*

the blacks. Doubtless this hostility was owing, in the first instance, to the white man's aggressions on their territory, and to the violence and injustice with which the settlers often acted towards them. It is hard to say how far civilized nations are justified in the means they take to establish their authority in barbarous regions; but wherever the white man plants his foot, a baptism of blood is almost sure to follow before he establishes his claim to possession. The quarrel in Port Philip soon became a struggle between pillage and murder on the one hand, and ruthless barbarity and cold-blooded massacre on the other. Bread poisoned with arsenic was purposely left in the way of the blacks-the waterholes near which they were likely to congregate were poisoned in the same deadly manner,-regular parties were made up to shoot them. The rifle, the poison, and the rum of the white man, were more than a match for the wooden weapons and the cunning of the black; and, within the precincts of the colony, the aboriginal inhabitants are now a broken-spirited and degraded race.

In 1836, the Port Philip district was in such a flourishing condition, that the New South Wales government did it the honour of annexing the territory to their own, and sent a magistrate to assert their supremacy, who called a meeting of the inhabitants, at which the sites of Melbourne, Williamstown, Geelong, and Portland were confirmed.

In 1837, the population amounted to three thousand; and Sir Richard Burke (the greatest and best of all the Australian governors) paid the colony a visit. He further confirmed the selection of sites for townships, and directed that their sale should commence immediately. Melbourne was laid out, surveyed, and divided into allotments, which were put up for sale. A reign of ruinous speculation in land now commenced. With an unlimited extent of land at its disposal, the government sold it only in small quantities at a time. These were speedily bought up by speculators, by whom they were sold and resold many times; so that an allotment which in 1837 had sold for £50, rose to £4,000 in 1839. The titles fell into inextricable confusion; and the whole proceeding ended in a commercial crisis and a general crash in 1840. Land fell to onetenth of its former price; and many were ruined by this deteriora

* The term native is applied to a white person born in the colony. "The blacks" is the only appellation by which the aborigines are designated.

† I can vouch for the truth of the following incident, which occurred about twelve years ago, when the colonial government was just beginning to put down such barbarities with a strong hand. I have often seen B., who is still living.

B. and M. made an excursion on some business affairs into the Eumeralla district, about two hundred miles from Melbourne. Being at a loss for amusement, they set off one day to shoot a few blacks." They did not meet any of the men, but came upon an encampment of women and children; some of whom they maltreated and butchered. When they had finished this exploit, M. saw that they had been observed by a white stockrider who was passing. He promptly mounted a fleet and strong horse, rode to Melbourne in twenty-four hours, paid some visits, and returned home at his leisure. The miscreants were arrested and brought up for trial. M., however, brought forward witnesses who proved his presence in Melbourne twenty-four hours after the time he was alleged to have been an actor in the butchery at the Eumeralla ; and as it was considered impossible that he could have been at the two places within such a short space of time, the trial was quashed, and the prisoners liberated.

tion in the value of their property. Others were reduced to great distress, and had to seek homes in the adjoining colonies.

After two years of great depression, matters began to mend; and by 1845 the colony was in a healthier and better condition than ever. The population had increased to 28,000; the imports to £248,000, and the exports (principally of wool and tallow) to £464,000 per annum; the two latter having doubled within a year. The squatters had found it more profitable to boil down their sheep and export the tallow, than to sell them at a merely nominal price.

I shall now look back a few years to trace the progress of the land question.

The original settlers took possession, as squatters, of as much land as they found necessary for the pasturage of their flocks and herds. This was, indeed, the most natural arrangement at the commencement of the colony, nor had the government power to order it otherwise. Those who wanted to buy land paid five shillings an acre. Things went on very well in this way; the squatters first occupying the land and then buying it for themselves, or else giving place to others and moving back upon unoccupied tracts. And so they would have continued to do, were it not for the interference of the home government, influenced by the colonizing schemes of Mr. Gibbon Wakefield. The plan of this gentleman was to sell the lands by auction at the high upset price of £1 per acre, and thus secure the land in the hands of men of property, and keep the colonists concentrated. The proceeds of the sales were to be devoted to the introduction of free emigrants, so that the settlers of capital might be well supplied with labour at low rates. By dint of puffing, false statements, and denouncing all opponents as interested parties, he gained the attention of the English press and government to his plan for making his colony of South Australia a "model colony," he obtained a charter, and formed a company for carrying out his projects. But after a short time of apparent prosperity, his plan proved a complete failure. Capitalists found it did not pay to give a pound an acre for land at the other side of the globe, and renounce all the comforts of home and civilization in order to occupy it; while those who were really fit for colonists, hard-working industrious men with small means, could not afford to pay such a price. Very little land was sold, beyond what was bought up at the first rush; there were, therefore, no funds to send home for labourers, and wages consequently rose to such a height that agricultural pursuits were abandoned, and the colonists spread over the country to find pasture for their stock on land for which they paid nothing. And thus, results exactly opposite to the anticipated concentration and cheap labour were arrived at.

But as yet the fallacy of the scheme was not detected. When Mr. G. Wakefield and his coadjutors saw that it did not work well, they addressed the home government to the following effect :— "How can our settlement attract emigrants, while the adjacent colony of New South Wales is selling land at five shillings per acre? Raise land there to the same price as ours, and we shall then get on smoothly together." Acting on this suggestion, the government, which seems to have placed implicit confidence in Mr. Wake

field's views, directed Governor Bourke to raise the price of land in New South Wales to one pound per acre. He, however, foreseeing the bad results that would follow, acted on his own responsibility and continued the former upset price of five shillings.

Unfortunately for the colony, Governor Bourke was in 1838 superseded by Sir George Gipps; and the Wakefield party renewing their demands, the home government directed that the land in New South Wales should be raised to twelve shillings per acre; at the same time instructing the governor to take measures for checking the sale of land even at twelve shillings, if he should observe that the extension of the population took place with a rapidity beyond what was desirable, and that the want of labour continued to be seriously felt.

But nothing was gained by the change. People would not pay the high price for land; settlers continued to spread over the country as squatters; the land-sales almost entirely ceased, and so did emigration.

Still the home government was prepared to go farther in backing up Mr. Wakefield; and in 1842 they passed an Act (5 and 6 Vict. c. 36) "for regulating the sale of waste land belonging the crown in the Australian colonies." The substance of this Act was, that no lands must be held unless they had been bought or were held by licence; the lowest upset price to be £1 per acre; leases to be granted for not longer than twelve months; and half of the proceeds of the land-sales to be applied towards introducing emigrants from home. It was left to the governor to raise the price of any land he thought worth more than £1 per acre, and to issue such regulations as he might see fit for the occupation of waste lands.

On

Empowered by this Act, Sir George Gipps issued a code of regulations, reducing the size of " runs to twenty square miles. these he imposed an annual licence of £10; and by assessments on stock and other regulations he did all in his power to force the squatters to buy their runs; which it was clearly impossible they could do, at the high price at which alone land was legally soldsince a "reduced" run of twenty square miles would require a sum of upwards of £12,000 to purchase it.

As might be expected, these regulations met with strong opposition; not only from the squatters, but from the rest of the community, who foresaw in the downfall of the squatters their own ruin. They formed an association for the vindication of their rights; claimed fixity of tenure by lease, with right of pre-emption; and refused to pay taxes. The whole country was convulsed; meetings were held in Sydney and in Melbourne, at which the speakers advocated total separation from the mother country, if the obnoxious regulations were not rescinded.

After the retirement of Sir George Gipps in 1847, the government went from one extreme to another. Instead of refusing, as heretofore, to make any concession, they passed an order in council which virtually handed over the whole colony into the hands of the squatters. They were granted leases, (with the right of pre-emption, for 320 acres or upwards, at one pound per acre without auction) and at the termination the lease they might claim compensation for im

provement. The rent, which was calculated on a poll-tax of 4,000 sheep and 600 head of cattle as a minimum number, effectually excluded all small capitalists from the occupation of the land; the upset price of one pound per acre remained the same.

However, notwithstanding these regulations and changes, the district of Port Philip continued to thrive, and in 1849 the population amounted to 60,000. They began to feel it a grievance to have their legislation carried on at Sydney, 700 miles off; especially as the government of New South Wales was not very scrupulous in appropriating the Port Philip revenues to its own purposes.

It was not long ere their desire was granted; and on the 2nd of July, 1851, Port Philip was proclaimed an independent colony, under the name of Victoria.

About a month before that date, gold was discovered in New South Wales by Mr. Hargreaves, an old Californian, who had been led to suspect its presence by the similarity of the country to California. The colonists could not have been more astonished if a magazine of gunpowder had exploded beneath them, than they were at finding that the ground they had been walking over contained such treasures. I have been told that shepherds and others had found nuggets of gold long before the public discovery, and that some canny people got rich in this way, but kept the secret to themselves.

In September, 1851, two months after the independence of the colony was proclaimed, it was disclosed to the world and to the astonished Victorians that their country was richer in gold than any other known spot of the earth. All the able-bodied men rushed off forthwith to the diggings, in the vicinity of Mount Alexander; thousands poured in from the adjacent colonies; and when the report, in a highly exaggerated form, reached Europe, ships could not be found sufficient to convey the multitudes who were anxious to share in the golden harvest. Wages, and the price of all articles of consumption, reached unprecedented rates, and the import trade more than quadrupled.

In four months after gold was discovered, it was procured at the rate of £250,000 worth monthly. Government organized a large body of mounted troopers for the protection of life and property at the gold fields, and appointed commissioners for the administration of justice. The expenses of this new department were defrayed by a monthly tax of thirty shillings on each digger. About three months after the imposition of this license, the government announced that they were about to double it; but this measure met with such decided opposition that they withdrew it immediately.

This readiness of the government to impose an exorbitant tax, and the subsequent weakness of withdrawing it as soon as opposition arose, had a bad effect on such a mixed class as the diggers. It lessened their respect for the consideration and firmness of the authorities, and gave them a great idea of their own strength.

During 1852, the excitement of the gold fever continued on the increase. Immigrants poured into Melbourne at the rate of 10,000 weekly; and much misery was caused by the crowding of such

multitudes into a country totally unprepared for them, and by the fact that thousands of these strangers were entirely unfit for the kind of work required of them in their new circumstances. Of this I have, myself, seen some lamentable instances. I knew a man who was employed as cook for thirty shillings a week, and who had given up a situation of £500 per annum, in London, to better himself in Australia; I have seen ex-Manchester cotton-spinners, and army and navy officers, working at the hardest manual labour; and, on one occasion, I met in the bush a navy lieutenant driving a dray for a digger and his wife, who allowed him only his diet for his services. He had lived for a time in Dublin in the days of his prosperity, and spoke regretfully of the delights of a lounge up Grafton-street on a fine afternoon, of evenings at the Theatre Royal, and of suppers at Jude's.

The treasures obtained at the diggings by men unaccustomed to such a flood of wealth, were squandered in the most reckless manner. Melbourne was full of lucky diggers, whose only object was to get rid of their money as fast as possible. Some ate bank-notes between slices of bread and butter, as sandwiches ; others stood at the corners of the streets with tubs of brandy, offering drink to the passers-by; or drove about the streets, drinking and shouting, in carriages for which they paid at the rate of twenty pounds per day. It was an insult to offer change to one of these gentlemen, who would fling a handfull of money to the shopman and tell him to take as much as he liked.

The publicans were the chief winners from this wild extravagance. Many of these have retired, after being six or twelve months in business, with fortunes of £40,000 or £50,000. I have known many instances of men spending £800 or £900 at a public house in two or three weeks. It was not alone by diggers that this madness was practised; the high wages received by workmen vanished, to a great extent, in the same manner. At that time labourers were paid fifteen shillings for a day's work; carpenters, twenty-eight shillings; bricklayers, thirty shillings; and plasterers even three pounds per day. The recipients of these enormous wages were often worse off (owing to the ruinous way in which they spent their money) than if they had been working at home for low wages and living on bread and water.

Now was the time to throw land freely into the market, and open a rational and profitable way to invest these unusual and ill-spent earnings. Millions of money would, doubtless, have been thus invested, had the land been easily attainable. I have no doubt that thousands who went to the colony with the intention of settling, left it in disgust on finding it almost impossible to obtain a tenure of the soil.

We have seen that the orders in council of 1847, besides fixing the high rate of one pound per acre, virtually handed the country over to the squatters. The consequence was that every acre of land that was sold, even at that high rate, was sold against the will of this class. And as they were the dominant party in the Legislative Council and in the Executive, they threw every obstacle in the way of free sale. With millions of acres at their disposal,