It was in 1841, in the commencement of this crisis of insolvency, that the British Parliament, in utter ignorance of colonial affairs, under the influence of a band of stock-jobbing theorists, attempted to prop up the insolvent colony of South Australia by an act which fixed the minimum price of land in Australia at £1 an acre.
In 1843, when the elective Legislative Council commenced its labours, the dissatisfaction of the colonists with the fixed minimum price of £1 an acre had become universal.
The wealthy parties who had expected their free grants, and their purchases at five shillings an acre, to be augmented in value by the increased price, were disappointed—the speculators who, following the example of the South Australians, had purchased large estates in the hope of realising large profits, by laying out paper towns and villages, were either insolvent or encumbered with tracts of useless waste land, unsaleable and unprofitable—the small settlers were deeply discontented with the impediments thrown in the way of purchasing small farms in good agricultural districts—while the great pastoral proprietors, or squatters, who were many of them also landowners in the settled districts, were worried—(no other word will express the policy of Sir George Gipps) by taxes, regulations, and restrictions imposed, repealed, and reimposed in a most arbitrary manner, with a view of compelling the purchase of their occupations at the ruinous price of £1 an acre.
Live stock became absolutely valueless; cattle were allowed to rove wild, unbranded on the hills; and sheep which had cost 30s. a piece were unsaleable at 1s. 6d., until it occurred to an ingenious gentleman to boil them down for tallow, by which the minimum price was raised to 3s. Land sales had ceased; the fund, which had previously imported labouring emigrants to take the place of convicts, was exhausted. The pastoral interest, whose fortunes had already been seriously injured by the depreciation of their stock, determined to resist the governor in his attempt to regulate their taxation, and to virtually confiscate their property on the fiat of himself and his irresponsible representatives, the Crown Commissioners.
