GOVERNOR BRISBANE AND THE PRESBYTERIANS.

prisoner part of the population could not, and the officials and settlers living on the government were not inclined to resist.

Succeeding to the absolute powers of Macquarie, three years after landing, in 1824, the Legislative, or rather Executive Council, against the check of which his imperious predecessor had protested, was established. The first chief justice, the first attorney-general, a solicitorgeneral, who was also a commissioner of the Court of Requests, a master in chancery, and colonial treasurer, arrived in the colony. Trial by jury took place in the first Court of Quarter Sessions; liberty of the press was conceded; and the Australian, the first colonial newspaper independent of government aid, was published by Mr. Wentworth and Dr. Wardell, and was followed by two other journals.

While on this side of the globe we were declaiming and subscribing for the liberties of Greeks, Spaniards, and South Americans, at the antipodes our countrymen were struggling for trial by jury and "unlicensed" printing.

Commercial liberty yet remained to be gained. The East India Company claimed the exclusive right of trading in the Indian seas, and repeatedly asserted this right by confiscating vessels loaded with rice and sugar for Port Jackson. In 1824 the captain of a man-of-war actually seized the ship Almorah, with a valuable cargo of tea and rice, at anchor in Sydney Cove, and sent her in charge of his lieutenant a prize to Calcutta.

Major-General Sir Thomas Brisbane, K.C.B., had acquired a high reputation, both as a soldier in the Peninsula, and as a man of science. The first observatory in Australia was erected under his auspices. But his government, which only lasted four years, was unpopular, and the political concessions made rendered further concessions inevitable. To this fire was added the fuel of grievances which went home to the pockets of almost all the settlers and traders, and an insult which deeply offended a powerful, united, and intelligent religious community-the Scotch Presbyterians.

The Presbyterians applied in 1823 for assistance to build a Presbyterian church in Sydney, and referred pointedly to the support afforded the Roman "Catholics." The tone of the application appears not to have pleased either Sir Thomas or his secretary, and he returned a bitter reply, of which the following is the concluding paragraph. The style is eminently characteristic of colonial secretaries and governors :—

"When, therefore, the Presbyterians of the colony shall have advanced by private donations in the erection of a temple worthy of religion; when in the choice of their teachers they shall have dis

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covered a judgment equal to that which has presided at the selection of the Roman Catholic clergymen; when they shall have practised what they propose, To instruct the people to fear God and honour the King;' when, by endeavouring to keep the unity of the spirit in the bond of peace' in a colony requiring it more than all others, they shall have shown through their lives the influence of the holy religion they profess, then assuredly will the colonial executive step forward to extend its countenance and support to those who are following the Presbyterian creed."

The governor, it is said, acted under the advice of his secretary, a gentleman of the old Tory school. The Scotch gentlemen applied to the home government, when the governor received a severe reprimand, and the Presbyterians the aid they required.

Sir Thomas Brisbane's financial measures were equally unfortunate, yet there is no reason to question the purity of his motives.

It had been usual under previous governors to purchase the surplus grain from farmers at the current price of the day. The colonial government was almost the only purchaser, and to government the corn-growers looked for a certain share of their profits. Among the smaller settlers, the only cash they received in the course of the year was from the commissariat. This was the latter phase of a system which began with rationing the whole community, and gave liberty to prisoners who undertook to support themselves, which, in its second stage, willingly provided a free and emancipated settler with land and prisoner labour, and purchased the produce of land so tilled, to feed the prisoners whom the settlers could not employ.

Sir Thomas Brisbane, who arrived with Commissioner Bigge's report hanging over him, adopted the ordinary contract system, and invited tenders for the quantity required at the lowest price. The small farmers, unused to calculate the effects of open competition, rushed forward to the stores with such eagerness that wheat fell from 10s. and 7s. 6d. a bushel to 3s. 9d. Abstractedly he was right, practically he was wrong;-so serious a change required care and time.

About the same time the governor established a colonial currency which raised the pound sterling twenty-five per cent., and proceeded to pay government debts in colonial money to parties who had contracted debts in sterling currency;-a revival of the system of depreciating the circulating medium obsolete in England, but still practised by continental monarchs.

The colonists, seeing the price at which wheat was transferred to the government stores, took it for granted that the harvest had been

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

"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.

THE AUSTRALIAN AGRICULTURAL COMPANY.

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"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."

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