CHAPTER XI 



THE PIONEER SQUATTER 



After the middle twenties many young men pushed 

 out into the wild, sometimes 200 miles to the westward, 

 to a new country on the banks of an intermittent stream. 

 They had no choice. The only land remaining in the 

 nineteen counties was inferior land that could not be 

 purchased but at a prohibitive figure. Their single 

 alternative was to push on into the far interior and take 

 up land under an annual hcense for pastoral occupation. 

 They had come out with capital for the purpose of 

 setting up as gentleman-farmers, but for that the 

 country was not yet sufficiently advanced, and the 

 would-be agriculturists sank back a degree in the scale 

 and became pastorahsts or squatters perforce. 



Some of the immigrants had themselves been gentle- 

 man-farmers, or were the sons of landholders. Others 

 had been unfortunate in mercantile speculations or felt 

 the pressure of hard times (for it A\as in the decade that 

 followed the great European war), and had decided to 

 risk the remains of their fortune in a new country, while 

 others still were doubtless actuated by a spirit of 

 adventure. 



At what time did these new pastoralists receive the 

 name of ' squatters ' ? They never assumed it, but 

 when they wanted a name, they called themselves, like 

 the migrants from Van Diemen's Land, "adventurers." 

 The term, squatter, had in New South Wales originally 

 the same signification as in the United States. Travel- 

 ling to Bathurst in the year 1836, Darwin passed " a 



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