BARRY STONE The Squatters: The story of Australia’s pastoral pioneers. Reviewed by Ann Skea

The stories here of the European settlers’ progress from trespassers to squatters to established pastoralists are absorbing, fascinating and well-told.

The Squatters tells the stories of the newcomers who, from the time of the First Fleet’s arrival in Australia, spread out across the land, clearing it, establishing homes, rearing animals, creating small settlements and, ultimately, exploring and charting it. It is an account of how ‘vast wealth and privilege was eked out of a capricious and uncompromising landscape’; and of the pioneers – ex-convicts, former soldiers, free settlers, and ‘penniless and moneyed-up squatters’ –who created their own new worlds far from their original homelands.

The beginnings were not propitious. In January 1788 the First Fleet arrived with its cargo of convicts and soldiers and, for food, an assortment of small animals including 44 sheep. They also brought two cows, a bull and a bull calf, all of which wandered off and were not seen again for three years. The seeds they brought from England overheated on the long sea voyage and failed to germinate, and 18 months after that first arrival the colony was ‘perilously close to famine’.

Yet, within a few more years the rediscovered cattle were flourishing, merino sheep had been imported and the beginnings of a rich wool industry had been established. Sydney changed from a penal colony to a free settlement and land grants were made, but people were spreading out faster than the government could track them. By 1821 free settler George Rankin wrote home to Scotland:

… the population was expanding, and the sheep and cattle were increasing faster. Impelled by a common impulse, the pioneers headed for the boundary. Shortly they were pouring across the frontiers in scores, north, south and west – the Government could not prevent this because all the police and military in Australia could not have guarded an open frontier of 500 miles.

‘The trespassers,’ he wrote, ‘had found a new name for themselves … they called themselves squatters.’

Stone briefly charts the history of white settlement in Australia state-by-state. His main focus, however, is on the people: the explorers, the chancers, the penniless migrants, the families, the failures and the successes, and, after gold was found in Australia, those who came hoping quickly to make their fortunes:

Only the strong-willed, the competent, and the lucky survived [but] by the 1870s most of the pastoral and grazing land had long since been settled by squatters and entrepreneurial pastoralists.

Some few of these became famous. Sidney Kidman, who was born to a squatter family in Adelaide in 1857, ran away from home at the age of 13 ‘with five shillings to his name and a one-eyed horse’. He began his career droving sheep and herding cattle, heard of the discovery of a new copper-ore deposit and saw the opportunity to become a butcher in a newly opened mining town, won a lucrative contract to transport copper ore in his newly acquired bullock wagon, and through acumen, enterprise, determination and clever land purchases went on to become ‘the greatest cattle baron’ Australia ever produced, owning ‘more pastoral land than anyone else in the world’.

There were women, too, who pioneered settlement in Australia. Many of them, like Mary Braidwood Mowle, endured lives of endless hardship and drudgery. In 1850, Mary wrote in her diary:

The same old story, get up, dress the children, feed the poultry, breakfast, go to work, feed the chickens, work till sunset, feed chickens … rise next morning to recommence the same routine.

Others, like Emma Withnell, the first white woman to set foot in the Pilbara region of Western Australia, undertook dangerous journeys with their husbands and children. Emma, heavily pregnant with her third child, endured shipwreck and a 13-kilometre walk in makeshift wooden clogs as part of their pioneering journey. Others, like Anne Drysdale and Caroline Newcombe, who became partners and eventually owned and managed a 10 000-acre pastoral property, were already financially independent, strong-willed women when they arrived in Australia determined to succeed.

Stone writes, too, of individuals who opened up the land, struggling through the unforgiving bush, creating cattle-droving trails across vast, dry and difficult territory. And of the encounters, sometimes friendly but often horrifically bloody, with the Aboriginal people whose land they were invading. Some explorers were helped by the Aborigines, some were killed. Many settlers established friendly relationships but others had their animals speared or stolen. However, Stone’s accounts of the number of massacres and murders of Aboriginal people are shocking.

The stories Stone tells of the settlers’ progress from trespassers to established pastoralists and, for a few, to the status of ‘scrub aristocrats’, are absorbing, fascinating and well-told. These were the ordinary men and women who helped forge a prosperous nation.

Barry Stone The Squatters: The story of Australia’s pastoral pioneers Allen & Unwin 2019 PB 245pp $29.99

Ann Skea is a freelance reviewer, writer and an independent scholar of the work of Ted Hughes. She is author of Ted Hughes: The Poetic Quest (UNE 1994). Her work is internationally published and her Ted Hughes webpages (//ann.skea.com/THHome.htm) are archived by the British Library.

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Tags: Australian history, Barry | Stone, Emma | Withnell, First Fleet, George | Rankin, Mary Braidwood | Mole, Sidney | Kidman