Down Wrote a Daughter

Up Came a Squatter: Niel Black of Glenormiston, 1839–1880
by Maggie Black
NewSouth and State Library of Victoria, 2016, 320 pages, $49.99
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Without Banjo Paterson’s “Waltzing Matilda” the good old word squatter, in its pastoral sense, might have disappeared from general usage. These productive old pioneers of the bush have had a bad press over the years: ruthlessly greedy land-grabbers; rural snobs; mass murderers of Aborigines; despoilers of a pristine environment; drivers of poor old swaggies to suicide over stolen sheep.

Maggie Black’s biography of her great-grandfather helps provide balance. Niel Black arrived from Scotland in 1839 at thirty-five at the peak of the southern Australian grazing boom and became an industry leader in Victoria’s Western District, perhaps the best fine-wool country on earth.

When he struck out on horseback into the immensity of the bush “his spirits were elated by the sense of space and freedom”—thousands of level, almost treeless, seemingly uninhabited acres.

He took up relinquished land near today’s Terang and established the Glenormiston and Mount Noorat stations while living alone in a wattle-and-daub bush hut. The fine pastures and his skilled management turned his relatively small flock into many thousands, annually loading whole trains of drays and wagons with wool for the port in Geelong. The stud quality Shorthorn cattle herd he was building up helped him through the turmoil of the gold-rush years by bringing unheard-of prices for meat. In the 1890s, after his death, the family turned to dairying, for which the land was suitable, and refrigeration was by then sufficiently advanced. Glenormiston estate was a pioneer of the butter export industry.

Within a few years of his arrival, Glenormiston was a community, with a large workforce, babies arriving, and producing its own food. Many of the staff were Scottish shepherds whom Black or colleagues recruited and brought to Australia, reimbursed under the bounty arrangements of the government immigration fund system. He preferred these men, regarding them as steadier (except sometimes with alcohol) than the thousands of ex-convicts from Van Diemen’s Land who provided the biggest workforce locally. Some freed convicts were “scoundrels”, Black wrote.

Later than he hoped, he built a rambling, verandaed one-storey homestead in the best Victorian style. He could also afford a mansion in Melbourne. Towards the crusty end of his life, he built, but regretted for the expense, a more European-style two-storey station homestead.

It is a minor, very welcome miracle that Maggie Black has been able to produce this wonderfully vivid window into the rural world of more than 150 years ago. Good illustrations enhance the time-machine effect.

Niel Black had a way with the pen. He preserved his correspondence, bits of journal and other papers throughout his Australian life. They lay in a trunk until about seventy years after his death when Margaret Kiddle drew on them for her book Men of Yesterday (Black’s self-effacing phrase as his world changed around him). Today they are a treasure of the State Library of Victoria.

Life was shearing, mud, droughts, heatwaves, bushfires (sixty men fighting one once), good and less-good stock sales, tragedies, welcome family and other visitors, and new immigrants from home but also unhelpful remittance men. Much of the book is concerned with land ownership, which was more complicated—and better explained here—than one would expect. The early squatters had only grazing licences for public land. These licences cost ten pounds a year, but had to be renewed annually. The area allocated depended the number of animals to be grazed. Unsurveyed and largely unfenced, the borders were poorly defined; disputes with neighbours over exact borders and straying or diseased animals were common.

This rough and ready 1830s “squatting” regulation, imposed to control the boom, proved extremely difficult to undo. The squatters complained that they had no security of tenure, but had to spend hugely to develop their runs, with fences, buildings, dams and pasture improvement. The swelling population, especially after it grew five-fold in the golden 1850s, clamoured to “unlock the land” for small farms.

Melbourne politicians, under strong competing pressures, messed around with the British 1847 Act that provided for fourteen-year leases and it was never properly implemented. There were various provisions for purchasing land, which sometimes worked—at a cost—for the squatters and sometimes did not.

The climax came with the faulty “selection” legislation of the 1860s. Though it was gradually improved, it at first encouraged corrupt dealings, including “dummy” selectors taking up land on the squatter’s behalf instead of farming it. Despite official intentions, the squatters became increasingly proprietorial over the years about “their” land. Black felt “degraded” by some steps he took to hold land.

It seems that the squatters often actually wanted more people and townships—but not yet, and on their terms. They often thought tenant farmers on their estates, as back in Britain, might be good.

Black’s near-apoplexy at the continual assaults on his estate colour many of the letters: “mobocracy”, “the wild torrent of democracy”, the “tyranny of the majority”. It induced him to be elected for the South-Western Province of the Legislative Council in Victoria. The Council, the upper house, was based on property or educational qualifications, as opposed to full democracy in the Legislative Assembly. He was one of the propertied MLCs who in many a famous encounter opposed or amended the buoyantly democratic and “levelling” bills from the Assembly.

There were further cuts to the squatters’ broad dominions as the selection system settled down, and then with later schemes for closer settlement. But they nevertheless emerged with extensive and secure freehold of some very decent land. To this day their inheritors remain a cosy rural elite.

Black’s generation and to a declining extent those who followed them were preoccupied with “home”. With limited capital of his own, he emigrated with financial support from three better-off Scots as a salaried managing partner. Much of the correspondence deals with him wanting more capital to back his judgment for expansion or his Scots backers wanting more dividends from their investment.

As with any substantial business, Black’s station brought in a lot of money, but a huge amount went out as well. Many squatters less experienced and astute than Black, less well financially backed—or less lucky—went broke.

Black and many other emigrants of the day hoped to make good money in the colony and go home to live in style. He spent lengthy periods in Scotland after long voyages, but from a mixture of emotion and obligation he always returned to Victoria, as the Port Phillip District became in 1851. (He was a strong supporter of separation from New South Wales.)

He wooed and married his wife Grace in Scotland when he was over fifty and she was twenty-two. Shortage of women in the early colony was always a problem, but he seems not to have been blessed by luck in previous wife-finding forays locally or in Melbourne or Scotland. But he did seem to hanker after a Scottish Mrs Black of suitable class. Grace blessed him with three sons, a happy marriage and an orderly household, with morning service and stylish dinner.

They sent the boys to Geelong Grammar, though Niel had at first sniffed warily about a “squatter’s college”. Cambridge followed. Increasingly, “home” became Oxbridge and the Home Counties, rather than the Scottish hill country.

His own family were well-to-do tenant farmers and livestock dealers from the middle ranks of Scottish society in Argyllshire. He was conscious of not being quite the educated gentleman. His facility with the pen notwithstanding, he was a native Gaelic speaker, like many of his workers and neighbours. About a third of the Western District squatters were Scots, often younger sons of similar background to Black. Another big contingent were “Cross Straiters” from Van Diemen’s Land. These men seemed to handle ex-convicts better. But even the stuffiest squatter had to treat surly ex-convicts tactfully or he would lose workers, such was the early labour shortage.

The book says disappointingly little about Aborigines. Black arrived as a new chum at the peak of the worst period of racial conflict in southern Australia, 1838 to 1843, on the edge of one of the worst areas, caused by a perfect storm of factors. He acquired the run from a squatter who had run from the law after an appalling massacre. Shocked, Black wrote of the indigenous people being “quietly slaughtered in unknown numbers”.

Like some others who have drawn on these papers, Maggie Black seems inadequately aware of the context; she generalises in the usual black-armband way as if the situation was typical, when it was not. As so often happens, the Aborigines appear briefly as dramatic victims and then disappear from the story.