The back-breaking and heart-breaking crown land grant

If you tour the back roads of rural Australia you will occasionally see them. As the structures are of no architectural merit, they seem to also have no heritage value. But, look carefully at this picture I took at Borenore NSW. What do you see?

You will see a structure that was built by one man’s own hand and within which his many children were born. Could any home be loved more? To its occupants it must have felt to be almost a real person in itself.

Who were these pale-skinned men and women who scratched out a living on a portion of land called a “selection” - land that only a few decades before was unknown to all but dark-skinned people who may have wandered over it?  In a beautiful verse Steele Rudd tells us. He opens the Australian classic On Our Selection with the following:

To you who gave our country birth;

to the memory of you whose names, whose giant enterprise, whose deeds of fortitude and daring were never engraved on tablet or tombstone;

to you who strove through the silences of the bush-lands and made them ours;

to you who delved and toiled in loneliness through the years that have faded away;

to you who have no place in the history of our country so far as it is yet written;

to you who have done most for this land;

to you for whom, in the march of settlement, in the turmoil of busy city life, few now appear to care; and

to you particularly, good old dad, this book is most affectionately dedicated.

Overlooked, and at the very core of our history, is a collection of people with rudimentary education who, in a way, shared the one collective consciousness because their problems were so similar.

Steele Rudd refers to the silence of the bush. Except for the sound of birds and your own animals and family, without electricity and linked to the outside world by a narrow, undulating, winding dirt road with a heavily broken surface, your environment was very silent.

You have a wash and dinner and the children are in bed while it is still light. The sunset has been glorious and it reminded you that there is a God - in spite of Him affording you such little mercy. But after the light finally disappears from the sky, you suddenly feel to be very alone. For an hour or so you stare into the flickering flames of the dying fire while allowing your thoughts to wander. Then you take the lighted kerosene lamp to your own bed. You blow out the flame and in the silence and blackness of the bush, ends another day of hard, physical struggle.

In our rush to move into ‘the century of Asia’, how can any of this mean anything to our grandchildren?

What Steele Rudd says about his “good old dad” in 1899 gets me thinking about my good old great granddad. They were two men who shared the same period of this country’s history and: “whose names, whose giant enterprise, whose deeds of fortitude and daring were never engraved on tablet or tombstone”.

I looked for his grave in Orange cemetery, but it is not there - although I know that his bones are. When he died, local governments were not responsible for keeping records on gravesites. A wooden marker had to be erected while relatives could still remember where the site was - and a tombstone had to eventually replace that. For both he and his wife, this was not done.

Patrick McCaffery and his wife had been panning for gold for months on the Araluen Creek with no luck. He had to move on - but move on to what? Long before there was any Centrelink, what could a man who could barely read and write, do, but have his family’s welfare depend entirely on the strength of his back and the determination in his heart?

Great areas of crown land had been leased to men who did little to make their portions productive. To break-up the size of the leases and the sometimes very large and illegal ‘squats’, the essential but ponderous surveying process had to be temporarily bypassed. From 1861 onwards, any suitable person who applied could take up a grant of unsurveyed land. These were the selectors. The applicant selected a portion of land with approximate boundaries drawn on an equally approximate map.

When I inspected Patrick’s selection I felt very sorry for him. It was in steeply undulating mountainous country. The image I had of him walking behind a horse as the plough turned over the rich sods was replaced with one of him struggling to roll away logs, digging out rocks the size of tubs, banging an axe up against the hard timber of big gums and then burning out the stumps. All this to get at some clear but slopping ground.

The terms for the selector were one-quarter deposit on land valued at £1 an acre. Interest was at 5 per cent per year. Before he could ever own the land as freehold, he had to show that there had been a value adding of £1 for every acre. It was not unusual for the purchaser to take more than 20 years to make the final payment.

As expected with the poorly producing selections, it was common for the original purchaser to bail out long before he could ever make the final payment by transferring, for whatever money he could get, the conditional title to someone else willing to give it a go. The result was that after years of backbreaking and heart-breaking work, the farmer who failed to attain freehold ownership walked away with almost nothing to show for his endeavours.

Through my searching in the state archives I noticed that by 1891 Patrick was still there, but there were two other names sharing the conditional purchase with him. It was not a big property - just too much sorrow for one man to carry. He died in 1902 - and yet it the final payment to the government was not made until 1909 by another man. It seems that my great grandfather was one of those who could never pay-off the debt.   

Why would he agree to take on such a challenge? My guess is that like most family men, he was desperate to get some assets together. He was also late in getting his pick and had to choose from the leftovers. As I attempt to put some of his life together, the impression that I am left with is that from the time he was born of humble background on the other side of the world, he seemed to be doomed by his situation in life to die with almost nothing.

Steele Rudd saluted his father with: “to you who have no place in the history of our country so far as it is yet written.” For my great grandfather I say: To you who have no place in the history of our country so far as it is yet written, I have put some words together here to salute you now.