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While the Swiss read with sadness the plight of their compatriots, the new Land Acts
were, however, beginning to offer some hope. By the early 1860s, immigrants,
includmg many former gold miners, were clamouring for land for agriculture to supply
the local people with food. The most important development in the 1850s had lain not
in the new towms, or the establishment of the river trade, or the ecological damage
caused by the diggers, but in the development of agriculture as an apparently viable
land-use system, an altemative to the extensive grazing system of the squatters. 'The
economic success of agricultural development during the 1850s', says McQuihon,
'became the critical prelude to and rationale for selection'.*' Some of the good
fanning land had been damaged by alluvial mining as creeks and river beds were
re-routed and the topsoil buried in a desert of subsoil. Large areas had been cleared of
timber for building, shaft lining and firewood and the sediment content of regional
rivers had been increased. During the 1850s, the small farmers and squatters had
become more cooperative with some of the farmers mnning their livestock on the
squatters' mns. The farmers were, however, neither secure financially nor small in
number and were eager to provide for themselves a more even share of the available
resources.
For the Swiss and Italian settiers of Daylesford, the Land Acts of the 1860s
were to provide the first opportunity to acquire land and develop a secure life-style.
The four major Acts, passed in 1860, 1862, 1865 and 1869, aU aimed to settie the
'small man' on the land and encourage agricultural production for self-sufficiency and
export. (Major change to the Land A.cts did not come again until 1894, when reform
was necessary to ensure fairer distribution and fuller use of land.) Common to all the
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