Atlas Page 90
By Sir T. Cockburn-Campbell

CENTURIES ago the western coast of Australia became known to the navigators of Europe —to the bold men, chiefly Portuguese and Dutch, who scoured the Indian Seas in search of adventure, wealth, and fame, or to add to the territories of their then vigorous and colonising states. Three hundred years, almost exactly, before the day H.M.S. "Success" touched at the mouth of the river Swan, and Captain Stirling, R.N., examined the neighbouring country with a view to its first settlement, the Portuguese Menezes discovered the west Australian shores and perpetuated the memory of his passing visit in the name given to the rocky islets still known as the Abrolhos. Upon Menezes followed Houtman, in his turn attracted to the same island group, where also thirty years later disastrous shipwreck was suffered by his compatriot Pelsart. Throughout the earlier half of the seventeenth century, Dutch discovery in the Southern Seas was actively pursued, and the Leeuwin, Nuytz’ Land, Dirk Hartog’s Island, De Witt’s Land, with numerous other localities on the western seaboard, christened after their captains or their ships, keep the enterprise of these sea-rovers in evergreen remembrance. Dampier was the first Englishman who followed in their track. In the "Roebuck," he entered and named Shark’s Bay, and touched at the islands still known as Dampier’s Archipelago. Ten years later, in 1697, Vlaming discovered the Swan River, and took back to Europe a specimen of that rare and beautiful bird whose presentment now adorns the flag of the western colony. From that time for close upon a hundred years Western Australia apparently remained unvisited, but in 1791 Vancouver discovered King George’s Sound; while following him came a French expedition in the corvettes "Naturaliste " and "Geographe," the former vessel giving her name to a rocky cape fifty miles northward of the Leeuwin, rounding which the storm-tossed manners glided into the still waters of a bay which in its appellation still perpetuates the memory of the "Geographe." A river also in this neighbourhood recalls a melancholy incident of the expedition —the drowning off its mouth of a sailor named Le Vasse. Here thirty-five years later the brothers Bussell, tracking strayed stock northwards from the settlement at Augusta, found them feeding in abundant pasture, named the locality "Cattle-chosen," made themselves there a home, and founded the town of Busselton. Till 1826, there was no occupation of any portion of the west Australian main, but in the beginning of that year the then Governor of New South Wales sent a few soldiers and convicts to settle at King George’s Sound under the command of Major Lockyer, deeming it desirable to secure possession of a locality with a harbour so magnificent, commanding the track of a large proportion of the Australian fleet homeward and outward bound. Twelve months later, Captain Stirling was despatched in H.M.S. "Success" to revictual this infant settlement, and to examine the Swan River with a view to its occupation, the government of the mother province fearing that the French might anticipate their purpose. So encouraging were the reports made by the members of this expedition that a settlement of the Swan River was finally resolved upon, Captain Stirling being sent to England for instructions, while to Captain Fremantle was entrusted the duty of hoisting the British flag at the locality which now bears his name, this latter event occurring on June 1st, 1829. Captain Stirling apparently reached England in 1828, for we find the first Order in Council having reference to the Swan River dated in December of that year. This order, for the encouragement of emigration to the new settlement, offered advantageous terms to persons proceeding to it at their own expense during the currency of 1829. For every three pounds invested in the colony, on public or private objects, they were given a right to claim forty acres of crown lands, with two hundred acres added for every servant, male or female, whose passage out they paid. A condition was attached that any of these conceded lands which at the end of twenty-one years had not been sufficiently reclaimed or satisfactorily improved, should revert absolutely to the Crown.

A later Order in Council extended the time for the issue of free grants until the end of 1830. But apparently the original offer was considered more liberal than expedient, for this second order declared that absolute possession would not be given until proof had been furnished of an expenditure of one shilling and sixpence per acre in cultivation or improvements, and it was further stipulated that unless within three years after occupation one-fourth part of the granted lands had been brought under cultivation, or had been improved or reclaimed to the extent of the amount per acre above mentioned, they should be liable to a yearly assessment of sixteen pounds per square mile, while if at the end of an additional seven years they were still in a state of nature, they should be forfeited absolutely to the Crown. The "investment of capital" required for establishing a claim to these free grants included the possession of stock of every description, and of implements of husbandry, and other articles applicable to the purposes of productive industry. The half-pay or pension of settlers entitled to either was for special reasons also treated as "invested capital." After the end of 1830, a modification of the free-grant system was introduced, and before long it was totally abolished, land being subsequently obtainable by purchase only at varying current rates. It has been necessary to state in some detail the land regulations under which the first settlement of the colony was effected, for they largely influenced its early history, and the result of their application is felt even at the present day.

THE efforts of the Colonial Office to obtain emigrants for Swan River were successful beyond anticipation, their offers of land on easy terms proving an irresistible temptation to many who knew nothing of the character of the country in which they proposed to settle, nor of the difficulties and hardships of pioneering enterprise. In July, 1829, the "Parmelia" —advance guard of a long list of immigrant ships —arrived in Gage’s Roads, having on board Captain Stirling the lieutenant-governor, Mr. Peter Brown, colonial secretary, Lieutenant Roe, R.N., surveyor-general, with their wives and families, Mr. and Mrs. H. C. Sutherland, Mr. George Eliot —then a lad of tender age —and many others whose names have not been equally prominent in Western Australian history. Upon the "Parmelia" followed the "Calista," and within eighteen months nearly thirty other vessels freighted with some thousand immigrants, representing it is said over one hundred thousand pounds’ worth of property in. money’, stock, or goods, on account of which, before the year 1830 had run out, claims for more than a million acres in free grants had been put in. These immigrants consisted chiefly of gentlemen of good position, their families, and indentured servants. Amongst them were retired officers of the sister services, professional men, and even scions of English houses of considerable wealth and social standing. Stranded on the inhospitable sandy beach which now fringes the sea frontage of Fremantle, with their delicately- nurtured wives and children and their household goods and chattels, the first experiences of these unfortunate people were discouraging in the extreme.

Totally unused to manual labour, accustomed to luxurious homes, or at any rate to comfort and plenty, possessing none of the mechanical ingenuity and apt contrivance which might have enabled men so circumstanced to make the best of rough surroundings, their early initiation into life on the Swan River was calculated speedily to efface the rose-coloured anticipations with which they had started from their motherland, and the hardship they suffered while all but shelterless from winter rain or summer heat formed a rude breaking-in to the life of toil which was to follow. But these early settlers possessed stout hearts and resolute spirits. Unfitted though they were for the work of pioneering, and discouraged as they must have been by their experiences on first arrival by the apparently infertile nature of a soil which they had pictured as superlatively good, and by the un expected difficulties which at every turn beset them, they nevertheless displayed an indomitable pluck and a steady perseverance. Some few of them, indeed, lost heart and returned whence they came, or proceeded to the eastern colonies but the greater part remained in the land of their first choice, selected their grants, cleared and ploughed, digged and delved, built themselves houses, and established themselves valiantly upon the soil, overcoming all obstacles by their energy and their determination.

The progress made by the new colony during the first five years of its existence was by no means inconsiderable. In that short space of time Fremantle had grown, so Colonel Irwin tells us, "into a small but neat town with wide streets, some of which had been macadamised." Perth had many houses of wood and brick, officers’ and soldiers’ barracks, a gaol, a church, and good shops and stores. Settlement had crept along the river flats. Above the islands over which the "Perth Causeway" was subsequently thrown, the Messrs. Hardy and Clarkson had established farms and gardens and comfortable homesteads.

Higher up, at Guilford, industrious agriculturists brought out by Mr. Peel were turning the rich soil of their "little village" to good account. At Woodbridge, a mile further, where now stands a well-known mansion; Sir James Stirling had his country seat. Opposite was the farm of Mr. Walcott, soon to pass into the hands of the Hamersleys, of Pyrton. On the Upper Swan were permanently settled Messrs. Tanner, Whitfield, Thompson, Wells, Brown, Drummond, Meares, Harris, Lennard, Brockman, Burges, Leake, and Irwin —colonists whose names are as "house hold words" to West Australians —well lodged, some of them, in two-storey buildings, and all surrounded with evidences of industry, profitably applied, and of toil more or less rewarded. Then again upon the Canning, to the southward, were located the Nairnes, the Phillips’s, the Hesters, the Gregorys, and the Bickleys over the hills at York, were the Trimmers and the Blands; on the Murray were Messrs. Pell and Hall. At Augusta, the Bussells and Molloys; at King George’s Sound the Spencers, the Taylors, and the Cheynes. These names, to which many others of subsequent arrivals might be added, are mentioned as locally historical, as conspicuous amongst those of the territorial families of Western Australia which have given its settlement a character differing totally from that of any other colony of the group. These early immigrants, by their social standing, by their individual character, their aims, their virtues, and even their weaknesses, moulded to a great extent the fortunes of the country and maintained its development within those lines which have made its history so strangely singular.

Wonder is often expressed that while her neighbours on the eastern side of the island continent exhibited progressive vigour almost from the first, and rapidly won their way to power and wealth, Western Australia should have lagged so far behind, and for the first forty years of her existence should have shown scant signs of expanding life and movement. This has been, and may be, accounted for in many ways. The colony was isolated, cut off by two thousand miles of uninhabited waste from eastern settlement, and rarely visited by the ocean carrier of commerce. The gold, the copper —the vast mineral wealth which brought capital and population to other divisions of the group —were in the western colony wholly wanting, or rather remained wholly undiscovered. The land in that southern corner of their vast territory, beyond which for decades the first settlers did not roam, was comparatively poor, vast stretches of it hungry and sandy, the patches of better soil too often infested by poison plant. All these causes operated to keep Western Australia from making rapid progress. But her early colonists themselves, and as has been said, their virtues as much as their weaknesses, contributed to that slow development of the resources of the country which critics describe as its "stagnation." Whether they left the shores of their native land with the object of seeking fortune or not it is impossible to say; but if they did, those who settled permanently in the country of their adoption speedily relinquished any such ambitious views. They soon became inured to the daily round of toil and manual labour necessitated by the nature of the country and the narrowness of their means. They became contented with modest things, used to the slow increase of their flocks and herds, satisfied with small yearly additions to their gardens, orchards, and cultivated lands, taking pleasure in adding by degrees to the comforts of their cosy farmsteads, rooted in fact to their small settlements, with scarce a thought beyond them, resigned to a modest lot of homely plenty, nor repining even at occasional privation. They possessed little of that restless activity which in other colonies impels the pioneer to be ever pushing outwards, ever seeking for fresh pastures, fresh fields for speculative enterprise. They ventured, it is true, upon occasional explorations on a more or less extended scale, but not for thirty years after the foundation of the colony was there any serious attempt at settlement outside the hundred-mile-wide strip of coast land stretching from Champion Bay to Albany. Within these narrow bounds they formed their own small world, in which rude toll was sweetened by domestic happiness and social pleasure.

Amongst them were men in numbers who in early life had known more of the book than of the plough, women accustomed rather to the drawing-room than to the kitchen or the dairy. Yet all accepted labour without repining, and lightened the weary monotony of their lives with the exercise of a generous hospitality and with the pleasures of occasional convivial gatherings devoted to feasting, to music, and to dance.

The social aspect of Western Australian colonisation was, indeed, particularly striking. The days of the early struggle were by no means devoid of brightness. The settlers dwelt together as one large family, bound by ties of friendship and of intimacy naturally contracted in the homely circumstances of their lot, and fostered by mutual helpfulness, and by co-participation in hardships and in modest joys. Like brethren, they clung together to one another, and relished a social intercourse in which the graces of liberal education, and even of art and of accomplishment, contrasted sharply with the rough realities of every-day existence. Indeed, it may probably be said without exaggeration that, despite the privations, the losses, and the disappointments which the early settlers suffered, those days before the colony had begun to emerge from its poverty and insignificance were socially the happiest it has known, and that never again can its people be so united, so contented, or so free from sordid care as before that memorable occasion when Sir Frederick Weld was able proudly to declare that "At last she moved."

The system of lavishly squandering free grants of land upon propertied immigrants during the first few years of the colony’s existence soon began to tell with unfortunate effect. Most of the best country on the Swan, the Canning, the Avon beyond the hills, and in the neighbourhood of the more southern settlements, was thus disposed of. Had the conditions originally attached to these grants been carried out no serious mischief would probably have ensued. The Orders in Council under which the governor was empowered to act offered land in extent proportioned only to capital invested in the colony for useful purposes; but, practically for every kind of property the immigrant imported, even for such articles as furniture and plate, he was allowed to claim and occupy broad acres. Nor were the location duties carried out, either in the letter or in the spirit. Full unconditional titles were readily obtained, with the result that over a million acres of the best portions of those districts which, from proximity to the capital and port might most readily have been brought into profitable cultivation, became virtually "locked up." The evil of this state of things was first manifest when the poorer immigrants, labourers and mechanics, and servants freed from their indentures, sought to establish themselves upon the soil, and found themselves shut out from those areas where their enterprise and labour would have been most productively and usefully applied. To the present day, these grants remain for the most part in the hands of the families of those who first secured them. Too poor to make profitable use of them, they yet cling to these properties with tenacity, refusing to part with them on reasonable terms, and one of the problems of the day is how to rescue from the condition of mere sheepwalks and place upon the market rich areas to which railways have been carried, but which, from their early wholesale alienation, are beyond the reach of those willing or able to make them reproductive. From 1839 to 1848, the government of the colony was successively in the hands of Mr. John Hutt, Lieutenant-Colonel Clarke, and Lieutenant-Colonel Irwin. During the administration of the two first-named, the colony remained in its stagnant condition, but under the third it entered on a. new phase.

AFTER twenty years of settlement, Western Australia numbered close upon seven thousand souls; four thousand acres had been brought under cultivation; sheep had increased to one hundred and forty thousand, cattle to eleven thousand; imports had reached a value of forty-five thousand pounds, and exports of thirty thousand pounds. The struggle to make a living, however, was becoming harder, trade was’ dull, labour was scarce, immigrants were unobtainable. A wide-spread depression prevailed amongst the colonists, and at last, though with dire misgivings on the part of many, they decided to petition the Home Government for the introduction of convicted prisoners, hoping thus to obtain cheap labour, an abundant expenditure, and a market for their produce. Some locality beyond the seas for the disposal of Imperial convicts being at the time desired, the prayer of the colonists was granted, and the first batch of prisoners were landed at Fremantle on June 1st, 1860. For eighteen years transportation to Western Australia was continued, some ten thousand members of the criminal class being added during that period to her population. On the whole it will probably be admitted by unprejudiced observers that the colony gained rather than lost by this hazardous experiment. The men who were sent out, more especially during the earlier years of transportation, did not belong to the worst and most villanous sections of English gaol-birds. Some shipments in particular were of hands specially picked as suited to the requirements of colonial life, consisting chiefly of agricultural labourers convicted of offences under the game laws —men not deeply seared by moral disease, and who in time became, from most excellent servants, useful and prosperous settlers. As a rule, with very few exceptions, the convicts, while health and strength remained to them, were the best of servants, tractable, civil, hardworking, and trustworthy when they felt that they were trusted. Statistics, it is true, show a large proportionate amount of petty crime in Western Australia, and of serious crime as well in unfortunate frequency. But this is chiefly traceable to the worst remnants of the convict class. The colonists generally are orderly and law-abiding, and although transportation has so lately ceased, it has left but a faint mark upon them which soon will be fully effaced.

During the earlier years of convictism, under Governor Fitzgerald, the prison labour can scarcely be said to have been used to the best advantage. Road parties were formed, indeed, and stationed in various portions of the colony, but the convicts were chiefly massed in Perth and in Fremantle, and engaged in erecting military barracks and other buildings in the former, and a huge prison in the latter town. When, however Governor Hampton took up the reins of government in 1862, a change for the better in convict administration was introduced. The new governor had qualified for his position as ruler of a penal settlement by holding an office of authority in Tasmania connected with the convict service of that colony. He thoroughly understood the business of obtaining the greatest possible amount of work from the men under his control, and foresaw in what directions their labour would best serve the interests of the colony. The remembrance of Mr. Hampton’s administration is perpetuated in miles upon miles of macadamised road, in the covering of many a heavy sand-stretch with well-laid metal, and in bridges and causeways innumerable over river and swamp from one end of the settled districts to the other. With the end of his term of office in 1868 transportation ceased, and prison labour, together with Imperial expenditure, was gradually withdrawn. During the eighteen years of the convict period, the hopes of the settlers for material advantage from it had been fully realised. Money had been freely circulated, excellent and cheap labour had been obtained, and many a modest fortune had been earned. But beyond these benefits and the improvement of internal communication, transportation had done nothing for the general advancement of the country. Isolation, from the first its most serious bane, had been fostered rather than removed. From 1850 to 1868, the colony was regarded as one vast prison, and facilities of communication with the outer world were viewed as a disadvantage, and even as a danger. The colonists, though in easier circumstances, retained their primitive ways, their simple, easy-going, homely habits. No vivifying breath from the outer world had quickened them into progressive life and movement. They were content with things existing, preferred to be left to their own devices, and regarded the rare stringers who came amongst them with a mild sort of curiosity not unmixed with a self-congratulatory sense of superiority to the fleeting fashions, restless ambitions, and feverish anxieties which produced specimens of humanity cast in so different a mould.

In these circumstances, Governor Weld arrived upon the scene. Trained to political life in the free, prosperous, and progressive colony of New Zealand, he soon discovered the causes of Western Australian stagnation, and determined, in the first place, to break down the barriers which impeded her intercourse with the outside world, regular communication with which was at that time maintained solely by means of the monthly mail steamers which coaled at King George’s Sound. But while the colony had little means of maintaining relations’ with her neighbours, the isolation of her individual settlements was almost equally deplorable. A stranger landing at Albany had two ways of reaching Perth. He could either wait at the southern port until opportunity offered of taking passage by some small and ill-found coaster, and of beating round the Leeuwin to Fremantle, or he could proceed by road in a lumbering van, which, ploughing through heavy sands and jolting over ironstone boulders, with intervening short stretches of metalled road as occasional breaks in the monotony of misery, brought him to his destination at the end of five weary days of travel. So great was the discomfort and difficulty then experienced in approaching the capital from its "gates" at Albany that few ventured upon a visit to it except under pressure of business or of necessity. Governor Weld realised the serious disadvantage of this barrier to intercourse with other and more advanced communities, and never rested until he had placed steamers on the West Australian coast. The "Georgette," which was eventually wrecked off the Margaret River with some loss of life, was the first steamship to enter the coastal trade. Her ports of call were Albany, the Vasse, Bunbury, Fremantle, and Geraldton, and a brisker commerce soon sprang up between these formerly isolated settlements. After the loss of this the first vessel Messrs. Lilly and Company, and subsequently the Adelaide Steam Ship Company stepped in, gradually enlarging their operations as opportunity arose until, at the present time, the latter have upon the coast a fleet of half a dozen well-found steamers connecting direct with Melbourne, and plying, from Albany to Cambridge Gulf, with regular service for all the intermediate ports. Not content with the establishment of steam communication, Governor Weld set himself the farther task of overcoming the prejudices of the colonists to the telegraph, which they then regarded as "nothing better than a costly toy," and before his departure, at the end of 1874, telegraph lines connected all the principal centres of population with Perth and with Fremantle; while the closing act of his administration was to plant the first pole of the line which has since brought Western Australia into direct communication with the other colonies and the world at large.

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