THE LAND QUESTION AND THE EARLY SALES 209 



and the surveys of Melbourne and Williamstown have been already 

 narrated. The details of the first land sale in a city that has grown 

 to the importance of Melbourne are worth preserving, and they are 

 given in full in an appendix at the end of this volume. They will 

 probably serve in the future, as they have done in the past, as the 

 text of many arguments about the right of the community against 

 the individual to the " unearned increment ". 



The 1st of June, 1837, may be regarded as the starting-point of 

 Melbourne proper. Prior to that date all the residents in the un- 

 named settlement on the banks of the Yarra were contumacious 

 trespassers, flouting a proclamation by the Grown. Their offence 

 had been condoned by the local officials, and a reluctant consent 

 had been wrung from the British Cabinet to their remaining in 

 possession if the requisite equivalent in coin was forthcoming. 



The total population of the Port Phillip district at this date 

 could not have exceeded 500, the number stated by Sir Bichard 

 Bourke in his message to the Legislative Council in the same 

 month, but it was receiving such daily increase that by the 31st of 

 December, 1837, it was officially returned at 1,264. Probably more 

 than three-fourths of those present at the date of the first land sale 

 had come from Tasmania, and none of them were capitalists in the 

 sense attached to the word to-day. Those who had possessed 

 money had invested most of it in stock and in the hire of the means 

 of transit. Their ambition did not take the form of a desire for 

 urban allotments, though possibly a few of them saw a tolerably 

 certain prospect of increased values as a result of the rapid immi- 

 gration. The chief buyers were those who had come with the 

 business object of building up a centre of supply for the outlying 

 pastoralist. The crowd of some 150 persons gathered around Mr. 

 Hoddle's extemporised rostrum mainly consisted of men who only 

 desired a lawful footing on which they might raise a home for 

 themselves and their belongings. If there was any speculative 

 element it was probably in the Sydney buyers, who, personally or by 

 agents, secured about a dozen out of the 100 half-acre allotments 

 which the Governor authorised to be offered. 



Mounted on the trunk of a fallen tree Mr. Hoddle, having 

 expatiated on the consideration shown by Sir Bichard Bourke in 



VOL. I. 14 



