Clancy of the Overflow: How Squatters Made Australia Rich

My great grandfather, John Clancy, migrated to Australia from Cork with his parents in 1841, to find a better life. Their story is typical of the period: following little success on the Bendigo gold fields in Victoria in the 1850s, the family moved to Deniliquin in south-west New South Wales around 1870, where John and his young family squatted, establishing a sheep run. His passion was horses, a love shared with A.B. “Banjo” Paterson, a Sydney lawyer from a wealthy sheep property in New South Wales, who became immortalised in Australian literature through his poetry promoting the pleasures of outback life. The two men developed a friendship through this common interest.

The late 1880s and early 1890s were a devastating time on the land: the worst drought on record, a rabbit plague destroying arable land, economic downturn, product price collapse, and government dysfunction led 1200 New South Wales squatters to walk off their land by 1900, abandoning 8 million acres. John Clancy was one. He then worked as a shearer and drover on “The Overflow”, a large property on a branch of the Bogan River (a tributary of the Darling) 400 miles west of Sydney, spending time droving sheep along “the western route” to Queensland. His documented claim to fame is recorded in a small rural newspaper as the first to report rabbits in Queensland. His name is known to all Australians not because he spotted rabbits in Queensland, but through his tardiness in paying bills. His friend Paterson, acting as his lawyer, sent a reminder regarding an unpaid account to his work address, “The Overflow”. Eventually a reply came from a colleague: “Clancy’s gone to Queensland droving, and we don’t know where he are.”

Paterson later wrote that this line was so arresting, he had to write a poem around it. The outcome: “Clancy of the Overflow”. This extraordinary poem was inspired by Paterson’s nostalgia for the bush, although it was based on the life of one of many striving for a living in a harsh and unforgiving land. Together with “The Man from Snowy River” and “Waltzing Matilda”, “Clancy of the Overflow” captured Paterson’s romanticised (if unrealistic) view of life in outback Australia in the latter part of the nineteenth century.

The life of John Clancy as a squatter, the land he had to walk off due to poverty, and the Overflow where he worked, a wealthy squatting sheep run that remains today, are emblematic of the settlement of rural Australia in the nineteenth century.

The term squatter was first used in Australia in Van Diemen’s Land in the 1820s to describe undesirables illegally “squatting” on land, usually with stolen sheep. By the mid-1830s, however, the spirit of adventure was driving younger sons from England, merchants, and demobilised army officers to become unauthorised occupants of land west of “the Divide” as reputable “new squatters”. A brief overview of European settlement in rural Australia helps to understand how squatting as it relates to land acquisition was arguably the most important contribution to nineteenth-century prosperity in the Australian colonies.

The colony of New South Wales began in 1788 at Sydney Cove as a jail for 750 convicts. Land occupation was by government grant until 1832. Subsequent acquisition of Crown Land was by purchase. The problem for the government was to retain “ownership” of the vast lands west of the Great Divide once it was crossed in 1813 and squatters with their sheep poured across the mountains to occupy pastoral lands.

Initially the grant system used in the confined area between the mountain range and the sea was extended to the area around Bathurst, the town established on the Macquarie River immediately west of the mountains. The squatters with their sheep moved past Bathurst to settle on land to the north, west and south, identifying “their” runs using natural borders of creeks, trees, and rocks, with no attention to formal survey.

The Crown, risking losing control of settlement, attempted to restrict unlawful occupation of land by legislating “limits of occupation” as a semicircle of land with a radius of approximately 100 miles from Sydney. This became known as the Nineteen Counties. Surveyor General Thomas Mitchell was instructed to construct the first trigonometric survey in Australia, to include the Nineteen Counties. By the time the map of his survey was published in 1834, great tracts of fertile land west of the Divide had been settled by squatters, emphasising the futility of legislation.

To the Colonial Office in London, squatting was a “systematic violation of the Law”. To Governor Bourke on the ground, tasked with sorting out the problem, “not all the armies of England could drive back our herds within the limits of the Nineteen Counties”. In 1836, Bourke introduced a practical solution to legalise and regulate squatting by creating squatting zones, providing local commissioners, and charging a yearly rent of ten pounds irrespective of the extent of occupied land.

Numerous adjustments to this basic plan were legislated over the next thirty years, enabling squatters to dominate land issues. They controlled all fertile lands, excluding those who wanted to farm smaller holdings. Miners returning from the gold fields in the 1850s searching for farming lots exacerbated this problem. The conflict was resolved by Governor John Robertson in 1861, with legislation of “free selection without survey”, aimed at limiting the size of land that squatters could keep while making the balance of land available to the selector. Corruption ruled, with squatters “selecting” their own land using dummy claims along the rivers, even using the names of dead or unborn children on claims.

By 1870, Australian squatters were the largest producers of wool in the world. In 1890, 210 million kilograms of wool were produced, making many squatters extremely wealthy, with little incentive to reduce their land holdings.

Critical review of the selection model which was no longer working led to legislation aimed at protecting the rights of both the squatters and those seeking farms for agriculture based on re-purchase and closer settlement. Various voluntary and compulsory re-purchase schemes followed. The general principles held for all the Australian colonies (and states after Federation in 1901). Re-purchase and re-distribution policies were used to accommodate returning soldiers from the First World War seeking small farming parcels of land.

Squatting in colonial Australia was an immense challenge for administrators due to the arbitrary nature of boundaries which lacked precise survey and an absence of incentive for squatters to precisely document their runs until the properties came to sale or subdivision.

Few printed maps of early squatting leases exist. One example was “Runs of the Late Edward Curr of St Heliers” of a large strip of land in northern Victoria crossing into New South Wales, included in Curr’s son’s Recollections of Squatting in Victoria published in 1883. Curr describes the tribulations and challenges of the squatter in the early 1840s as he managed his father’s property. Extending the area of “ownership” involved simply climbing a mountain and claiming adjoining land. Survey and formal mapping were optional.

The extent of squatting in Victoria by mid-century was captured by Thomas Ham in his important “Map of Australia Felix” in 1847, accompanied by a list of squatting runs. By the third edition in 1851 it was known as “Ham’s Squatting Map of Victoria”. It remained in production for eleven editions until 1864.

Within twenty years of the Robertson Land Laws that attempted to create opportunity for small landowners, corrupt practices forced a review conducted by August Morris and George Rankin. Their report contained thirty maps documenting the control of land “ownership” by squatters. Immediately the colonial government legislated a program of closer settlement in 1884 based on subdivision of squatting leases. This attempt to control land settlement in fair fashion would shape land policy for over fifty years. As with the earlier selection laws in New South Wales, all colonies would adopt variations of voluntary or compulsory land resumption laws.

An important model for the creation of farming lots came in 1911 with the decision of the Australian Agricultural Company to subdivide and sell a major part of its pastoral interests in the Peel River area of northern New South Wales.

The AA Company, established in 1825 as the first great Australian pastoral company, had a shareholding dominated by English politicians that enabled quasi-independence from local control. Disposal of their New South Wales holdings enabled the AA Company to join the family dynasties of Kidman, Forrest and Durack in squatting on an industrial scale with properties in central, western and northern Australia and claims of hundreds of thousands of square miles supporting a massive cattle industry. The size of these properties was such that they appeared on national maps.

Maps recording a restructured rural industry appeared in government reports, parliamentary papers, cadastral surveys, and parish maps. Following the First World War a need to provide land for returning soldiers was met in part by making available irrigation plots developed on the Murray and Murrumbidgee rivers, and subdividing large squatting properties, using the established model of voluntary or compulsory subdivision of existing leases.

Modern irrigation began at Mildura on the Murray River in 1886. Following repeated severe droughts, the Victorian government sold 250,000 acres to the Chaffey brothers from Canada, who developed the first large-scale irrigation scheme in Australia. This model was followed by the Murrumbidgee Irrigation Area once the Burrinjuck Dam was constructed from 1907. An important subdivision of a leased property for soldier settlement involved the Overflow station, where John Clancy had been employed as a shearer and drover.

Printed and manuscript cadastral maps of pastoral leases produced by private surveyors, land agents and government became increasingly common in the latter parts of the nineteenth century, documenting land re-allocation and land sales consequent upon the legislative changes forced by conflict between squatter and farmer. Smaller-scale regional, colonial and parish maps were produced by government, and commercial cartographers such as H.E.C. Robinson. Robinson dominated specialty commercial cartography in Australia from 1882 for over fifty years. In the 1920s he produced maps of South Australia, Victoria, New South Wales and Queensland to include all pastoral stations.

Collated pastoral maps required quality topographical maps, based on accurate survey. The trigonometric survey of the Nineteen Counties by Mitchell was followed by topographical maps of variable quality and extent in all colonies by 1900. The data base from the New South Wales survey was used by Mitchell’s assistant Robert Dixon to identify alienated (granted/bought) land in the Nineteen Counties, in his map published in London in 1837. These maps from the same data base that was organised by Mitchell but significantly obtained by his deputy Dixon, are different in nature, with pure survey on Mitchell’s, and cultural/property additions on Dixon’s. Mitchell was furious, sacking Dixon, who had omitted to get permission from his superior (probably because he knew he would not get it). All colonies began trigonometric surveys, but most were inaccurate and incomplete.

These cartographic challenges became recognised following Federation, when surveys of variable accuracy lacked proper register at state borders.

National quality topographic mapping began in 1907 with the military constructing “strategic one inch to the mile” (1:63,360) maps. The old problems of the absence of a homogeneous base and a discordant register emphasised the need for a national geodetic topographic mapping program. By the Second World War, less than 2 per cent of Australia was covered by 1:63,360 topographic maps. The immensity and unprecedented nature of the task of triangulating 7.7 million square kilometres (with a population density of 1.2 per square kilometre) with its attendant costs and hurdles, took the war to stimulate the effort required.

The value of aerial mapping tethered to fixed land bases had been demonstrated by the private initiatives of Donald Mackay, who made four aerial surveys between 1930 and 1937. With H.E.C. Robinson, Mackay constructed topographic maps of central-west Australia, covering about 15 per cent of Australia. In 1968, 540 maps at 1:250,000 (1 millimetre to 250 metres) were printed as the first uniform medium-scale topographic map series covering all Australia.

John Clancy had very little to do with the cartographic history of Australia. But owing to his lack of attention in paying his bills, he became a focal point in the folklore of outback Australia. Clancy as a squatter, shearer, and drover is identified with an era in Australian history that marked its transition from a jail at the end of the world to a federated country with the highest standard of living in the world in a little over 100 years.

This evolution was directly related to the drive and success of the outback squatter in creating an enormously profitable grazing empire. After a staggering start, cadastral maps recording the squatters’ leases, together with a consequential need to complete topographic mapping programs, link the essential cartographic history of rural Australia to the illegal settlement which became the backbone of Australian independence and prosperity.

Robert Clancy is an emeritus professor at the University of Newcastle’s School of Biomedical Sciences and Pharmacy. He was admitted as a Member of the Order of Australia in 2005 for service to cartography as a collector of early maps of Australia and to the field of immunology.