From Fallacy to Fable? Reading the Currie Diary against the yeoman ideal and the pioneer legend.

The story of the farming life of the Currie family can be placed within two larger narratives of Victorian farming and rural life. The first is the yeoman small independent farmer ideal championed by the land reformers of the 1850s and 1860s. This was not just an agricultural ideal designed to foster a strong rural economy, but also a social and political agenda dedicated to some democratic principles and the opportunity for many to share in land and the status it could bring.

The yeoman ideal was a vision of the new Victorian society that would be created in the ensuing decades. Indeed, we shall see from our reading of the Currie diary that this new class of farmers would be active in creating and maintaining their communities.

But not only was the yeoman ideal a vision of the future, it was also rooted in the past. It was linked to romantic notions of a similar class of English farmers and to political philosophy which argued the moral, social and political benefits of property ownership in land. It was a political reaction to the ‘squattocracy’ and their control of vast tracts of land.

But just as the land reformers cast their eyes backward when creating land policy for the yeoman ideal, so too has Australian history and sentimentalism cast its eyes back to the selectors and created from their experience the pioneering bush legend. The story of the young man with his family carving a farm and prosperity out of the bush with nothing but his labour and an axe. It was pioneers, we are told, who made this country.

This view has been justly criticized in recent decades as simplifying and excluding the complexity of rural Victoria, but there is an underlying current of truth in relation to the resourcefulness, courage and achievement demonstrated by many selectors.

But while there are those who look to this period and to the pioneer for the formation of our national character, the result will be an homogenous European male character. The Currie diary can provide evidence that might simultaneously embrace and confound the pioneer legend.

We can use the Currie diary to test each of these narratives, if not to explode them, then at least to concede their limitations and attempt to colour a richer picture of rural life in the latter half of nineteenth century Victoria.

In this way, we can not only think critically about an historic political issue such as land reform, but also a modern one; one that is tied up with issues of heritage, values and identity.

The following quote from Charles Daley seems particularly pertinent when reading the Currie diary following the relocation of the family to Gippsland. Daley writes,

There was a curiously naïve idea, very prevalent at this time, that the more heavily timbered the country was, the more productive it would be, and so the fledgling pioneers rushed to peg the densest scrub, thus serving themselves a maximum sentence of back-breaking work and unremitting poverty.[1]

The diary shows, that for John Currie, clearing was practically a daily ritual. The notion of heavily timbered land holding the most productive soil is also referred to by Dingle, in that selectors had little else to judge land by other than the vegetation growing upon it.[2] But did the move from Ballan to Lardner bring ‘unremitting poverty’ to the Curries? If so, was this caused specifically by the labour of clearing, or as a result of being further from a large local market for their produce, such as Ballarat had been. The diary can help to answer these questions and test the assumptions prevalent in the historiography.

Daley reserves most of his attention to the nature of work performed by the men. He mentions techniques used for clearing, and the tools and clothing used and worn. He describes a McCubbin-like transition from the selection being little more than a tent in the scrub to shelter the men, to eventually comprising of a log house in a clearing suitable for the arrival of wife and family. But the hauntingly lonely image inspired by Frederick McCubbin’s ‘The Pioneer’ is at odds with the social and community life that even the perhaps somewhat anti-social Anne Currie describes and participates in.

Russel Ward in ‘The Australian Legend’ argues that the pioneers of the bush had a disproportionate influence on the shaping of the Australian mystique.[3] Indeed, can we truthfully assert that a national character and spirit can be defined by a group who were a minority both socially and economically? This disproportionate influence is the link between the yeoman ideal and the pioneer legend, and the success or failure of a family like the Curries as documented by their diary is where it can be tested.

Daley accounts for the eventual abandonment of a third of the selected hill country of Gippsland being due to the 320 acre allotments being too large for a single family to manage, and laid out with a regularity that did not allow for variations of terrain and soil quality.[4] This perspective is clearly different to the view that, in other areas of Victoria, 320 acre allotments were much too small for a family to make a successful living from. John Currie selected 110 acres in Gippsland, so the diary might prove able to test Daley’s thesis, however we also know that John spent much time working James Currie’s selection.

In ‘The Tyranny of Distance’, Geoffrey Blainey continues this theme of small acreages and high land prices, when compared with North America

Dear land cursed farmers. One of Australia’s tragedies in the second half of the nineteenth century was the failure of tens of thousands of farmers and their families to make a living from small farms after slaving for years.[5]

But even if the land prices made Australia unattractive for new migrants, for John Currie the arduous move to Gippsland was in search of better quality land. The squatters had used many nefarious means to preserve their runs, or cherry-pick the best land on it. The heavily forested land in Gippsland was of little interest to pastoralists.

Michael Cannon in ‘Life in the Country’ argues

Much of the deplorable state of political morality in the eastern colonies during the remainder of the century, and the evil flowering of the urban land boom, had their origin in the corruption encouraged by evasion of the land acts.[6]

He is referring to the corruption of the squatters and elements of the Lands Department and the surveyors. It is cautionary to note that the legislation designed to create a conservative, democratic and respectable rural class initially had the opposite effect of encouraging corrupt behaviour and consolidating the power of the squatters.

John McQuilton in his chapter on selection from ‘The Kelly Outbreak’ also links this yeoman ideal with the ideals of the Chartist movement. Land reform undertaken on these principles could allow the ‘democratic’ diggers to take up land and create a rural class to rival the squatters. But he describes this as an initial failure, as the established squatters were able to make conniving and illegal use of their resources as a means to select the best land. This paints a corrupt image of the squatters who otherwise have been considered to embody part of the pioneering legend.[7]

For Cannon, the yeoman selector as a new class was doomed to fail;

The old ideal of a huge self-sufficient ‘yeoman’ population covering the nation always was a fallacy under Australian conditions, and led to wide-spread unnecessary hardship for as long as the dream persisted.[8]

Selectors often required large families to succeed on their small allotments, indeed a large family was sometimes seen as a substitute for sufficient capital. But the children of large families raised on selections had little choice but to eventually leave to find employment or new land. A 320 acre selection could not be divided between several children with any hope of it supporting all their families.

John Hirst argues that the pioneer legend is an empty myth, which although democratic in its pretense is fundamentally conservative, and does little to reveal the complex nature of social and economic life in rural Victoria in the latter half of the nineteenth century. [9] We can read the Currie diary with this criticism in mind, and use it to highlight the complexities of life as experienced by the Currie family.

For Dingle as well as Hirst, the yeoman farmer ideal was also a conservative notion that romanticized a particular class of farmers in English history that had been threatened by the industrial revolution. They were seen as the backbone of a rural and pre-capitalist England that was quickly disappearing.

Dingle concurs with McQuilton that the initial experience of the Land Acts and selection was one of failure. The land reformers and many of the selectors were inexperienced when it came to farming in Victorian conditions, and, Dingle argues, the attempt to plant families on the land was both daring and foolhardy, but would eventually succeed.[10] But this success would always be limited by the number of viable small farms and the limit to how many families they could support.

It is worth considering then the difference between viewing the selectors as a pioneering class that created or served as the basis for the pioneer legend, and considering them as a created class that was based upon a social idea that was at once both radical and conservative.

When looking at the wider history of rural settlement in Victoria, observing the changing trend from pastoralism to agriculture, the yeoman ideal must be considered. Certainly, by historians writing of the land reform movements which followed the Victorian gold rushes of the 1850s, it seldom is ignored. The yeoman ideal was a vision of a rural landscape dominated by small landowners. These small farmers would be free of the corrupting vices of the cities, living a simpler and more virtuous agricultural life. Owning property would give them a vested interest in the state and create a stable, dependable and conservative political class.

Furthermore, land in Europe was a cornerstone of status and wealth, and almost totally inaccessible to those without significant means. Settler colonialism in both North America and Australia was fuelled by the promise of land for all. In his chapter in Greenwood’s ‘Australia: a Social and Political History’, McNaughtan argues

The spectacle of Australia as a “vast sheepwalk” was distasteful to the overwhelming majority of settlers who had not been bred in the Colony and who carried with them from the old country an unvarying picture of a proper rural landscape. It is curious that the ideal of an Australia peopled by a “sturdy peasantry” or “industrious yeomanry” should have made such an irresistible appeal among all classes of people which, in the British Isles, had long since extinguished its own peasant class and was even then in process of reducing its yeomen to beggary.[11]

The yeoman ideal then, similarly to Australia’s conservative notion of the pioneer legend, was thus also part of a romantic view of the English past. But what is interesting is that this romanticized view of England’s rural past was not revived in Australia by immigrants from conservative land-owning families, but rather from those who in England were both urban and radical. Williams argues that the Chartist Movement in Britain cannot be ignored when considering the theoretical underpinnings of the debate and anxieties over land reform in Australia.[12]

Is it a paradox then, that the yeoman ideal in Victoria was composed and enacted as a mixture of radicalism and conservatism? Not exactly, because although land reform as a way of further democratizing the ‘old societies’ threatened longstanding and powerful interests, the same sorts of reform in Australia had to contend with the only recently established squatters and pastoralists. In this case, the evocation of the yeoman ideal could be used to prevent the further entrenchment of a landed elite in Australia; as F.G. Clarke argues

one of the greatest stimulants to electoral reform and universal manhood suffrage in all colonies stemmed from the realisation by liberals and radicals that the pastoralists’ grip on the lands of Australia could only be broken once their control over the colonial legislatures was also reduced.[13]

Ultimately, the image of the yeoman farmer was an idealistic rather than practical approach which focused on an abstract creation of an orderly system rather than any tangible reality. It was as much about politics as it was about farming.

But why might it be important when studying the Currie diary and the fortunes of that family? The almost universal appeal in Victoria of the yeoman farmer ideal is what later made selection possible for the Currie’s. Without this mythic ideal, and the Land Acts which embraced it, the family would not have been farmers at either Ballan or Lardner. It is important to consider the yeoman ideal when reading the Currie diary because it reminds us of the pattern of ideas behind the forming of legislation, which in turn has influence on the behaviour of people. As Williams suggests

rural settlement was seen as a vehicle for influencing the type of society that the colonies   wanted, or at least, thought that they wanted; it was an early example of a type of social engineering.[14]

The Curries then, were a living part of that particular rural vision of Victoria, but they were by no means passive participants. There were many other factors which would influence the fortunes of the Currie family; personal and environmental factors. It is however, important to remember that in some respects, their course had been charted by the aspirations of an earlier generation.

The pioneer legend is one of the many narratives of Australian history. For Russel Ward, it is part of the search to find what is unique in the Australian character and identity, and he argues that it developed first amongst the workers employed by squatters and pastoralists.[15] The pioneer legend assumes that unique Australian character was both the product and the requirement for settling the frontier, or at least that they developed mutually. Donley argues that

Whether they succeeded or not depended on their personal qualities. Good judgement,       perseverance and the ability to withstand loneliness and hardship – with the aid of good fortune – decided whether a squatter made or broke himself in the outback.[16]

Broadly, the pioneer legend embraces groups as varied as the first squatters and pastoralists, and the labourers they employed, to the stockmen who worked the cattle stations, shearers, and the bullock drivers who were relied on for the transport of goods before the railway networks spread. It celebrates a male-dominated world of hard work and self-sufficiency, both of which are considered impeccable conservative values.

It is curious that the life of the itinerant rural labourers like the shearers or the swagmen venerated by the pioneer legend was in some ways an impediment to the success of selection. Furthermore, that many selectors had to resort to this life was also a demonstration of the short-comings of the Selection Acts. As Bessant argues

Legislation alone was seen to be all that was required to establish this yeomanry. Hard work and sacrifice which it was assumed every selector would enjoy, would do the rest. It was taken for granted that the selector and his family would be on the farm for life. Yet the Australian rural worker was notoriously nomadic, quite out of character with the demands of the Land Acts.[17]

At its most superficial, the pioneer legend implies a homogenous class of men, white and of European origin. Frederick McCubbin’s most famous work is titled ‘The Pioneer’, referring singularly to the man in the painting and not his wife. The Currie diary is useful here, in that it gives a voice to the sort of woman depicted in this painting. The bleak, lonely image inspired by ‘The Pioneer’ is contradicted in the Currie diary by the almost daily recording of visitors to the farm, whether they be social calls or visits to borrow equipment or goods

Part of the mystique of the pioneer legend is not just in the character of the pioneers, but also in the landscape they went into. The Australian bush could be a dangerous place. Peter Pierce writes of the ‘lost child’ in Australian mythology who gets lost in the Australian bush

the lost child is an arresting figure in the history and the folklore of colonial Australia. More profoundly though, the lost child is the symbol of essential if never fully resolved anxieties within the white settler communities of this country.[18]

In some ways this tragic mythology is also experienced by the Currie’s in 1880 when their young daughter drowns in the waterhole after wandering away from the house

I had no heart to fill up my book since we lost our wee pet on the 24^th of the last month, it was oh so sudden… I carried her to the hole to dip a bucket of water. I stood her down and dipped it and she had a drink out the bucket, I led her by the hand to the door and said to her come in…I   feel sure she came in and went back to see where I got the water… I then ran to the water hole. The first thing I saw was a little foam on the water. My heart told me what that was oh shall I ever forget it, I looked under the sticks and saw my wee pet, but oh dear I never thought I was too late, as she was such a short time in… I’ve lost her my heart is breaking and I feel frightened to grieve for fear I am punished even more severely for it must have been as a punishment that she was taken from us like that. I can’t help blaming myself for letting her out of my mind… but she was so clever. There was never one so knowing of her age.[19]

In his book ‘The Country of Lost Children: An Australian Anxiety’, Pierce discusses the contemporary illustrations, literature and paintings which showed or described lost children in nineteenth century Australia as ‘asleep’. The viewer, like perhaps the rescuer when they first come upon the child, cannot be sure if the child is sleeping or dead. Likewise Catherine Currie thought it might not be too late.

Writing about Frederick McCubbin’s ‘What the Little Girl Saw in the Bush’ and ‘Childhood Fancies’, Pierce argues McCubbin “made visible… that nameless force which had for so long attracted children across boundaries, so that they wonder and wander, then become lost. This innocent attraction to the bush can be fatal.”[20] Was Catherine’s daughter perhaps attracted by her prior view of the waterhole to return for another look?

Almost three weeks passes before Catherine resumes her almost infallible daily journal entry. There is a strangely selfish sensation in reading this series of entries of Catherine having held back on this significant event, as though the information was being kept from the reader. It makes one wonder if the diary was a largely personal task, or whether it had been intended as a simple chronicle which from time to time happened to expand to include her thoughts, anxieties and feelings. We can perhaps surmise from the fact that no entry whatsoever was written on the fatal day of 24 November 1880 that diary entries may have been generally a task reserved for the evening, despite Catherine’s immediate writing style which often reads like it has been set down as events were occurring.

When Catherine Currie does resume making entries on 14 December 1880, she initially talks about John’s work and other comings and goings before mentioning her child dying. Had she not intended to write about it when she first sat down to make her next entry? Perhaps the process of writing brought forth the feelings and emotions which cover the rest of the page and a large part of the next one.

After the Curries along with many of their neighbours moved from Ballan to take up their new selections at Lardner, the task of building a new community existed alongside the building of new farms. John Currie was regularly involved in these processes. Catherine records in her entry for 15 January 1876, “John away to Brandy Creek to attend a meeting to get a Shire Council.”[21]

Several years later on 7 September 1879, and 15 September 1879, the diary records John organizing and collecting signatures from neighbours for a petition, which he then presents to the Council about clearing the road running near or past Rintel’s store. A later entry on 13 October 1879 records that this petition is read at a Council meeting, and it is decided to take action about “our road.”[22]

These are just some of the many occasions that John attends meetings, or is active in community business. The selector did not farm his selection in isolation. Support and links with neighbours and the community were essential to selection life. Although land reforms enacted in the spirit of the yeoman ideal may have envisioned a certain sort of rural society, it remained that it was up to families like the Curries and their neighbours to build their own community.

Catherine Currie may have rarely mentioned her own attendance at church after the family had moved to Lardner, but her diary entries reveal interest in the members of her family attending, and who they met there. She also often recorded who gave the service, which early on would often be John Currie. Sometimes the quality or punctuality of the minister would be worthy of being  recorded. For example on 20 April 1879 and 27 April 1879 the family went to church, but both times the minister did not attend; “the minister did not attend again”, wrote Catherine, “he must not be [of] much account.”[23]

Catherine also very regularly mentions the attendance of the children at school and Sunday school, and also occasions when either Katie or Tom might be home from school to help John or if the schoolmaster had given them holidays.

Whether the minister was on time for church on Sunday, or indeed whether he showed up at all, were not the most serious sorts of incidents which occurred in the new community. The hardships endured by the selectors and their families may have created a higher level of social tension than might otherwise have been experienced. We might never know the precise circumstances behind the incident which Catherine records in her entry of 26 September 1878, and it is of limited use to speculate whether it was due to personal differences, or an argument over borrowed money or equipment. But we can learn something from the various responses to the incident which Catherine records

we are all upset… we were called up at about 12 o’clock last night by Hamilton and Gregory. They told us that Syme had nearly killed McKay on Monday evening and they wanted John to go over at once to see him… John got a great fright when they told him as we never expected anything to happen old Mac he was such a quiet old fellow. John has taken him to Drouin today, he lent the poor old man £2-16/ and paid other expenses for him. I am afraid it will be all lost as John thinks he will not get better.[24]

This entry shows that beneath the rhythms of farm life recorded in the diary there were similar tensions and violence which have always occurred in human society. Also interesting are the circumstances in which John is called upon to go and see McKay. Was he perhaps an older man looked up to by the others? We might also surmise something of John possessing a generous and charitable nature by his lending of money to McKay, especially considering John thought he would not recover. It shows also that the Curries could spare money at this time, whereas almost a decade later this may not have been so. Even so, it is difficult to escape how valuable money was to the selectors. Two days later on 28 September 1878, when Catherine records that McKay had died, as much on her mind as what might be Syme’s fate because of the incident, is whether Syme will pay them the money he owes; “McKay… died yesterday morning. I wonder how it will be for Syme now and if we will get the money he owed us.”[25]

From the diary, it appears that not much in the way of consequences befell Syme, although it is possible that the Currie’s opinion of him had diminished. The following year there is an entry mentioning Syme “John… saw Syme, and he say the post office has been robbed last night, we don’t think it, there has been something else behind the scene that we do not understand.”[26] The suggestion that the Currie’s don’t trust Syme’s account of the robbery is intriguing.

In ‘The Land Hunger’, Bessant argues that “the most common picture of the lives of the selectors painted by historians and writers is one of poverty, hardship, ignorance, struggle against the wicked squatter, desperation and defeat in the end.”[27] Indeed, Bessant also includes excerpts from the works of Steele Rudd and Henry Lawson to illustrate the hardships of the selectors.[28]

These sources, along with some of the mentioned works of McCubbin, provide much of the imagery for imagining what life looked like, and how people experienced it. But we must remember that these are all produced for an audience in a very different way to what the Currie diary is. Still, we should take note where parallels in subject matter occur. For example, the anxiety produced by the use of fire to clear scrub and bush is described by Steele Rudd in ‘On Our Selection’

It was a delightful topic before we started, but in two weeks the clusters of fires that illuminated the whooping bush in the night and the crash upon crash of the big trees as they fell, had lost all their poetry.[29]

The enormous task of clearing, and the fears of falling trees and fires are echoed in the Currie diary in a series of entries in January and February of 1880. On 30 January 1880, Catherine writes “James’ new hut was burned down sometime yesterday, and everything in it, we never saw anything of it”,[30] and a week later in February she records, “I am so afraid of the fires that I am wishing for rain.”[31] To be effective in clearing the land, the burn required hot dry weather. Although rain would bring greater safety, it might also undo much of the hard labour of clearing.

As the decade progresses, farm life on the Currie selection and in the surrounding area seems to become more precarious. Catherine Currie’s diary shows how setbacks such as the one described 10 October 1887 could take a heavy emotional toll on the morale of the family

I feel quite unhappy this morning. I suppose Judy and all her pigs being dead has something to do with it. I don’t seem to see how we are going to manage to get through at all if something don’t turn up and I don’t know of any possibility of a turn for the better.[32]

These hard times continued throughout October of that year. Catherine makes an entry on 21 October 1887 recording Mr. George’s selection being sold; “I should be very sorry to leave it if it was mine,” she writes, “I suppose they all are it is one of the signs of the hard times as I am sure they would not leave it if they could help it.”[33]

The summer of 1887-88 must have brought no respite to this trend, but there is not a sense of defeat comparable to this stanza of Henry Lawson’s poem ‘Past Carin’’, which Bessant includes in full to illustrate the despair experienced by some selectors

            My eyes are dry, I cannot cry,

I’ve got no heart for breakin’,

But where it was, in days gone by,

A dull and empty achin’.

My last boy ran away from me –

I know my temper’s wearin’ –

But now I only wish to be

Beyond all signs of carin’.[34]

When Catherine’s son Tom leaves in January 1888 to find work her entry is not despairing like Lawson’s poem, nor like her entry describing the dead pigs. Rather, there is a sort of wry irony to the tone; “Tom went off this morn I am so sorry he has to go… of course it must be for the best, how can we make anything farming the grasshoppers.”[35]

The Currie diary lets us explore notions like the pioneer legend and the yeoman ideal against the experience of the people that each of these meta-narratives encompasses. It allows us to see that there could be both good times and bad times, and successes and failures. It removes the temptation to generalize judgements of success, failure, hardship or happy times on the story of selection. Success varied from district to district, family to family, and from year to year. The diary demonstrates that although the larger narrative stories are important and useful for conceptualizing history, they can have a tendency to be both mythic and shallow.

Yet it is also somewhat reassuring to find in the Catherine Currie’s diary a very small hint of the sort of humour the likes of which Steele Rudd and others have given to selection life. The Australian landscape and its wildlife brought many hardships and difficulties to the selectors, especially the wallabies and parrots getting into the crops, but as Catherine’s entry of 8 November 1879 shows, the Currie’s had the resourcefulness and endurance to meet them: “we catched a King Parrot in the trap, we tied it to a stick to frighten the rest, and it laid an egg.”[36]

Bibliography

Bessant, B., The Land Hunger: Commentary and Documents, Melbourne, Nelson, 1980.

McNaughtan, I.D., ‘Colonial Liberalism, 1851-92’, in Gordon Greenwood (ed.) Australia a Social and Political History, Sydney, Angus and Robertson, 1955, pp. 98-144.

Blainey, Geoffrey, The Tyranny of Distance, Melbourne, Sun Books, 1966.

Cannon, Michael, Life in the Country, Australia in the Victorian Age: 2, South Melbourne, Nelson, 1973.

Clarke, F. G., Australia: A Concise Political and Social History, Sydney, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Publishers, 1992.

Daley, Charles, The Story of Gippsland, Melbourne, Whitcombe & Tombs Pty. Ltd., 1960.

Diary of Anne Catherine Currie, MS Number 10886, Australian Manuscripts Collection, State Library of Victoria.

Dingle, A.E., The Victorians Vol. 2: Settling, McMahons Point, Fairfax, Syme & Weldon Associates, 1984.

Donley, R.J.R., Conquerors of the Bush: The Australian Squatters, Adelaide, Rigby, 1979.

Hirst, John in Deborah Gare and David Ritter, Making Australian History: Perspectives on the Past Since 1788, Thomson, South Melbourne, 2008.

McQuilton, John, The Kelly Outbreak, 1878-1880: the geographical dimension of social banditry, Carlton, Melbourne University Press, 1979.

Pierce, P., The country of Lost Children: an Australian Anxiety, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1999.

Ward, Russel, The Australian Legend, South Melbourne, Oxford University Press, 2003.

Williams, M.,  ‘More and smaller is better: Australian rural settlement 1788-1914’, in J. M. Powell and M. Williams (eds.),  Australian Space Australian Time: Geographical Perspectives, Melbourne, Oxford University Press, 1975, pp. 61-103.

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[1] Charles Daley, The Story of Gippsland, Melbourne, Whitcombe & Tombs Pty. Ltd., 1960, p. 96.

[2]A.E. Dingle, The Victorians Vol. 2: Settling, McMahons Point, Fairfax, Syme & Weldon Associates, 1984, p. 64.

[3] Russel Ward, The Australian Legend, South Melbourne, Oxford University Press, 2003.

[4] Daley, p. 101.

[5] Geoffrey Blainey, The Tyranny of Distance, Melbourne, Sun Books, 1966, p. 166.

[6] Michael Cannon, Life in the Country, Australia in the Victorian Age: 2, South Melbourne, Nelson, 1973, p. 139.

[7] John McQuilton, The Kelly Outbreak, 1878-1880: the geographical dimension of social banditry, Carlton, Melbourne University Press, 1979, pp. 25-60.

[8] Cannon, p. 176.

[9] John Hirst in Deborah Gare and David Ritter, Making Australian History: Perspectives on the Past Since 1788, South Melbourne, Thomson, 2008, p. 139.

[10] A.E. Dingle, The Victorians Vol. 2: Settling, McMahons Point, Fairfax, Syme & Weldon Associates, 1984, p. 74.

[11] I.D., McNaughtan, ‘Colonial Liberalism, 1851-92’, in Gordon Greenwood (ed.)  Australia a Social and Political History, Sydney, Angus and Robertson, 1955, p. 115.

[12] M. Williams, ‘More and smaller is better: Australian rural settlement 1788-1914’, in J. M. Powell and M. Williams (eds.),  Australian Space Australian Time: Geographical Perspectives, Melbourne, Oxford University Press, 1975, p. 72.

[13] F. G. Clarke, Australia: A Concise Political and Social History, Sydney, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Publishers, 1992, p. 128.

[14] Williams, p. 61.

[15] Ward, p. v.

[16] R.J.R. Donley, Conquerors of the Bush: The Australian Squatters, Adelaide, Rigby, 1979, p. 8.

[17] B. Bessant, The Land Hunger: Commentary and Documents, Melbourne, Nelson, 1980, p. 51.

[18] Peter Pierce, The country of Lost Children: an Australian Anxiety, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1999, p. xi.

[19] Diary of Anne Catherine Currie, MS Number 10886, Australian Manuscripts Collection, State Library of Victoria, 14 December 1880.

[20] Pierce, p. 58.

[21] Currie, ‘Diary 15 January 1876’.

[22] Currie, ‘Diary 7 September 1879’, ‘Diary 15 September 1879’, ‘Diary 13 October 1879’.

[23] Currie, ‘Diary 20 April 1879’, ‘Diary 27 April 1879’.

[24] Currie, ‘Diary 26 September 1878’.

[25] Currie, ‘Diary 28 September 1878’.

[26] Currie, ‘Diary 18 July 1879’.

[27] Bessant, pp. 58-9.

[28] Bessant,  pp. 58-62.

[29] Steele Rudd, in Bessant, p. 58.

[30] Currie, ‘Diary 30 January 1880’.

[31] Currie, ‘Diary 7 February 1880’.

[32] Currie, ‘Diary 10 October 1887’.

[33] Currie, ‘Diary 21 October 1887’.

[34] Henry Lawson, in Bessant, p. 66.

[35] Currie, ‘Diary 3 January 1888’.

[36] Currie, ‘Diary 8 November 1879’.