Southward Bound Information - History SA

BACKGROUND INFORMATION
In the early nineteenth century many problems existed in the majority of British
colonies that led a group of influential people in England becoming interested in
new ideas about colonisation. One such person was Edward Gibbon Wakefield.
This is typical of the conditions endured by the poor in Europe in the early 19 th
century.
Wakefield strongly believed that land in new colonies should not be granted freely
to settlers, but should be sold at a fixed price. The money raised by these sales
should be used to bring out additional emigrants who could labour on the land. He
also believed that the emigrants should not be convicts or paupers, but energetic
people who would seize the opportunity to make a better life for themselves and
their families in the new colony.
Wakefield’s proposal was that:
• Land was to be sold at a sufficiently high price to keep newly arrived
immigrants in the workforce (as labourers) before they could save
enough to buy their own land.
• There should be no free grants of land.
• Revenue from land sales had to go towards bringing out more migrants
to replace the workers who had purchased land.
• To keep the new settlement concentrated, land had to be surveyed by
the Crown before it could be sold. Occupiers of unsurveyed land would
have no security of tenure.
• There should be no convict labour. Existing convict settlements had
shown that this was a deterrent to potential free settlers.