redundant, proceeded to feed pigs, and otherwise expended the unsold proceeds of their harvest. As the season advanced it was discovered that the harvest, so far from being plentiful, was deficient. Wheat rose to £1 4s. a bushel. Those who had sold cheap had to buy at a high price. The tampering with the currency added to the severity of the crisis. A great flood swept away the finest crops on the Hawkesbury. A famine followed: the government, by proclamation, required that cabbage stalks should not be rooted up. A large body of small farmers became so insolvent that their farms were sold to pay their debts, and passed into the hands of money-lenders and grogshop-keepers. The discontent of the colonists reacted on the home government, and Sir Thomas Brisbane was recalled on the 1st December, 1825. Four very important discoveries were made during his administration. In 1823, the Maneroo Plains, situated between two and three thousand feet above the level of the sea, separated from Twofold Bay by a lofty range of mountains, over which there is now a dray-track, were explored by Captain Currie, R.N., who named them Brisbane Downs, but they have since reverted to their native name. In the same year, Mr. Oxley, the surveyor-general, by order of Sir T. Brisbane, explored Moreton Bay, and discovered the navigable River Brisbane, leading to the fine semi-tropical country now fully occupied by squatters, but capable of supporting a large agricultural population. In the following year Messrs. Hovell and Hume made their overland journey to Port Phillip; and, in 1825, Mr. Allan Cunningham, one of the most enterprising and accomplished of Australian explorers, discovered Pandora's Pass, a cleft than which the Alps offer nothing more wild, more imposing, or more picturesque, affording the only practicable road from the Upper Hunter to the pastoral uplands of Liverpool Plains. Lieutenant-General Sir Ralph Darling, K.C.B., succeeded Governor Brisbane; the colony during an interregnum of eighteen days having been in the hands of Colonel (afterwards General) Stewart, of Bathurst, an honour which formed one of the boasts of the gallant officer and standing jokes of the district for the remainder of his life. GOVERNOR DARLING. 1825 TO 1831. Sir Ralph Darling arrived in December, 1825; his administration lasted six years, and was singularly and deservedly unpopular. He was a man of forms and precedents, of the true red-tape school-neat, exact, punctual, industrious, arbitrary, spiteful, commonplace. He laboured hard to reduce into order the confusion he found in the public offices of the colony, and substituted a system which became quite as corrupt and more dilatory. It was like changing from the court of a Turkish cadi to the Court of Chancery. He obstinately evaded the control intended to be imposed upon him by the secret official and nominee council, and perpetrated an act of tyranny which has no parallel in English history since the time of Charles I. and the Star Chamber. The red-tape tendencies of Governor Darling were shown in his management of the waste lands of the colony. In the last year of Governor Brisbane, New South Wales, in common with South American mines, Greek and Spanish loans, and a crowd of other bubble speculations, which seem to be decennially necessary to the commercial existence of Englishmen, became the subject of the operations of a great company, incorporated by charter and by act of Parliament, with a directorate including the best men of the city of London, a capital of a million pounds, a grant of a million acres, and various other privileges and pre-emptions, of which a monopoly of the working and sale of coal eventually proved the most profitable to the shareholders and offensive to the colonists. Under Governor Darling, the agents of this Australian Agricultural Company selected, took possession, and commenced operations on their grant. A retrospect of the plans and prospects in 1825 will perhaps afford the best landmark of the progress of the colony from the time when the whole community depended for salvation from famine on one ship, and that ship driven by adverse gales out of Sydney Heads away to sea. The Australian Agricultural Company. The directors of the Australian Agricultural Company, in their original prospectus, represent New South Wales as well calculated for the growth of "timber, wheat, tobacco, hemp, flax, and fruits, amongst which are the olive, grape, fig, mulberry, guava, almond, peach, citron, and orange." They derived their information chiefly from the reports of Mr. Commissioner Bigge; and from the same source rested great hopes of profit 66 66 '1st, On the growth of fine merino wool. 2ndly, From the breeding of cattle and other live stock, and the raising corn, tobacco, &c., for the supply of persons resident in the colony. 66 THE AUSTRALIAN AGRICULTURAL COMPANY. 87 3rdly, From the production, at a more distant time, of wine, olive oil, hemp, flax, silk, opium, &c., as articles of export to Great Britain. 4thly, From a progressive advance in the value of land, as it becomes improved; and by an increased population." 66 The grant of land was made on the ground that the colony would derive advantage from the importation of so large a capital, invested in cattle, horses, and sheep of the Cheviot breeds; in the cultivation of the produce of Southern Europe; and that the mother country would be saved the cost of maintaining a certain number of convicts. At that period it was still so much an object with the government to relieve itself of the cost of the maintenance of criminals, that it was agreed that the company should be relieved of quit rent, on condition of their employing a certain number of prisoners. But, from the period of the grant to the Australian Agricultural Company, the value of convict labour rose so rapidly, that they never were able to obtain the stipulated number of servants; and in 1830 we find the editor of the Sydney Monitor proposing that convicts should be sold on arrival to the highest bidder, and anticipating that they would realize, in lots of two hundred, £100 a year each for five or ten years ! In the course of the correspondence with this company, the Secretary of State for the Colonies announced that in future, "instead of giving grants of land free, lands were to be put up to sale, according to a valuation of the surveyor-general, similar, in many respects, to the system adopted in the United States of America." This course had been suggested by Mr. Commissioner Bigge, with a price of 10s. an acre for lands near towns, and 5s. an acre in the country. It so happened that the example of the Australian Company infected many members of Parliament and other persons of influence, who hastened to obtain grants which cost the minister nothing, and appeared to the granters of immense value-a delusion on both sides. The precedent became most embarrassing to the government, while many of the huge blocks were of very little money value to the absentees. Instead of adopting the simple American system of survey and sale at a moderate price, a plan of grants. was adopted admirable in theory, but too open to favouritism to work well. As to the Australian Agricultural Company, their proceedings created, in the then state of the colony, a financial revolution. They sent out from England, as companies always do, a numerous staff; cargoes of implements and breeding stock on a most costly scale; purchased ewes and heifers so largely that the price was raised one, and even two hundred per cent. throughout the colony. The company, with a "long pocket," was a universal purchaser, and sellers were never wanting as long as they had any money to invest. A reaction of course followed, as it always does follow extravagant expectations of pecuniary profit. The colony, nevertheless, derived advantage from the introduction of the company's capital and superior stock in sheep, horses, and cattle. The grand ideas of vineyards, olive oil, opium, silkworm cultivation, and orange groves, which formed applauded passages in speeches in the House of Commons and the court-room of the company, were never extended beyond the resident manager's or commissioner's gardens. Unfortunately the beneficial influences were neutralized by the coal monopoly, which not only handed over a large tract of coal seams to the superior machinery and active capital of the company, but actually precluded the colonists from working, on any terms, coal which might happen to be found under their estates. These doings seem monstrous. They were at that period ordinary transactions, in which honourable men and liberal politicians took a share without shame. In the same perverse spirit of monopoly, the authorities and merchants at Sydney, until 1826, compelled every ship to enter and break bulk at Sydney before calling at the ports of Van Diemen's Land. Monopoly was then as much an article of faith with statesmen as free trade is at present. Under Governor Darling emigration from England of persons of moderate capital increased. Unfortunately a vicious system was established in the surveyor's office, for the benefit of favoured or feeing parties, by which surveys of waste land were kept secret from the uninitiated. In 1830 the author of a letter of advice to emigrants recommends "every settler to bring out an order from the secretary of state to be allowed to inspect charts and maps in the surveyor's office;" and adds, "From being denied such inspection, emigrants wander about the interior of the colony at great expense, but to little purpose.' Reform makes slow progress in the Colonial Office. In 1848 there existed secret choice reserves near the town of Melbourne, which, by the open sesame of a letter from Earl Grey, were, after being long retained, handed over to a German colony. Darling ruled the convicts with a rod of iron. The times of the "first fleeters," the irresponsible flogger, and the short allowance of coarse food were revived. A penal settlement was formed at Moreton Bay, and there, it is commonly affirmed, the prisoners were so badly treated that they committed murder in order to be sent for trial to Sydney FIRST LEGISLATIVE COUNCIL MEETS. 89 At the same time the county magistrates were empowered to award any number of lashes for insolence, idleness, or other indefinite offences. As it was not lawful for a man to flog his own assigned servants, he exchanged compliments with a neighbour. Considering the class of persons who were then frequently selected for magistrates in the colonies, it may easily be conceived to what brutal excesses such irresponsible authority led. But year by year the civilizing elements of society made way. At one time, in 1826, we find a dispensary opened: in the following year a great public meeting is held, with the sheriff in the chair, to petition the King and both Houses of Parliament for the civil rights of trial by jury, and a House of Assembly; and the next year a general post-office throughout the colony, and an Australian jockey club, are established. The editor of a newspaper is found guilty of libel, and two gentlemen fight a bloodless duel. A dispensary, a post-office, an action for libel, and a duel!—the banes and antidotes of civilized society. The two last years of Governor Darling present events and contrasts still more remarkable. A Legislative Council, being a step in advance of the Executive Council established by charter of 1828, held its first meeting in 1829. This was the check against which Governor Macquarie so earnestly and naïvely protested. The council consisted of the Archdeacon (now Bishop) Broughton, who superseded Mr. Scott, the Commander of the Forces, the Chief Justice, Attorney-General, and Colonial Treasurer, Alexander M'Clean, afterwards (at eighty years of age) the first speaker of the first Australian Legislative Assembly, and four members selected by the governor. The proceedings of this council were secret, under an oath administered to that intent; and the governor had an absolute veto. The majority were officials, totally unacquainted with the colony; and, looking at the minority in which, in the open Legislative Assembly, the nominees of the government were constantly found, it is not extraordinary that this council gave no manner of satisfaction to the colony. Yet it must be owned that in 1829 New South Wales did not possess the materials for representative institutions. The first act of the council was to establish trial by jury in civil cases. In the following year, on the 31st March, 1831, the first steam-boat in Australia was launched; two other steam-boats came into use within a few months. Close after the steam-boat followed Dr. Lang, from Scotland, the first Australian agitator, a Presbyterian O'Connell, who, |