The Promise and Peril of the Free Selection Act
In 1861, near Canberra, a small farmer named Samuel Shumack contemplated his future with cautious optimism. He had just purchased a Suffolk Punch mare and planned to expand his farm with another horse, a plough, and a harrow—investments made possible by a promising harvest. Yet a shadow loomed over his aspirations: the Free Selection Act, a contentious land reform bill stirring agitation across New South Wales. His neighbor, Mr. Davis, a wealthy squatter, warned that if passed, the act would devastate the pastoral elite.
Meanwhile, in Sydney, William Charles Wentworth—once a champion of colonial aristocracy—fretted over the erosion of Australia’s landed gentry. Fearing democracy’s tide, he lamented that gentlemen were becoming “the last roses of summer,” doomed to wither under manhood suffrage and land redistribution. By 1862, disillusioned, he retreated to England, abandoning his dream of an Australian aristocracy.
The Squatters’ Resistance and Selectors’ Struggles
The Free Selection Act, enacted in 1862, aimed to break the squatters’ monopoly by allowing small farmers (“selectors”) to claim Crown land. Conservatives predicted chaos: a “dictatorial tyranny” of gold-diggers and publicans supplanting the gentry. Yet in the bush, optimism prevailed. Selectors like Shumack found that predicted calamities never materialized. Neighbors—whether selectors or squatters—shared machinery, labor, and camaraderie, weathering droughts and floods together.
But the reality was often harsher. Many selectors, underfinanced and inexperienced, became ensnared in debt to storekeepers. Some abandoned their land in despair; others turned to cattle duffing or sly-grog trading. The “class war” raged in land offices, where speculators and squatters manipulated the system through “dummy” selectors—paid proxies who secured land for elites. Corruption flourished, with bribes ensuring favorable surveys and delayed declarations of available land.
The Human Toll of Land Reform
For struggling selectors, life was brutal. Families lived in bark huts, children worked alongside parents, and women endured backbreaking domestic labor. Dairy farms demanded predawn milking; men fought the land’s harshness while women churned butter, baked bread, and tanned hides. Some, like Niels Hertzberg Larsen, a Norwegian immigrant turned selector, faced despair. His son, the future writer Henry Lawson, grew up in deafness and poverty, later immortalizing the bush’s cruelty in his works.
In Queensland, the Crown Lands Alienation Act of 1868 promised opportunity but delivered hardship. Selectors like Thomas Davis, a Welsh wheelwright, battled kangaroos, cockatoos, and debt. His son, Arthur Hoey Davis (writing as “Steele Rudd”), later captured their struggles in On Our Selection, a darkly comic portrayal of rural resilience.
The Squatters’ Last Stand
While selectors scraped by, squatters clung to fading grandeur. Niel Black, a Western District pastoralist, lamented democracy’s rise, calling Queensland the last refuge for “master and man.” Others, like Rachel Henning in Queensland, maintained genteel pretenses—reading English novels, hosting evensong, and clinging to social hierarchies even as the bush eroded their illusions.
Legacy: A Fractured Dream
By 1880, the Free Selection Act had reshaped rural Australia—but not as reformers hoped. Many selectors failed, leaving behind abandoned farms and “graveyards of human endeavor.” The bush remained a place of hardship, where bushrangers like Ben Hall and cattle duffers like Henry Redford became folk heroes, defying a system stacked against the poor.
Yet the act had democratized land ownership, however imperfectly. It weakened the squatters’ grip and seeded a rural mythos of endurance—a legacy that would echo in Australia’s literature and identity. The clash between democracy and gentry, between hope and harsh reality, became a defining chapter in the nation’s story.
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