62 THE PASTORAL AGE IN AUSTRALASIA 



and willing to improve it. Yet Lang gives instances 

 to show that the old system was not completely dis- 

 used. On his own representations 640 acres, or a 

 square mile, were granted by Darling to a well-doing 

 family, and he implies that there were many like cases. 

 The grants were often meritorious. Alexander Berry 

 discovered and explored the Shoalhaven district about 

 the year 1820. With the aid of assigned convict ser- 

 vants he cut a channel from the lower end of the Shoal- 

 haven River, which had terminated in a sand-bar, to 

 the Crookhaven River. He thus made the Shoalhaven 

 navigable. He was fittingly rewarded. A few years 

 later Henry Dan gar, who had discovered, through a 

 prospector, the district of Armidale, was granted 700 

 acres, which became the nucleus of his Neotsfield 

 property on the Hunter River. Grants were not lightly 

 made in the early days, even by Governor Macquarie. 

 One of the best of the old settlers, J. Blaxland, uncle of 

 the discoverer of a track across the Blue Mountains, 

 was granted 8,000 acres on condition of expending 

 £6,000 in clearing and cultivating them.* Sometimes 

 grants were made wdth large public objects. Thus, 

 when Macquarie's system of making grants to selected 

 persons was done away with, and Commissioner Bigge's 

 report had drawn attention to Austraha as a field for 

 colonisation, very large grants were sometimes conceded. 

 These earliest grants were usually coupled with con- 

 ditions. Residence was required ; cultivation was 

 enforced ; reservation was made of timber for naval 

 purposes ; and a quit-rent was exacted. The quit- 

 rent was, of course, a peppercorn rental, and was at 

 first sixpence per 30 acres to emancipists and two 

 shillings per 100 acres to free settlers, but in both cases 

 only after ten years' occupancy. Governor Macquarie 

 slightly varied the amounts. His successor, Governor 

 Brisbane, withdrew the clause requiring cultivation, 

 and annexed it as a condition of grants that so many 



• See a despatch of Macquarie's to Lord Bathurst and a 

 letter of Blaxland, in the Mitchell MSS. vol. i. 



