292 THE PASTORAL AGE IN AUSTRALASIA 



Pioneering Reminiscences. Nowhere else, till quite re- 

 cently, was there to be found so ample a narrative of 

 the discovery of new country (as that of the Clarence 

 River District) and its prompt settlement, the taking 

 up and the forming of stations in Queensland and New 

 South Wales, their abandonmeiit and resumption, their 

 vicissitudes and passage from hand to hand, together 

 with some attractive pictures of squatters' homes. 

 Two other works belong to the same historical class. 

 J. J. Knight's hi the Early Days is richly charged with 

 historical detail, and Ms contributions to the jubilee 

 number of the Queenslander in 1909 form almost a 

 complete history of the settlement of Queensland, 

 What he omits, for Northern Queensland, Edward 

 Palmer fills in, and the latter writer adds to the value 

 of his historical sketches by descriptive pictures of 

 typical bush figures — the superintendent, the overseer, 

 the stockman, the boundary -rider, the shearer, and 

 other station types. 



A volume that has a still higher value and almost a 

 greater authority than these is part of the inconsiderable 

 literature of squatting pubhshed in Victoria. In 1853, 

 a few months before he retired from the governorship 

 of Victoria, Lieutenant-Governor Latrobe despatched a 

 circular to the Victorian squatters, inviting them to 

 furnish him with detailed accounts of their experiences — 

 their acquisition of their runs and settlement on them, 

 their stocking of them, their economics, their success 

 or failure, and above all (for this seems a prominent 

 feature in all cases) their relations with the aborigines. 

 Replies were promptly returned by almost sixty squatters 

 — some of them brief but significant, most of them 

 moderately full and richly instructive, and one of them 

 (written, as he confesses, by an uneducated man) of 

 great length and importance. These precious memorials 

 of the pastoral age in Victoria remained for more than 

 thirty years in the Victorian archives, where they lay 

 undisturbed, save by G. W. Rusden, who ransacked 

 them for evidence of the relations between the squatters 



