Australian Agriculture: Its History and Challenges

By Ted Henzell

Agriculture in Australia has had a lively history. The first European settlers in 1788 brought agricultural technologies with them from their homelands, influencing early practices in Australia. Wool production dominated the 19th century, while dairying grew rapidly during the first half of the 20th century.

Despite having one of the driest landscapes in the world, Australia has been successful in adapting agricultural practices to the land, and these innovations in farming are explained in this well-researched volume.

Focusing on the technologies that the farmers and graziers actually used, this book follows the history of each of the major commodities or groups of commodities to the end of the 20th century: grain crops, sheep and wool, beef and dairy, working bullocks and horses, sugar, cotton, fruit and vegetables, and grapes and wine. Major issues facing the various agricultural enterprises as they enter the 21st century are also discussed.

Written in a readable style to suit students of history, social sciences and agriculture, Australian Agriculture will also appeal to professionals in the industry and those with a general interest in Australian sociology and history.

• Language: English
• Publisher: CSIRO PUBLISHING
• Release date: May 9, 2007
• ISBN: 9780643098558

Book preview

Introduction

It all began with the arrival of the first European settlers in 1788. The indigenous people, who had occupied the continent for at least 60 000 years, had come close to developing agriculture, but had not actually cultivated the soil or raised livestock. So the first settlers brought their agricultural technology with them, and one of the main aims of this book is to relate what those people did at home to what they did, or tried to do, in Australia. Many of the British and Irish practices were traditional ones with long histories and they were an invaluable part of the colonial inheritance.

But Australian agriculture is also of interest in its own right. It has been a major achievement for one of the driest parts of the world, with, ‘by far the oldest, most infertile, most nutrient-leached soils of any continent’i to be able to produce enough food and natural fibre to meet the needs of several times its own population. This book follows the history of each of the major commodities or groups of commodities to the end of the 20th century. The pace of development has varied greatly amongst them. Wool was the front runner in the 19th century while dairying grew rapidly during the first half of the 20th century. So too did grain growing, though even more after the Second World War (WWII). Other major exports—cotton, wine and even beef—are of relatively recent origin. In fact, much of the nation’s current capacity for food and fibre production has been created over the past 50 years. It has long since ceased being European (except in its distant origins) and become truly Australian. Even some of the sustainability issues, such as dryland salinity, are peculiarly our own.

The focus here is on the technologies that the farmers and graziers actually used rather than the state of scientific knowledge at the time. Wadham and Wood’s book Land Utilization in Australia was perhaps the first to deal with the reality rather than the theory of Australian agriculture.ii This book tries to do the same. It is not a history of agricultural science but of innovations in farming, which are influenced by a broader range of factors, not least the ingenuity of the farmers themselves. While every effort has been made to identify the sources of key inventions, the details of discovery have usually been omitted.

Despite its trials and tribulations, Australian agriculture has been a great success. Well then, why weren’t Australian farmers far more affluent at the end of the 20th century? The answer lies in the changing nature of traded goods and wealth. In 1876–80, food and natural fibre accounted for about 58 per cent of the value of world trade,iii and Australians were amongst the wealthiest people in the world. Agricultural trade held up pretty well until just after WWII, when it still made up about 40 per cent of the total, but the figure has since fallen to around 10 per cent.iv Australian farmers have felt the effects of this in a relentless cost/price squeeze; their costs being determined largely by the national economy, their prices by the world market. They have responded very positively, though by 1999–2000 they needed to produce more than four times the volume to earn, in real terms, only just over half of what they had done in 1951–52.v

*****

So much excellent research has been done on British and Irish agriculture at the time of settlement that it is very hard to précis it; the multi-author Agrarian History of England and Wales, 1750–1850, alone runs to more than 1200 pages.vi There are many fine monographs too, especially for England but also for Ireland and Scotland. However, much of this information has yet to find its way into Australian texts. While the key references are usually available in Australian libraries (though not at any one place), they are more easily accessible in England, where the author did some of his reading.

Likewise, a wealth of information is available on the earliest days of Australian agriculture. The Historical Records of Australia run to 33 volumes and the Historical Records of New South Wales to 7 volumes; thankfully, they are well-indexed. The British genius for attention to administrative detail shows through very clearly in these early records. In addition, some excellent books were published before 1830: David Collins’ The English Colony in New South Wales (1798) is invaluable, so too are the first-hand experiences of Wentworth and Atkinson (who had been a farmer in England) and of Widowson, agricultural agent with the Cressy Company in Tasmania.vii

The vital role that Sir Joseph Banks, the ‘father of Australia’, played in planning the settlement at Botany Bay and in the early days of Merino wool growing is very well documented (he did not publish that much himself). Carter is the accepted authority in this fieldviii and he writes with the added insight of having been engaged in sheep and wool research in both Australia and Britain. Many of the key figures in early NSW were Banks’ choice.

In the search for statistics, the main gap turned out to be not in the very early days but later on. The decline in standards from about 1815 onwards was associated not only with increasing local responsibility but even more so with squatting; many of those who were settling the outback did not want anyone to know what they were up to, least of all the government. Order was restored in the second half of the century and the colonial statistics from about 1860 onwards are reasonably reliable. However, not much else was reported until the colonies set up their own departments of agriculture and agricultural colleges. The biggest change of all occurred when CSIR and the universities took up agricultural research between the two World Wars. This helped Australia to develop an international perspective and record keeping since then has been good to overwhelming.

Although Australian historians have made very significant progress during the 20th century, a lot remains to be done. Much of the literature is purely descriptive, for instance, and lacks any real depth of analysis. Sometimes the reasons for key changes are reasonably obvious (mechanical refrigeration was a prerequisite for exporting fresh food from Australia and heavy machinery for advances in sugar cane and cotton growing) but it is not obvious why Australia persisted for so long with a primitive form of soil fertility management for grain growing, nor why it omitted to do anything about the feeding of its beef cattle. Resolving such issues goes well beyond the scope of a work of this size.

*****

The insights of well-informed visitors were particularly helpful in writing this book. Trollope was not a specialist in agriculture, but he did his homework thoroughly, and he proved to be a remarkably astute observer when he visited in the 1870s.ix He had a special interest in this country because his son was on the land in New South Wales. Wallace’s visit in 1889 was especially significant because he was the accepted authority on farm livestock in Britain at that time and he had travelled widely.x And for elegant and sensitive writing it would be hard to beat the report of the Scottish Agricultural Commissioners who visited Australia at the invitation of the Commonwealth Government in 1910–11.xi Their dispassionate observations were particularly important during an era of rather narrow-minded Australian nationalism. Unfortunately, intellectual isolation often went with Geoffrey Blainey’s tyranny of distance.

But the technical literature usually does not throw much light on what life was like for the battlers: the humble men and women who did so much of the making of Australian agriculture. Biographies and novels tell us far more, and have influenced the writing of this book to a greater extent than might be apparent from the citations (besides, it was a good reason to re-read some Australian classics). In New South Wales, for example, key sources included Kingsley’s novel Geoffry Hamlyn for station life in the 1850s and for giving us the phrase, ‘Australia, that working man’s paradise’ (which may have enjoyed as much currency in its day as ‘the lucky country’ did a century later); Furphy (Such is Life) for the musings of an erudite bullock driver in the 1880s; Bean who was a great rural journalist (On the Wool Track) before he became official historian of WWI; and Ker Conway (The Road from Coorain) for what it was like to grow up the child of a soldier settler in the dust and drought of the western division of NSW.xii

But each of the colonies/states has had its notable rural authors. Facey in Western Australia, for example; he endured the hardships of droving in the north-west and of the wheat belt (as a youngster and as a soldier settler who went broke) and then wrote A Fortunate Life. In Queensland, there was Steele Rudd of the Dad and Dave stories; his father had selected a small farm on the Darling Downs in 1870. And in the Northern Territory, there was Herbert, who took a very sceptical view of its mores between the two World Wars.xiii

The author owes a huge debt of gratitude to these and other writers of earlier times, and to all the people who read drafts of this book and who are acknowledged rather inadequately.

Notes

Chapter 1

Grain crops

The greatest challenge facing the settlers who arrived on the First Fleet in 1788 was to grow enough food for themselves. Their initial sowings on the sandstone soils in what is now the centre of Sydney were a disaster, so cropping was moved to more fertile land at the head of the harbour (Parramatta) and then to the even more productive Hawkesbury/Nepean River Valley.¹ But this took time, as did learning to farm in a new land. Supplies were slow to arrive from home and the infant settlement was often hungry in its first five years.²

The problem was that wheat did not grow very well in coastal New South Wales.³ Maize did better, but the colonists did not like eating grits and cornbread and persisted with wheat. While they were able to grow enough of it to meet their needs in good years from about 1795 onwards, they had to import or go short when harvests were poor. Supplies improved when Tasmania and then South Australia began to export, but New South Wales itself was not consistently self-sufficient in wheat until the end of the 19th century.

This chapter tells the story of how Australia developed grain growing and became one of the world’s leading wheat exporters. But first, it is instructive to look at the food and farming practices that the British and Irish brought with them to Australia. These inherited practices were most influential during the first half-century of settlement. By the 1840s, the colonial farmers had begun to make their own inventions, such as the stripper-harvester, and to look to other new European-settled countries such as the United States for ideas rather than to Europe itself. There had, of course, been a lot of improvisation from the start, because conditions were so very different from those at home.

The colonial inheritance

Food preferences

At the time of settlement, many people in the British Isles still lived on the lesser grains, depending on incomes and relative prices,⁴ and there were distinct regional patterns of consumption too. Wheat was most important in the south and east of England, barley and oats in the north and west of England,⁵ Wales, Scotland and Ulster. Rye, the hardiest of all the cereals, had faded out of use during the 18th century; formerly it had been grown on the poorest soils and in the coldest parts of the kingdom.

In fact, Britain was in the process of switching to wheat. The equivalent of about 66 per cent of the population of England and Wales probably ate wheat in 1800, and 88 per cent in 1850. In Scotland, the percentage of wheat eaters rose from 10 to 44 per cent over this half century, while that of oat eaters declined from 72 to 50 per cent.⁶ So wheat was in the ascendancy at home and it was the clear preference in New South Wales too.

Approximately 6–8 bushels of corn (cereal grain) were available per person per year in England between 1788 and 1850, with little evidence of any time trend.⁷ That is equivalent to about a pound (about half a kilogram) of wheaten flour per person per day. A similar quantity of flour or bread was issued to all adult males after their arrival in New South Wales.⁸ Australians were eating only about half as much as that in the 1990s.

Peas (the pease pudding of the old nursery rhyme) made an important contribution to the protein content of diets in the United Kingdom at the time of settlement. The marines on the First Fleet were issued with two pints of them a week and they were initially part of the ration at Sydney Cove. Faba or broad beans were not so highly regarded; the prevailing opinion of the period was that they were a flatulent and coarse food better suited to the laborious than the sedentary class of society.⁹ Accordingly, they were fed mostly to horses, swine and other livestock.

Supplies of cereals

Two aspects are of particular interest in relation to what happened in Australia: Britain’s achievement in remaining largely self-sufficient in cereal production until the 1840s and then the creation of an open market in which colonial exports had to compete with those from the rest of the world. The British population roughly trebled between 1750 and 1850, yet for most of the time the country was able to get by with only modest imports of foreign grain. How this was done is described in more detail under the next heading. Many observers thought that the same methods should have been used in Australia, but they were not, and for good reason.

The Irish situation was even less relevant to the early development of Australian grain growing. Ireland produced ‘far more grain than might be expected in competitive conditions from a country with such a damp climate’¹⁰ and in the mid-1830s supplied as much as 80 per cent of Britain’s closely regulated wheat imports. However, this was largely an artefact of the protection afforded by the Corn Laws under the special relationship formalised by the Union of 1801. Meanwhile, more and more potatoes were being grown and eaten in Ireland (see Chapter 7).

The second point relates to what happened after the Corn Laws had been repealed in 1846. The United Kingdom then espoused free trade and continued to do so until after the first of the two World Wars that dominated the 20th century (1914–18 and 1939–45). What this meant was that when Australia began to ship wheat home on a regular basis in the 1870s, it was fully exposed to the harsh discipline of global competition. In fact, the competition was so intense that British arable agriculture collapsed under the pressure, although Australian grain played virtually no part in that collapse.

Farming practices

Production of the four main cereals probably doubled in England and Wales over the century from 1750 to 1850, and much of the increase was due to higher yields, with the total area of these crops expanding only by about a quarter (Table 1.1). While some British historians have labelled these changes as an ‘agricultural revolution’, they do not really fit the criteria defined by those who have studied industrial revolutions in general, such as the substitution of mechanical for human effort, of inanimate for animal power, and of new and more abundant raw materials for old ones.¹¹ In the case of British agriculture, it was more a matter of implementing a useful innovation that had been around for some time: the practice of rotating fodder crops with grain crops.¹²

Table 1.1 Estimated areas of the chief crops of England and Wales, 1750–1850 (millions of acres)

Source: Holderness, B. A. (1989). In ‘The Agrarian History of England and Wales Vol. 6: 1750–1850’. (Ed G. E. Mingay.) table 2.7. (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, UK.)

Although British farmers had long been producing both crops and livestock, they had usually managed them as discrete components of their operations. The grain crops had typically been grown in a two crops followed by a fallow sequence on the arable land while the rest had remained under permanent pasture. But well before Australia was settled this old separation had begun to break down under the influence of fodder crop rotations. The Norfolk four-course sequence (wheat, turnips, barley, and red clover) was the best known of these; it substituted fodder crops (turnips and clover) for bare or weedy fallow, and alternated fodder and grain crops on the arable fields. The feed supply for livestock was greatly improved and soil fertility was enhanced by the nitrogen that the legumes fixed from the air.¹³ The root crops were partly grazed in situ (often by sheep), and partly conserved for winter feed, while the legumes were usually made into hay before the aftermath was grazed. Plant nutrients were recycled by fertilising the fields with the farmyard manure that had accumulated in the yards and buildings where the stock had over-wintered. The whole system was called ‘high farming’.

These fodder crop rotations were not a British invention; they had evolved on the continent in earlier times, and had been perfected in Flanders and Brabant, that is, in present-day Belgium and the adjoining regions of the Netherlands and France.¹⁴ When first introduced to England, they were practised in Norfolk (hence the name) and their adoption is reflected in the rising acreages of turnips and clovers in Table 1.1. However, a number of modifications were made to the classical four courses in the process:

• Other fodder crops were planted instead of turnips and red clover. By 1850, the list of root crops included swedes, fodder beets and potatoes, while rape, cabbages and kale were also being grown for feed.¹⁵ Lucerne, sainfoin, and white clover/ryegrass were the principal alternatives to red clover. These changes had been necessary because of the build-up of pests and diseases that occurred when turnips and red clover were replanted as often as once every four years.

• The sequence was extended beyond four courses. As soil fertility improved, more than one cereal crop could be taken before the next fodder crop was sown, while the proportion of fodder crops could be expanded if livestock prices were high enough relative to those for grain. In the East Lothian region of southern Scotland, for instance, the proportion of ley ranged from 50 per cent of total arable in 1780, when wheat prices were quite low, to 16 per cent in 1812, when they were high.¹⁶ (A ley is a pasture that is sown with the intention of ploughing it out later to grow a crop.)

Some writers give the impression that the Norfolk four-course rotation (or something similar) was standard practice in Britain during the formative years of Australian grain growing, but that was not true. Over much of the British Isles, the rainfall was too high or the soil too heavy for good growth of root crops and a lot of this land was still being fallowed. Thus, Prince concluded that, in 1800 ‘a large proportion of the arable land in a belt extending from Durham to Dorset was fallowed one year out of three’.¹⁷ Typically, these were the clay soils in the vales that had been the chief wheat-growing areas of the country before fodder-crop rotations had allowed it to move to lighter land. The classical clay-soil sequence was winter wheat followed by a spring crop (barley, oats or beans) then fallow. Prince put the total area then under fallow in England at no fewer than two million acres a year, whereas the Agrarian History of England and Wales estimated it to be 1.3 to 1.5 million acres.¹⁸ Nevertheless, if all the farmers had still been practising the old two crops and a fallow sequence, it would have accounted for at least one-third of all the arable land in the country. Even in 1850, the total area of fallow was estimated at about a million acres.¹⁹

So there was ample precedent for the use of bare fallow in Australia, but the rationales were probably quite different. Weed control was probably the chief reason for fallowing the heavy wheat soils of old England. The Agrarian History says that, ‘bare fallows had always been subject to several ploughings purely as a cleaning operation’.²⁰ It was very difficult indeed to kill the more persistent weeds with the implements then available, except during dry spells in summer; the land was too wet for much of the year. Conservation of soil moisture, which was one of the chief reasons for fallowing in the colonies, was usually irrelevant in Britain. However, there were good reasons for doing so around the Mediterranean, tracing back to ancient Greece.²¹

Scottish agriculture was in the midst of great change in 1788.²² Within three or four decades it had risen to a high rank amongst the agricultures of western Europe and it continued to advance; in fact, to such effect that by mid-century the large farms of the Scottish Lothians, the Carse of Gowrie and southern Perthshire had achieved the highest standard of mixed farming.²³ Yet the challenges were still sufficient for Symon to claim that Scottish farming provided an excellent training for those intending to settle in the new countries of the world.²⁴

Leys were probably more important in Ireland, where conditions favoured pastoral production (Chapter 3). The first official survey recorded about 1.15 million acres of grass-clover mixtures, and although this figure was obtained after the Famine had begun, it probably reflected the earlier situation.²⁵ So, the larger farms that grew most of the cereals would have been able to rotate their cultivations if they had wished to do so, and Irish cereal yields were similar to English ones throughout the period under review. However, many Irish smallholders did not grow any cereals at all, and those that did tended to practise a see-saw between oats and potatoes.

While rotations have received most attention from British historians, the invention that was to have by far the greatest impact in Australia was the process for making superphosphate from rock phosphate, patented by Lawes in 1842. Although about 60 years were to elapse before much ‘super’ was used in Australia, it was adopted promptly at home, with British imports of rock phosphate rising from 1700 tons in 1841 to 220 000 tons in 1850.²⁶ Unfortunately, Australia was even slower to adopt another valuable fertiliser practice in Britain and Ireland—the regular liming of arable land to correct soil acidity.

Varieties

One of the most important contributions to the early development of Australian agriculture was the technology embodied in the seeds that the settlers brought with them. Nevertheless, there is no record of the provenance of the first grain crops, and it may not have told us much anyway. Wheats and other cereals were named in those days, but not in the form of the well-defined, uniform, unique varieties of the 20th century. In fact, the general standard of seed supplies in the United Kingdom left much to be desired. John Le Couteur’s interest in this important subject had been aroused in 1831 by seeing a nursery of about 80 wheat varieties that had been planted in Jersey by Professor La Gasca of the Royal Gardens, Madrid. They exhibited remarkable diversity (some seven feet high, some only four etc.) but more to the point, La Gasca examined Le Couteur’s own wheat, which he (Le Couteur) thought was as pure, or at least as unmixed, as that of his neighbours. La Gasca found 23 sorts in just three fields: some red, some white; some ripe, some still green; spring types amongst the winter ones; and so on. This led Le Couteur to select his own ‘pure’ seed, which he said almost doubled his farm yield. Fortunately, he wrote up his experiences,²⁷ and published a second edition of his paper in 1872. It was featured in The Sydney Mail early in 1873 and may have been read by William Farrer because he mentioned Le Couteur in a letter to The Queenslander in 1882.²⁸

Charles Darwin credited Patrick Shirreff with having been more successful than anyone else in Britain in producing new kinds of wheat; seven of his varieties were being grown extensively then (Darwin’s two volumes on domestication were first published in 1868).²⁹ Shirreff was an East Lothian farmer who worked with oats and wheat for about 50 years from 1819.³⁰ He was no ordinary farmer; he had visited Canada and the United States, and had published a book of advice to intending migrants in 1835. His earlier single-plant selections were far more successful than his later attempts at improvement by cross-fertilisation. No evidence has been found that Shirreff’s varieties had any significant impact in Australia, but the description of methods that he published in 1873 may well have done.

More than one hundred kinds of wheat were known in England in 1850, but that total would have included a number of synonyms and homonyms. Meanwhile, Australia had been growing Red and White Lammas wheats. The name Lammas certainly appears in the records of English varieties between 1780 and 1850, but it does not feature very prominently. William Marshall observed in 1788 that the old red and white wheats appeared to be nearly extinct in Yorkshire, referring to the latter as the White Lammas of other districts.³¹ Most of the names then in use were associated with the person who had selected the variety, or its place of origin, or the grower or marketer of the seed, whereas Lammas pertained to the crop’s date of maturity. It was winter wheat, sown in the autumn and ripe by Lammas Day (1 August).³² All that can be said with any certainty is that the Australian wheat industry was founded on British winter wheats.

There is no doubt about the origins of Chevallier barley. It came from one or more ears of grain selected in Suffolk in 1819 or 1820. An observant farm worker named John Andrews and the Rev. Dr John Chevallier shared in its discovery and development.³³ By 1850, it was being grown widely in the United Kingdom and other countries; a local selection (Prior’s Chevalier) played a vital role in Australia later on.

Mechanisation

Cultivation and farm haulage had been mechanised with animal power before 1788, and the United Kingdom might have been expected to have been actively mechanising the rest of its agriculture by then. After all, the nation was in the midst of the world’s first industrial revolution. But there was surprisingly little change in grain growing and processing methods through to about 1850 and three of the most demanding tasks, sowing, harvesting and threshing, remained heavily dependent on manual labour:

• Sowing: Jethro Tull (1674–1741) is one of the best-known names in the history of British agriculture. Although he had written persuasively on seed drills in 1731, and the technology had been far from new even then, most British farmers continued to broadcast their crops more than a century later. Besides saving on seed, drilling allowed the inter-row spaces to be hoed mechanically for weed control.

• Harvesting: Most British and Irish grain crops were still being harvested manually in 1850. In England, the tools used for reaping evolved slowly from sickles, with which about 90 per cent of the wheat crop was harvested in 1790, to bagging hooks and finally to scythes. A skilled farm worker could reap about a third of an acre daily with a sickle cutting high and about an acre with a scythe.³⁴ Either way, the work was very demanding.

• Threshing: This was heavy work too, but it was still common for grain to be flailed and winnowed by hand in the 1850s.

The Irish smallholders did almost everything by hand, and spades were commonly used to cultivate holdings of fewer than 10 acres.³⁵ Nevertheless, Irish cotters retained the use of animal power for as long as they could, often in the scaled-down form of donkey carts.

The United Kingdom’s conservatism was not due to any lack of technical invention. Take the case of threshing: machinery capable of separating grain from husks and straw had been invented in Scotland in 1786, and methods already existed for using horse power to drive such devices. The most flexible and widely used version was one in which a horse or horses were harnessed to the arm or rim of a horizontal wheel and walked in a circle around or beneath it.³⁶ Various kinds of machinery could then be driven through a set of gears. Steam engines provided an alternative source of power from about 1840 onwards.

The explanation lay principally in the chronic under-employment of poorly paid farm workers. At the time of the 1841 census, agricultural labourers accounted for about 19 per cent of all occupied persons in England and they were one of the poorest groups in the whole country. Despite their close association with the land, they lived ‘permanently on the verge of starvation’,³⁷ and not surprisingly, were bitterly opposed to the introduction of labour-saving machinery. In fact, when the farm labourers of southern England rioted in 1830, threshing machines were one of the main targets of their anger. But they paid a very heavy price: some were hanged and more than 450 were sent to Australia.³⁸

However, there was also a more subtle influence at work, a belief in farming not as a business but as a ‘way of life’ that should not be changed. As late as 1932, an international survey reported that, ‘the European attitude towards agriculture is entirely different from that of the great exporting countries beyond the sea’. The Europeans were still resisting mechanisation at that stage, arguing that, ‘the man in the field is important; the plow is a sacred symbol, while plowing, sowing and harvesting are almost religious occasions’.³⁹

Australian wheat growing

The main focus of this chapter is on wheat, which has always been the most important Australian grain crop; other grains are covered briefly in a separate section. Wheat production was a high priority for each new colonial settlement, lest it run short of food. Moreover, the early wheat growers had to make do with whatever land was to hand (often quite unsuitable) before they could move on to something better. The first century of Australian farming was characterised by its mobility.

This section opens with the early history of wheat growing in the colonies of New South Wales and Tasmania,⁴⁰ and then comments on why British fodder crop rotations were not adopted in the colonies. It goes on to detail the history of wheat growing in South Australia, as illustrative of major developments in southern Australia. South Australia and Victoria dominated Australian wheat production during the second half of the 19th century, harvesting more than four-fifths of the whole crop in 1890. The focus then switches to the special features of wheat growing in the other colonies/states and the section concludes with accounts of varietal selection and breeding and of national production and exports.

Getting started in New South Wales and Tasmania: 1788 to 1850

The first farmers, if they’d had any time for reflection, might have listed six things that were very different from those they had been used to at home: they did not know where to farm; trees were usually in the way; they did not have any draught animals to help them; there was no farmyard manure; maize grew better than wheat; and farm labour was very expensive. In relation to land use, it was all trial and error in Australia, whereas they had been able to draw on centuries of experience at home. The priority that they attached to this matter is shown by the letter that Surgeon George Worgan wrote to his brother in June 1788: ‘in our excursions inland, which I believe have not exceeded 30 or 40 miles in any direction, we have met with a great extent of park-like country … It is the general opinion here, that it would be a great length of time, and require a vast number of cultivators to render it fit to produce grain enough to supply a small colony’.⁴¹ In fact, it took several years of trial and error to do just that.

Shortly after the first successful harvest of 1791–92, wheat began to be grown on the fertile flats of the Hawkesbury River and by 1810 more than 70 per cent of the colony’s wheat and maize (by area) and all of its oats and barley were being grown there.⁴² The Hawkesbury continued to develop, with more than 10 times as much land under wheat and maize in 1821 as in 1810, and cropping expanded also on the less-fertile forest soils around Sydney. While still restricted mostly to the Cumberland Plain at that point, it then spread so rapidly that about half the New South Wales wheat crop was being grown in the valleys of the Hunter and Manning Rivers by 1840.

Tasmanian grain growing began around the convict settlements on the Derwent (1803) and Tamar (1804) Rivers and they too had their hungry years: much kangaroo was eaten.⁴³ Nevertheless, things generally went better than in New South Wales: the soils were more fertile, the rain was more regular and the farmland was less subject to flooding; also, English wheats grew better in a climate not so different from that of their homeland. Tasmania was the first Australian colony to achieve self-sufficiency in wheat production (in 1815 or 1816) and with ready access to harbours and navigable streams was able to export the surplus. But there was still the same restless quest for better land as on the mainland. Cropping moved upstream from Hobart and further afield to the shores of Pittwater and the valley of the Coal River, while in the north it migrated from below the present site of Launceston to the Tamar’s tributaries, the North and South Esk Rivers. Although the south of the island grew most of the wheat in 1820, the balance had swung to the north by 1850.⁴⁴

The biggest difference from home was in methods of cultivation. Instead of dealing with land from which the original forest had been cleared long ago, the colonists often found large hardwood trees just where they wanted to farm.⁴⁵ The problem was greatest in New South Wales; several accounts of early Tasmania mention the existence of large areas of open country created by Aboriginal burning practices. Anyway, the pioneers soon gave up on digging out the trees; it was very hard work indeed. Instead, the larger stumps were left in place and farmers had to till the soil with hoes and spades until they could be removed. The settlers in New South Wales did not begin to fully clear new land until about 1815 or 1816.⁴⁶ It has been claimed that it was a mistake not to have sent more people with farming experience on the First Fleet, although it is hard to see why they would have done any better than those who were cutting down gum trees and hoeing amongst the stumps and roots.⁴⁷

The shortage of draught animals was not rectified in New South Wales until the 1820s and then with bullocks not horses. While they represented a very welcome advance for cartage they were of limited use for cultivation because, at that stage, tree stumps were still present on half to three-quarters of the farmers’ fields.⁴⁸ They were still a common sight in the 1840s.⁴⁹ Although the country had been more open in Tasmania, the situation in 1820 was that, ‘clearing was seldom complete and many paddocks were dotted with stumps that were removed only gradually’.⁵⁰ Again, the land had to be cultivated with hoes and spades, and the transition to animal power tended to be even slower than in New South Wales. This was because convict labour was available for longer in Tasmania (transportation continued to 1853 versus 1841 in New South Wales).

Very little farmyard manure was to be had in the colonies, yet its use on crop land was so deeply ingrained in British thinking that the first successful farmers in New South Wales, Edward Dodd and James Ruse, were very concerned at the lack of it.⁵¹ The whole idea of frontier farming, that is, of cropping the land repeatedly without manure or fertiliser and moving on when that became unrewarding, was totally new to them. Arthur Young, the great English agricultural writer, had the same problem. While there is no evidence that he knew what was happening in New South Wales, he took a keen interest in what was going on across the Atlantic and corresponded regularly with George Washington. Apparently he (Young) kept on about manuring until the Americans put him straight. Thomas Jefferson wrote, ‘manure does not enter into this, because we can buy an acre of new land cheaper than we can manure an old one’.⁵²

Maize grew far better than wheat round Sydney; in fact, the first substantial grain harvest in 1791–92 comprised about eight times as many bushels of maize as of wheat.⁵³ A larger area of wheat was sown later on (about 10 of wheat to six of maize between 1795 and 1821), but maize usually gave a higher yield per acre. Most of it was fed to livestock, although the convicts ate a good deal of it at times: they stole nearly a third of the 1791–92 maize crop.

Finally, farm labour was far more expensive in Australia. There were not enough convicts to meet both public and private needs and emancipated workers soon found that they could charge a much higher price for their services than farm labourers could at home. Governors Hunter and King both tried to fix agricultural wages at English levels, but failed. In 1800, the market actually paid five times the rate that had been set for general work.⁵⁴ The labour-intensive techniques inherited from the old country proved a major hindrance under such conditions, and had to be shed as soon as possible.

Amongst the more familiar things in the Australian colonies were the varieties of wheat, their pests and diseases, and methods of harvesting. Tall, late-maturing Lammas wheats were commonly sown in both colonies,⁵⁵ although others had been tried, and there were the same problems of varietal purity and identification as at home; Atkinson wrote in 1826 that it is ‘extremely difficult to obtain a true sample of seed of any description’.⁵⁶ The common pests and diseases of grain crops in Britain and Ireland (blight (rust), smut, grain moths and weevils) had all been introduced by the 1820s⁵⁷ and there was nothing much that the colonists could have done about it. The methods of harvesting, threshing and winnowing wheat were also very similar to those used at home. Reaping was with sickles, and on most farms the grain was threshed and winnowed by hand. While the Macarthurs may have had a ‘great warehouse full of … threshing, winnowing, grinding and flour-dressing machinery, all worked by horses’ at Camden in the 1820s,⁵⁸ that was exceptional (as it was in England at the time).

The extreme variability of Australia’s rainfall may not have been apparent for some time. Although there were nine dry years in the first 20 of the Sydney settlement, the first multi-year drought was not experienced until 1827. Another followed in 1837–39, when both the Murray and Murrumbidgee Rivers stopped flowing.⁵⁹ In bleak contrast, disastrous floods were distressingly common as the run-off poured down from the sandstone uplands around Sydney. Thus the Hawkesbury suffered 10 high floods between 1799 and 1819. In 1806 ‘some seven persons were drowned and the wonder is that this figure was so low’.⁶⁰ The Hawkesbury farmers faced an agonising trade-off between soil fertility and safety for themselves and their families.

Mill streams provided most of the power for milling grain in the British Isles, but there were few reliable streams in coastal New South Wales, and alternative sources of power had to be found. The metal hand-grinders brought with the First Fleet soon wore out and treadmills and horse-powered capstan mills had to be used until the first government windmill began to operate in 1797. A water-powered mill operated intermittently at Parramatta from 1804 and the first steam-driven mill in New South Wales dated from 1815.⁶¹ In contrast, Tasmania had some excellent mill streams, and later on, milled wheat for use on the mainland.

The milling itself was another important part of the colonial inheritance. The traditional method of milling grain in Britain and Ireland, which employed the ancient principle of a fixed bed stone with a rotating ‘runner’ on top, fed through a central ‘eye’ and with the ground meal delivered around the edges and sieved through cloth screens, was also used in Australia. It was not until the 1870s that a new milling technology, roller milling, was perfected on the continent, particularly in Hungary. It was taken up quite rapidly in Australia.

The colonial wheat records are more complete for area than for yield and total production.⁶² The area of wheat in New South Wales grew quite slowly for about 25 years before rising more rapidly; Tasmania began about 15 years later but caught up (Fig. 1.1). Each colony grew 25 000–30 000 hectares of wheat in the 1840s and together they accounted for about 80 per cent of all sowings in Australia. While Tasmanian yields are said to have been higher, this was not the case between 1832 and 1850. Over the 15 years for which comparable data are available, New South Wales averaged 0.98 tonnes per hectare and Tasmania 0.84 tonnes.⁶³ Anyway, there were no Corn Laws to protect the colonial grain growers and although New South Wales imported regularly from Tasmania, it bought from other sources as well (chiefly Chile and India; the Cape had its own problems). This strongly restricted colonial wheat prices.

Fig. 1.1 The beginnings of wheat growing in New South Wales and Tasmania.

While useful progress had been made in New South Wales and Tasmania by 1850, in neither colony had specialist wheat growers been able to make a decent living. In fact, many of the exconvicts who had been granted small farms in New South Wales had gone broke and lost their land, some more than once. For instance, James Ruse, the first of the emancipated farmers, sold his land grant at Parramatta and at least one other on the Hawkesbury before fading into obscurity.⁶⁴ The problem was highlighted by the poor state of the farms and farmers that remained in business. The situation in New South Wales after the first 50 years was summed up by C. J. King as follows: ‘although farming continued to be followed it was without enthusiasm, in the end becoming the preserve of the small settlers only, men without capital sufficient to enable them to obtain and stock large grants of land and who no doubt would very gladly have abandoned farming altogether if suitable opportunities had offered’.⁶⁵ Anyone with the capital needed to invest in sheep and cattle did just that, in line with Governor Gipps’ advice to the Secretary of State in 1844 that, ‘Australia is essentially a pastoral country and must remain such for ages’.⁶⁶

The condition of specialist grain growers in Tasmania was no better. They were described in 1839 as ‘a needy, struggling, and … despised class of people … most of the farms are naked and poverty stricken’ with only ‘a scanty stock of poor cattle’.⁶⁷ In fact, the majority had been bought out and subsumed in larger mixed farms by then,⁶⁸ but the after-effects were still obvious 30 years later. Travelling between Launceston and Hobart in 1866–67, Charles Dilke saw ‘acre upon acre of old wheat-land abandoned to mimosa scrub’, and wrote that, ‘the people in these portions of the island have worked their lands to death’.⁶⁹

This period opened up a social divide between grain growers and pastoralists that lasted for a century or so. As early as 1843, a correspondent wrote to The Sydney Morning Herald about the two great classes of colonists, graziers and farmers; later on, their differences were accentuated by strong feelings about the selection of pastoral land for cultivation. Even after WWII, when the old order was about to change, the National Dictionary was able to quote such examples of usage as, ‘the expensive sports-coat his wife made him buy so that he will look like a grazier instead of a farmer’ and the advice, ‘You must never refer to a grazier as a farmer. A farmer is a lower type of human.’⁷⁰

Why fodder crop rotations weren’t used

The early Australian grain growers were often berated for their poor farming practices, particularly their failure to adopt fertility-restoring fodder crop rotations. The situation in New South Wales was that by 1835 ‘much of the land now growing wheat has been under that crop, alternated with maize, for 30 years’.⁷¹ If yields fell too far, which was more likely to happen on the less-fertile forest soils, the land was allowed to revert to grazing or even to bush. In Tasmania, because the climate was too cold for maize and there was little demand for other crops, wheat was sown year after year. By 1851, one field at New Norfolk had been planted continuously for 22 years.⁷²

The reason why the colonists did not take up the British rotational practices was, in brief, that both the environmental and socio-economic conditions were totally different in Australia. The climate was so mild that there was no need to house farm animals in winter, not even in Tasmania, and the natural grazing so abundant that stock did not need any extra feed to survive. Also, there was little or no incentive for out-of-season production of prime beef or fresh milk. These facts of colonial life seem to have been recognised quite quickly in New South Wales, and with them, the case for fodder crops vanished. Thus, W. C. Wentworth wrote in 1819 that, ‘the natural grasses of the colony are sufficiently good and nutritious at all seasons of the year, for the support of every description of stock, where there is an adequate tract of country for them to range over’.⁷³ Wentworth himself, by crossing the Blue Mountains in 1813, had helped to open up the vast grazing resources of inland Australia. There was very little case for planting anything to feed sheep or cattle until that land had been stocked.

British root crops and fodder legumes were certainly tried in New South Wales. This is clear from the evidence presented by large landholders like Gregory Blaxland and John Macarthur to Commissioner Bigge.⁷⁴ Samuel Marsden had already tested the most important artificial grasses (a term that included pasture legumes in those days), while Wentworth’s book deals briefly with the growing of turnips for sheep and of grass and clover on turnip land. Although most of these British fodders proved to be poorly adapted to the warm temperate climate of New South Wales, there was little reason to look for better ones.

For fodder crop rotations to be attractive to farmers, returns from both the crop and livestock components need to be favourable. Although such conditions existed in Britain up until the 1870s, they were not replicated in nearby France (and certainly not in Australia). Australian farmers did not really become interested in pasture improvement until the 1920s, while wool prices were still relatively high and after the natural grazing lands had been fully stocked. The inclusion of legume leys in Australian grain crop rotations became a far less attractive proposition when wool prices fell later on.

Wheat growing in South Australia

While the New South Wales and Tasmanian wheat growers were struggling to survive, a new era had opened in South Australia, where wheat did well from the start. The settlers who arrived in 1836 found themselves in an environment that favoured agriculture, the red-brown earth soils being relatively fertile and not needing much clearing.⁷⁵ Another important difference was that the South Australian growers were free settlers who had chosen to be farmers; it had not been forced upon them, as it had been on the ex-convicts of New South Wales and Tasmania. Nevertheless, they still found that their ‘old-world experience was of little use in a new and unfamiliar land’.⁷⁶

As already mentioned, the history of wheat growing has been presented in greater detail for South Australia than for the other colonies/states.⁷⁷ Three phases can be distinguished, based on the methods that were adopted to manage soil fertility: frontier farming, frontier farming with fallowing and fertiliser (superphosphate), pasture rotations (ley farming), and probably a fourth: crop rotations.⁷⁸ The first phase ran from the time of settlement to the 1890s and was characterised by continuous wheat growing without any fertility-enhancing inputs at all. Local demand for wheat had been satisfied within seven years of arrival and about 17 000 hectares of it were being planted annually by 1850.