Australia History Between 1830 and 1850 Part II

According to ehuacom, Australia (and with it and even more New Zealand) was in those years the favorite field of application of the new theory, germinated by the colonial experience and gradually developed in the writings of Wakefield and his most enthusiastic theoretical supporter and collaborator practical, Colonel Roberto Riccardo Torrens, the creator of the Australian system of land registration, which he is entitled (the Torrens Act of South Australia 1858). The entire period of Australian colonization, which goes from 1830 to 1850, takes its name and character from systematic colonization, like the preceding one from penal colonization; since it not only presides over the origins of the newly founded Australian colonies, but also applies more or less widely and integrally to the others. The Australian colony, where this systematic colonization was applied from the beginning in all its theoretical rigor and thus showed, with its merits, even its defects, was South Australia, whose foundation a colonial company was entrusted with. The bill constitutive of it, approved by the English Parliament in 1834, in fact substantially implemented Wakefield’s theories, contemplating for the colony to be established, in addition to the governor and a council invested with executive and legislative power, a body of administrators (one of whom was to reside in the colony itself) in charge of controlling the use of public lands and promoting immigration. In harmony with the fundamental principle of systematic colonization, applied to the letter, the new colonial establishment had to suffice from the very beginning (colonial self-supporting theory, very convenient in this case to the capitalists of the South Australia Company, founder of the colony to be established); relying on the sale of the lands, for the service of the same initial debt contracted for the transport of the first emigrants (1836), and on the demographic and economic development of the nascent colony, for the same expenses required by the preparatory works of the colonization, not to say by the administration of it. The exaggeration of the system was not long in receiving the harshest penalty. Land speculation had already appeared at the beginning of the nascent colony, when the area of ​​the future capital, Adelaide, fixed at the price of 15 francs an acre, was already sold three days later for 150 francs, which rose three years later, in 1839, to 25 and even 50 thousand, in a new country on an almost unoccupied continent. But in 1840 the crisis broke out, dragging into the abyss, with the unwary who had allowed themselves to be seduced, the whole population. The colony, forced to always make new debts, without having adequate resources not even to pay the interest, ended in bankruptcy. The generous help of the metropolitan government, which advanced the sums necessary for this purpose, guaranteed the political life of South Australia; while they ensured its economic future in the first cultivation of the lands surrounding the capital, fertile and suitable for grain cultivation, later the discovery of copper mines in Kapunda and Burra Burra (1843 and 1845), and finally and above all the initiative of the rough overlanders, a class of breeders similar to that of the squatters, who partly by sea from Tasmania, partly through the steppe desert from the neighboring colonies, flocked with their flocks to the excellent pastures of the mouth of the Murray. On the other hand, the original colonization plan failed, South Australia was subtracted from the colonial company in charge of its foundation, and placed again in 1841 under the direct government of England as a “colony of the Crown”, like the other two colonies. Australians of the time, New South Wales (with annexed Tasmania) and Western Australia. In 1842, alongside the governor, a legislative council was created to appoint the Crown.

If systematic colonization was initially applied in the most excessive way in South Australia, its fundamental principles, namely the sale of the land at a relatively high price and the use of the funds raised in subsidies for immigration, were, where more where less, extended to all the Australian colonies in the period from 1830 to 1850. Indeed, subsidized immigration was mainly due to the social origins of a fourth Australian colony thanks to the population and enhancement of the Port Phillip district birth, the colony of Victoria. While immigration to Australia, from 1825 to 1829, had been only 5175 individuals, in the following decade alone it was 53,274, with an annual average of 5300 individuals, which rose for the whole of Australasia (Australia, Tasmania and New Zealand) to 12,700 in the following decade. Over the entire two decades, from 1830 to 1850, subsidized immigrants to Australia rose to 220,000. And while the deportation had largely given Australia the arms of males only, an instrument of wealth; Subsidized immigration gave Australasia all not only adult males, but also proportionately to them, women and children, instruments of propagation of the species, gave the family, a stimulus to the accumulation of capital, as well as a source of morality and instrument of civil progress. The main factor of the demographic development of the country in those twenty years, despite its numerous and not indifferent defects, it was also a beneficial current that purified the Australian criminal element of its washing.

Australia History Between 1830 and 1850 2