The spread of settlement in the original nineteen counties of New South Wales: 1788-1829 : an historical geography

Abstract

The thesis describes the salient physical features of the part of New South Wales included in the original nineteen counties which were proclaimed in 1829 and then discusses the settlement of the Cumberland Plain, the area in the immediate vicinity of Sydney. It shows how in the settlement of the plain variations in the quality of the soil led to the establishment of scattered clusters of farms, and how in the years 1810 to 1821 a series of droughts and caterpillar plagues made it necessary for the colony’s stockowners to find new areas in which to graze their cattle-and sheep. A reduction of the plain’s stock carrying capacity rather than a shortage of land was the reason for the outward movement of settlers during these years. A general account of the spread of settlement from the Cumberland Plain over the encircling sandstone plateau into the surrounding areas of the Hunter Valley, western uplands, southern tableland and Illawarra-Shoalhaven coastal plain is then given, and the circumstances and policies which led to the imposition of "limits of location" in 1826 and 1829 are discussed. Pour chapters are then devoted to a more detailed discussion of the way in which physical features,governmental policy, and economic expediency affected their settlement. The general conclusions drawn from the study are that during the period 1788 to 1829, the pattern of settlement was influenced to a large degree not only by the nature of the country (including its periodic visitation of drought and caterpillar plague) , but also by its governor’s policies, and that in each of the regions considered in detail differences in topography, climate and soil, in the class of settler who occupied them, and in the amount of government control of settlement, produced four quite distinctive types of land utilization and frontier society. Neither environmental nor human factors alone determined the pattern and nature of the settlement of the nineteen counties, and the changing relations (both in place and time) of these two sets of factors thus resulted in marked regional differentiations, a fact which rarely emerges in the generalised picture of early settlement in the standard histories. Show more