332 THE PASTORAL AGE IN AUSTRALASIA 



squatters admit, its operation was beneficial. According 

 to Nathaniel Bartley,* it did most good and least harm 

 in the Clarence River district, and the adjoining river 

 basins. There, he says, " was no clashing between the 

 interests of selectors and those of pastoral tenants," 

 and with reason. The good lands were too heavily 

 timbered with cedar to be fit for grazing, but they were 

 well adapted for farms. 



Equally unfriendly historians relate that the worst 

 consequences ensued. Indi\iduals selected pieces of 

 land only in order to sell to a rich neighbour. Wealthy 

 squatters used others as " dummies," and added to their 

 estates. Children and relatives, real or fictitious, were 

 similarly used. Thus large properties were aggregated. 

 The condition of residence was evaded, or complied 

 with in mockery. Of 112,000 selections only 19,000 

 had residents. Deferred payments were not collected. 

 By 1880 a large proportion of the selections had lapsed. 

 Many had passed into other hands. The loss to the 

 Colony was tremendous. f 



One of the chief promoters of the Act, Sir Henry 

 Parkes, admittedly "looked back with misgiving" 

 on some of its results. A species of dummyism, he con- 

 fessed, had grown up by which men " fraudulently gained 

 possession of large tracts of the choicest land with only 

 a mock compliance with the conditions of the law and 

 in direct contravention of its spirit and intention." 

 Yet he insists that Robertson's Act ''did immense 

 good." It " brought hundreds of comfortable homes 

 into existence." And, after all the amendments that 

 have been made in it, its " chief principles are embedded 

 in the law of the Colony." J 



Victoria eagerly trod in the footsteps of New South 

 Wales. In the following year that ardent democrat. 

 Sir Charles Gavan Duffy, carried through the Victorian 

 legislature a measure framed on the lines of the Robert- 



* Pioneering Reminiscenced, p. 44. 



t RusDEN, History of Australia, iii. 540 ff. 



i Parkes, Fifty Years of Australian History, i. 151-4. 



