CHAPTER XXXIII 



THE ECONOMICS OF THE STATION 



In the early days of Australian colonisation land had 

 little or no market value, and the first estates, like the 

 first estates in England after the Norman Conquest, were 

 granted as donations. Between the years 1810 and 1821 

 estates of from 3,000 to 5,000 acres were promised to 

 gentlemen-settlers by the Secretary of State in England 

 proportionally to the capital they carried out with them. 

 In 1821 Governor Macquarie drew up a scale regulating 

 the extent of land-grants by the apparent capital pos- 

 sessed by the immigrant, and ranging from 100 acres 

 for £100 to 2,000 acres for £3,000. The days of free gifts 

 had come to an end. When John McArthur, who 

 already held 7,500 acres, induced Lord Bathurst to 

 assign him 10,000 more, he was to pay for them at a 

 stipulated rate. 



All such acquisitions, however, were freehold, and, 

 though the earliest pastoralists, Johnson and Marsden, 

 vv^ere freeholders, and McArthur, the first great pastora- 

 list, was a freeholder, it is not with them that we are 

 here primarily concerned. It is in the at first unlicensed 

 and afterwards licensed occupiers of the waste lands of 

 the Crown lying outside of the recognised boundaries of 

 settlement that we are here interested. The pastoral 

 initiation took place within the pale, and from it the 

 stimulation issued, but the nisus of pastoral progress 

 operated without the bounds, on the vast stretches of un- 

 trodden land that were hungry for the advancing settler. 



A large number of the pioneer stations — those formed 

 in New South Wales from 1815, in Victoria from 1836, 



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