WOOL AND THE NEW SOUTH WALES ECONOMY BEFORE 1851 G. J. Abbott Degree: Doctor of Philosophy- Date of Submission: April 1969 TABLE OF CONTENTS Chapter Page I. INTRODUCTION .................................................. 2 PART I. WOOL AND THE GAOL ECONOMY II. SHEEP FARMING IN NEW SOUTH WALES, 1788-1821.................... 23 PART II. THE PASTORAL ECONOMY, 1822-1851 III. THE WOOL INDUSTRY, 1822-51: A SURVEY......................... 73 IV. THE SHEEP FARMING TECHNOLOGY.................................. 128 V. SHEEP FARMING: COSTS AND RETURNS............................. 162 VI. SHEEP FARMING AND THE GOVERNMENT............................. 188 PART III. WOOL AND THE NEW SOUTH WALES ECONOMY BEFORE 1851. VII. WOOL AND THE NEW SOUTH WALES ECONOMY BEFORE 1851 ............ 307 BIBLIOGRAPHY 330 LIST OF TABLES Table Page 1. The Number of Sheep in New South Wales: 1794-1810 .......... 33 2. Commissariat Purchases of Fresh Meat in New South Wales: 1811-19........................................................ 51 3. Wool Shipped from New South Wales: 1807-21.................. 56 4. Prices Obtained at London Auctions of New South Wales Wool: 1818-21........................................................ 60 5. Prices Received at London Auctions by H. Macarthur: 1821-25 . 78 6. The Marketing of New South Wales Wool.......................... 82 7. 'Official' Wool Prices: 1827-50 ............................ 93 8. Land Revenue and Expenditure on Immigration in New South Wales: 1832-5 .............................................. 226 9. Average Price per Acre Obtained at Government Land Auctions in New South Wales: 1838-40 ................................ 253 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS Figure Page 1. Number of Sheep in New South Wales: 1800-21 ................. 66 2. Number of Sheep and Wool Exports: New South Wales, 1821-51....................................................... 126 3. New South Wales: The Settled Areas, 1825.................... 197 4. New South Wales: The Nineteen Counties....................... 203 5. The Number of Assisted Immigrants Arriving in New South Wales: 1832-50...................................................... 242 6. 'Sketch Showing the Squatting Districts in New South Wales: 1844'......................................................... 257 7. 'Ways and Means for 1845'..................................... 270 8. 'Raising the Wind....'....................................... 271 9. 'Don Quixote's Remarkable Adventure....' .................... 272 10. Value of New South Wales Wool Exports:1826-51................ 326 ABBREVIATIONS BAH ........................ Business Archives and History HRA.................. Historical Records of Australia HRNSW......................Historical Records of New South Wales JRAHS ...................... Journal of the Royal Australian Historical Society SUMMARY Despite the importance accorded to the wool-growing industry as the most crucial formative influence on the growth of New South Wales during the eighteen twenties, thirties and forties, few attempts have been made to trace the history of this industry from its inception till the begin­ ning of the gold era in 1851, and these attempts were made many years ago. Much of historians' thinking about the role of wool in the New South Wales economy before 1851 is conditioned by a romantic tradition initially established in works such as Bonwick's Romance of the Wool Trade and Collier' The Pastoral Age in Australasia - both of which were published over fifty years ago - and continued in S. H. Roberts' books. The inadequacies of certain aspects of this interpretation have been shown in recent years, yet no attempt has been made to fully re-examine the material on which these previous histories have been based. A close examination of their sources (books and pamphlets about New South Wales written in the eighteen twenties, thirties and forties; govern­ ment reports of the same period; and manuscript material) and of new sources reveals a very different story. As is shown in Part I of this study, the origin and development of the wool industry before 1821 - in the period when New South Wales' primary economic function was regarded as that of a self- sufficient gaol - depended less on actions of men with heroic visions and more on simple market opportunities. Part II seeks to show that the devel­ opment of the wool industry in that phase of New South Wales growth often Summary, cont'd described as the 'pastoral age', was less of an unqualified success story than the traditional account suggests; that profits stemmed less from wool sales than from sales of surplus livestock, and that the technology of sheep-farming was designed to take advantage of this profit situation. Understanding this it is easier to explain the shape of the local govern­ ment policies and legislation concerning land and immigration during the three decades preceding 1851. But this does not mean that the growth of the wool industry was of minor consequence in this period, rather that the exaggerated claims of the romantic tradition should be discounted and that the process of growth in the New South Wales economy should be recog­ nized as being more complex than a simple reference to a central role for wool suggests. INTRODUCTION 2 CHAPTER I *lt* vv ir~ Kensington e\ INTRODUCTION \ V In his book The Three Colonies of Australia which was first published Use ear^ in ^1850s, Samuel Sidney divided the history of New South Wales previous to 1851 into two stages: the first, when it was 'a mere gaol or sink in which surplus felonry was poured'; the second when it was a 'sheep- walk'^. He was, in the use of this division, the precursor of modern historians who have depicted the progress of New South Wales in the period 1788-1851 as the transformation of a society bound by penal regulations into a society with free institutions and of an economy dependent on the British government's expenditure on its prison into a viable economy based on wool production. The statement, 'wool made 2 Australia a solvent nation^, and, in the end,a free one' epitomizes this approach and indicates the nature of the changes discerned by historians when examining this period, and the role they have ascribed to wool in this metamorphose. In spite of the importance attributed to wool, few studies have been made of the history of the wool-growing industry from the time of its origins till the discovery of gold in eastern Australia in 1851 introduced a novel element into the Australian development process. ^ *?lf 'Pires* Colon e ~f S idney, /ap—♦ , p. 11. Throughout this study New South Wales will be used to denote the mainland area of the colony as it was before the separation of Victoria in 1851. 2 W. K. Hancock, Australia, (Sydney, 1945), p. 12. See also A. Barnard, The Australian Wool Market, 1840-1900, (Melbourne, 1958), p. xv. 3 There are some studies which purport to do so but they were written many years ago since when new data has rendered many of their findings suspect. More recently studies of the wool-growing industry covering various parts of the 1788-1831 period have been made, but differences in the approaches adopted mean that they cannot be simply strung together to form a consistent and coherent account of the history of wool-growing in New South Wales before 1851. The major contribution to the history of the pre-1851 development of the wool industry is to be found in the work of S. H. Roberts; in particular in his books, History of Australian Land Settlement, which was published in 1924, and The Squatting Age in Australia: 1835-1847, , 3 which was first published in 1935. In the preface to the former book Roberts explained: The final product is far different from my original plans. As far back as my memory goes, nothing has ever gripped me more than the romance of Australia's squatters--the conquest of an unknown land by a body of adventurers, who spread over hundreds of miles, and who occupied principalities in the face of Government, the natives, and all manner of natural diffi­ culties. I set out with the intention of explaining that ^ period and showing how it really sums up Australia's story. It was undoubtedly with this intention that Roberts wrote the second book, The Squatting Age, for it is permeated by this theme of the romance of squatting. This book was reprinted with corrections by Melbourne University Press in 1964. 4 S. H. Roberts, History of Australian Land Settlement, (Melbourne, 1924), p. xiii. 4 In this respect Robert's work represents a continuation of a tradition established in two earlier books--James Bonwick's Romance of the Wool Trade, published in 1887, and James Collier's The Pastoral Age in Australasia, published in 1911. The tenor of Bonwick's work is shown in his opening sentence, 'Romance, though sometimes associated with the wild and improbable, is often but a tender suggestion of the poetical and wonderful''? It was this latter quality which Bonwick saw exemplified in squatting, which he described as a 'vagrant life of hardship' proving the mettle of the men who pushed into the interior of the continent with their flocks. His account of the wool-growing industry in New South Wales is therefore cast in an heroic mould, providing descriptions of the work of 'Captain Macarthur, Founder of Australian Squatting', of the Reverend Samuel Marsden and of a vast conglomerate of persons he loosely labelled squatters. But Bonwick equated squatting with the movement of flocks outwards from the Sydney Plain and made no distinction between the depasturing of sheep on purchased or granted land outside the Sydney Plain and depasturing them on crown land by simple occupancy. Squatting, in terms of Bonwick's description, was the geographic expansion of the wool­ growing industry and to the degree that he failed to differentiate between the types of land occupation involved in wool production, he exaggerated the importance of squatting. Such a distortion is under­ standable and inevitable, for Bonwick was not seeking to analyze, but ^J. Bonwick, Romance of the Wool Trade, (London, 1887), p. 1. 5 <4c3cr*\tc. to^'sympathetica lly ^UstgBS^Sk. a 'poetical and wonderful' aspect of Australian experience.