104 THE PASTORAL AGE IN AUSTRALASIA 



unaltered till 1816, when Governor Macquarie settled 

 it at £10, preferably paid in money.* The indenture- 

 system, we may add, was maintained to the last. 



When the convict had gained a ticket-of-leave, he 

 could work for wages ; the slave had risen to be a serf. 

 Many of them were mechanics, and in that caj)acity 

 they often erected the whole of a station buildings. Dr. 

 Lang tells of a house where all the brickmaking and 

 bricklaying, the carpentry and joinery, the plastering 

 and shingling, and perhaps the cabinet-making and 

 upholsterj?^, had been executed by assigned convict 

 servants. f The assigned convicts were also largely and 

 for long shepherds. Probably, most of the shepherds 

 in New South Wales during its first half-century were 

 convicts, and as late as 1852, in Van Diemen's Land, 

 Governor Sir W. Denison, a great believer in trans- 

 portation, asked : to whom but to convicts could 

 colonists look to cultivate their lands, tend their flocks, 

 and reap their harvest ? 



Yet the convict shepherds of the early days were 

 the chief agents in breeding trouble with the natives. 

 They drove their masters' flocks into locations where 

 their rights to encroach were, sometimes fiercely, dis- 

 puted by the blacks. It was not only aggressions on 

 the land that they committed. The reports of settlers 

 (communicated to Lieutenant-Governor Latrobe and 

 now reprinted) assert that the real cause of the quarrels 

 between blacks and whites was always the same. The 

 convict servants or shepherds trafficked with the fins, 

 and, having made a bargain, failed to give the articles 

 promised. Or, " they were over-familiar with " the 

 blacks, " for the sole purpose of getting their women." 

 Hut-keepers and stock-keepers took lubras from their 

 camp and brought them to their own huts, and then 

 shot the husbands. Sometimes they shot the blacks 

 for sport. A ticket-of-leave man was not content 

 with shooting blacks on his employer's station. He 



* BiGQE, Report, 1822, pp. 74-7. 

 t Account, etc., i. 248. 



