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| Squatter Alexander Lang's self portrait entitled 'The Squatter at Home 1839 Bad news from the outstations'. Although this dwelling is simple, many early pastoralists accumulated enough wealth to build themselves great mansions. |
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| Hand coloured lithograph, c. 1847, by Alexander Denistoun Lang (1814?-1872), contributed by the La Trobe Picture Collection, State Library of Victoria. |
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| The frontier warfare the squatters precipitated when they drove their sheep and cattle into other people's territories. |
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| Wood engraving by Samuel Calvert (1828-1913) published in published in The Illustrated Melbourne Post, May 27, 1867, by Robert Stewart.. Contributed by the La Trobe Picture Collection, State Library of Victoria. |
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The term 'squatter' radically changed its meaning in nineteenth-century Australia. Squatters, as the name suggests, occupied land that they did not own.
The earliest of them did so illegally - doubly so, because they were not only defying the white authorities but also the law of the land's traditional owners.
The Colonial Office in London and Governor Darling in Sydney had ruled that no-one was permitted to settle on the mainland beyond 'the limits of location' - bounded by a semi-circular arc 400 kilometres from Sydney. Yet even when Darling made his decree in 1829, settlers were pushing beyond the limits of location in New South Wales. Then, in 1834-35, pastoralists from Van Diemen's Land began to occupy the grasslands of western Victoria.
Darling's successor, Governor Bourke, decided that it was futile to try to check the expansion of settlement, and instead set out to regulate it. Under the 1835 Squatting Regulations, Crown land could be taken up on annual licence for a fee of ten pounds per year. In September 1836 Bourke declared the whole Port Phillip District open for settlement under these regulations.
The result was a free-for-all in which the rights of the traditional owners were summarily overridden. As Henry Reynolds has pointed out in his important work, The Law of the Land (Penguin, 1987), this was contrary to Colonial Office policy. Occupation licences were intended to be a non-exclusive form of land tenure. The licence-holders were not entitled to expel traditional owners from their country or cut them off from water. 'Protectors' were appointed to safeguard Aboriginal access rights. In practice, however, the liberals' vision of co-occupation proved impossible to realise. When the Chief Protector, George Augustus Robinson, toured the Western District in early 1841, he found that squatters simply assumed their occupation licences gave them the prerogatives of ownership.
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| Portrait entitled 'A Port Phillip Squatter, 1850'. |
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| Calotype by John Hunter Kerr (1821?-1874) from the Lang album of views in Victoria 1849-1861, contributed by the La Trobe Picture Collection, State Library of Victoria. |
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Having taken up vast areas of grazing land at little cost, many squatters became extremely wealthy. They also entrenched themselves in the Victorian Legislative Council, which enabled them to deflect repeated moves for land reform. The 'squattocracy', as they soon became known, were a formidable conservative force in Victorian politics, their aristocratic pretensions belying the unsavoury and often violent origins of the wealth they fought so hard to defend.
Copyright Imagine The Future Inc. and Australian Film Commission, 2002.
Text by Jenny Lee for ITF.
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