THE GENESIS OF THE STATION 63 



convict-servants should be employed by the settler, 

 who thus relieved the Treasury of the burden of their 

 maintenance ; and the amount of the grant was in 

 proportion to the number of convicts employed. This 

 method of disposing of lands by granting them on a 

 quit-rental was soon discovered to be illusory. As in 

 all countries where they have existed, such rents could 

 not always be collected. None were collected before 

 1822 ; on much of the four million acres of land aUenated 

 by 1831 they could not be collected at all. In 1836 

 the quit-rents in New South Wales and Van Diemen's 

 Land, though they were light — sometimes as low as an 

 eighth of a penny per acre — were in arrears. In 1840 

 Governor Gipps endeavoured to enforce the payment 

 of arrears, and he Avas accused of collecting them harshly. 

 Mr. (afterwards Sir Charles) Cowper prayed the stern 

 Governor to suspend the issue of distress warrants. 

 By December, 1843, these rents were in arrears to the 

 extent of £55,000. Yet it was on these terms that the 

 great landholders held their vast domains — the Aus- 

 tralian Agricultural Company (with its milhon acres), 

 the Van Diemen's Land Company, the Peel River 

 Company, and the princely occupants of the Liverpool 

 Plains, where eight pastoralists held 1,747,840 acres, 

 nine held 311,040, five held more than a million, and 

 one (Ben Boyd) held 381,000, paying an annual quit- 

 rent of £80. 



These men and these companies were virtually OAvners 

 of their vast domains, as the fief-holders were in me- 

 dieval Europe, and the insignificant quit-rents they 

 paid were the equivalent of the peppercorn rental, the 

 various dues, and the militarj^ service the vassals owed 

 their suzerains. But not from these and their tenures, 

 of whatever nature, sprang the " runholders " — the 

 great pastoralists who eventually covered the larger 

 part of Australia with their flocks and herds. 



With these the pastoral industry, indeed, originated. 

 There Marsden bred his sheep, and there McArthur 

 initiated the whole subsequent pastoral development. 



