The nineteenth century was an age of mass migration, with approximately 10 million people leaving the British Isles by the end of the century. Of these, 1.6 million free and assisted emigrants eventually found their way to Australia. A destination
tainted by its convict origins, Australia had difficulty competing with
the shorter and less expensive migration routes to North America. However,
in the second quarter of the nineteenth century,
The aim of my research as a summer scholar at the National Library was to contrast the expectations of theorists, planners, and government officials (embodied in Wakefield’s writings) with the realities of the immigrants and their colonial experience. In exploring this, I discovered that this history was told through a wide array of materials, comprising parliamentary papers, personal diaries and letters, Colonial Office records available through the Australian Joint Copying Project, and various emigrant tracts and pamphlets. Edward Gibbon Wakefield (1796–1862) was the leader of a group of theorists that promulgated this idea of ‘systematic colonisation’ and is credited with being one of the founders of South Australia. His theorising had a colorful start when he kidnapped and married a 16-year-old heiress in hopes of attaining her father’s parliamentary seat. However, her family did not look favorably on this action and his marriage was annulled by an Act of Parliament. After a well-publicised trial, Wakefield spent three years in a London prison where he devoted himself to becoming an expert in matters of colonisation.
During this time, he wrote ‘A Letter from Sydney’, in which he lays out a plan for colonisation of Australia. His plan was primarily designed to solve the British domestic difficulties of overpopulation and rampant unemployment and poverty, for in Wakefield’s view Great Britain suffered from an abundance of capital and labour, but a scarcity of land. The colonies, on the other hand, had abundant land but labour and capital were scarce. Systematic colonisation was meant to create a balance between land, labor, and capital, by transferring surplus capital and population from Britain to the colonies. The principle tenets of his plan required the establishment of a price for land sufficiently high to restrain speculative buying and the premature acquisition of land by labourers. It also required the employment of the proceeds from land sales towards an emigration fund to maintain a steady flow of labour to the colonies. The proper selection of emigrants was critical to the planners’ vision for South Australia. Wakefield’s plan advocated that both sexes be sent in equal numbers to the colony, since the imbalance of the sexes was one of the most frequently cited problems in the other Australian colonies. Moreover, the plan called for young, unmarried couples to be sent, since they had years of labour ahead of them and therefore were of the most value to a new colony. (Wakefield objected to sending any children, as it would be years before they would become labourers.) Wakefield’s selection criteria were quickly institutionalised in the regulations governing assisted emigration.
From the beginning, the commiss-ioners encountered problems recruiting the desired type of emigrants. Although the intention was that the bulk of them would be young, childless couples, it was soon clear that these people were generally uninterested in emigrating. The records of the Colonial Land and Emigration Commission reveal that families were the most likely to want to emigrate to Australia, and that a strict adherence to the age requirement would mean the loss of valuable settlers to the colonies. Moreover, experience had shown that many parents would abandon their children if they proved an obstacle to emigration. At the centre of systematic colonisation was the belief that all previous colonial settlements were flawed because land was too easily acquired, resulting in an inadequate supply of labour. Wakefield’s solution was to restrict land to capitalist investors by selling it at a ‘sufficiently high’ price, thereby ensuring that labourers would be unable to purchase land immediately. (In South Australia this was £1 an acre, and land sold in sections of between 80 and 640 acres.) In tracts and pamphlets aimed at immigrants with money, this aspect of the colonisation was heavily emphasised. One of the problems with earlier settlement in places such as New South Wales was that ‘men were elevated to the station of gentlemen, who neither by conduct nor character, were entitled to any such distinction’. Thus, one of the appeals of Australia to the wealthier emigrants was that the society in South Australia would resemble that of England, with each class kept distinct and separate.
In reality, however, one of the most significant changes for working-class immigrants was the job mobility they found in Australia. Immigrants had a wide choice of jobs and generally found that labour was scarce and wages high. (An immigrant to Adelaide in 1838 writes that his first job was driving bullocks, but in short time he had also worked as a carpenter, a civil servant, and finally at a dairy.) With labour in high demand, immigrants were able to change jobs as often as they liked, often leaving for higher wages or better living conditions. They were no longer tied to their employer as they had been in Great Britain, and diaries and letters of the period indicate the wealthier classes were uncomfortable with the diminishment of social deference in Australia. Mary Thomas, a wealthy immigrant, claimed that: ‘the servants are becoming as saucy and independent as they are in America. Both servants and labourers being scarce, they get too much wages by half.’
Letters published in newspapers and pamphlets promised a better life for the new immigrant. These publications were replete with success stories—such as that of J. Rainsford, who worked for a baker, selling bread to emigrants, but who, within a few months, had built his own house and bakehouse. Benjamin Boyce, who came to Australia from Ireland in 1842, said that he was ‘making muny as fast as I could count it’. He encourages his family to show his letter to other young men who might like to emigrate, for he was sure that if they had any idea what is was like in South Australia, ‘they would not work hard in ingland to starve whear in the collines thear is plenty’. Reports such as these were meant to show prospective immigrants that money and social advancement could be readily achieved in South Australia. The objective of Wakefield’s plan was that labourers would work and save for two to three years, and then have the money to buy land. However, from previous studies done on this subject, it has been found that very few assisted immigrants were actually able to purchase land. One historian found that of the 4000 adult male emigrants given free passages in the first seven years, fewer than 50 purchased 80-acre sections of land. Another study found that almost all the original purchasers of land were men who had arrived as self-paying immigrants. When immigrants did buy land, they generally purchased it from wealthy immigrants who had purchased the land in order to subdivide it.
By the late 1840s, objections were being raised to the system of land sales in South Australia. Labourers saw the system as one designed to benefit the wealthy, and prevent them from becoming landowners. The profits generated from the land could not justify the price of £1 an acre when it required 3–4 acres to feed one sheep. Samuel Sidney’s emigrant tract attacked the Wakefield system, saying that such a plan might work in a small and fertile area like Europe, but not in Australia where the land was relatively poor, and thousands of acres were required in order to be successful. Most emigrant tracts commented on the disastrous effects that the inability to acquire land had on the morals of the labouring class, stating that ‘Hundreds of thousands have been spent by the labouring population in the public house, which would have been spent in little farmes, if such were purchaseable.’ Finally, the colonies were worried that the inability of labourers to buy land was decreasing emigration to Australia, as land was much cheaper and more easily available to labourers in North America. It is important to keep in mind that Wakefield’s theory was more than just an exercise in the facilitation of people from one side of the world to the other; it was also an exercise in social engineering, an attempt to create a model society. The planners of the colony intended that this community should be free of the problems that had plagued the other Australian colonies through the proper selection of immigrants, the restriction of land, and the concentration of settlement. Ultimately Wakefield’s plan did not work out the way he expected. Social mobility was high, there was a constant labour shortage, and the land could simply not support the type of settlement he envisioned. However, as far as systematic colonisation improved the lot of Britain’s labouring poor, it was successful. Essentially, what Wakefield wanted to do was give Britain’s poor the opportunity for a better life. Diaries and letters reveal that, in general, the immigrants felt they had found a better life in Australia than that which they could have expected in Britain, and they encouraged their families to join them in what one writer called the ‘land of promise’. JOANNE ARCHER was a scholar under the National Library’s 2003 Norman McCann Summer Scholars Program |
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