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1780-1840 - Early Immigration

Transportation of convicts eventually brought a total of about 160,000 prisoners to Australia. The initial character of a penal colony lasted for nearly 60 years in the areas of major original settlement. It ended in 1840 in New South Wales and in 1852 in Van Diemen's Land (modern Tasmania), which became a colony in 1825. Western Australia, which was founded in 1830 by free immigrants, added convicts to its population by its own choice from 1850 to 1868. Convicts were not sent to South Australia, which became a colony in 1836.

The major continuing problems of the colonies arose from efforts to carry out British policy designed for a penitentiary when other interests-fishing, sealing, farming, and trade-were developing. The economic development begun in the convict phase of settlement included the expansion of agriculture where conditions were favorable, as in Van Diemen's Land, which started in 1815 to export grain to New South Wales. Roads, bridges, and other transportation facilities necessary for commerce were built by convict labor, as were government buildings. In the early nineteenth century, enterprising colonists successfully introduced merino sheep as a source of the fine wool increasingly demanded by the expanding British textile industry.

Individual immigrants to Australia increased in number in the 1820s. They were mostly people of some means with which to acquire land, which was in general granted only to those of substance. This land policy, favoring the so-called exclusives, or individuals of established position, over the freed convicts, or emancipists, who sought to advance themselves, facilitated the pastoral expansion of the 1820s. The colonies already established - New South Wales and Van Diemen's Land-got most of the early immigrants, but some immigrants went to the newer colonies, Western Australia and South Australia. In the 1830s, the southern part of New South Wales, which later became the colony of Victoria (1851), was occupied by sheepmen fromfarther north and from Van Diemen's Land. Thus, this portion of Australia was originally settled by migration within Australia.

In 1829, 19 counties around Sydney in the southeast, comprising 8.9 million hectares, were officially designated as the only area of settlement in New South Wales. But sheepmen had already established stations (ranches) and sheep runs beyond the official boundaries before they were so designated. Such individuals were legally trespassers on crown land and, like their counterparts in the United States who occupied land without title or permit, they became known as squatters. Unlike squatters in the United States, however, those in Australia were for the most part men of substance from the middle and upper classes of British society. The term squatter did not carry any invidious meaning.

In fact, squatters became the landed gentry of Australia-the so-called squattrocracy-and their wealth made them the most powerful economic segment of the population. Sheep were the basis of their wealth, and by 1850 there were more than 15 million head in Australia. Squatting was legitimized in 1836, after the British government recognized the impossibility of enforcing the original settlement restrictions. The expansion of the pastoral industry did not result in new urban centers; the hundreds of sheep stations in New South Wales had an average of only 10 to 12 people each. The established seaport cities continued to be the main centers of population, making relative urbanization a feature of the Australian settlement pattern in the colonial period.