SMALL SETTLERS' FARMING.

Lyttelton Times, Volume II, Issue 55, 24 January 1852, Page 1 (Supplement)

SMALL SETTLERS' FARMING.

The following is the continuation of the narrative of the " Pioneer," whose first experience of Hard Work we reprinted in our paper of January 10. He now brings one of the yarns so common in bush life to bear upon his own observation of successful farming by persons of small ital:— ri w"'i<l be but waste of time to follow along the se.'",.. events through circumstances, merely reite.iJtiti^ or slightly varying the species of information already given. I pass on to a point at which matter presents itself of a different cast, and necessary to complete the view of the whole subject in hand. 1 went on some business, on one occasion, to a part of the territory where a great number of small settlers are grouped ; where, in fact, almost the whole population consists of such persons in the several stages of advance, from the first operations of clearing the land to the lacer ones of independence and of progress towards opulence. -> The hut where. I took up my.quarters, during the sojourn of a few weeks that I made in this district, belonged to an old man originally taken to the colony as a convict, but who had then been a freeman some twelve or fifteen years. Two or three years in such a matter signifies little. He had come to be possessed of about a couple of hundred head of horned cattle, several breeding mares, and some working horses, and he had under cultivation upwards of thirty acres of the very best of land. Between the annual increase of his stock, after paying all expenses of management, and the produce of his little dairy, and the gains from his crops, his yearly income could not be less than three hundred pounds^—l mean that it would be so much after all bis current annual outlay was deducted. I have often heard him relate the general events of his career, and I will endeavour to give them, as nearly as I can, in his own style ; to my m.nd, they seem to be calculated to be eminently instructive to the free as to what they might do. , " When I came home from the court house (he said), after getting my certificate of freedom, I wasn't ten minutes in the hut before down comes the cove from the cottage. [This was the free settler whose assigned servant he had been during his seven years' sentence of transportation. The gentleman, now deceased, was the possessor of a farm of about six thousand acres, beginning on the low sloping foot of the coast mountain, and reaching on to the open sea beach.] So be stands with his hands in his pockets for a minute or two, and then he say.-:, 'So, Mister Jack, you're your own master again at last.' 'Yes,' says I, 'but no thanks to you, master.' ' Very likely not,' he says, ' but what do you mean to do ?—go to Syriney and get on the cross, and get another seven years?' ' Not while there's work to be got,' I makes answer. ' Well,' he says, after a minute or two more, ' if that's what you mean, you might as well work for me as for anybody else ; I must say yo ire a capita] ploughman; moreover, you're a man as always does justice to the bullocks.' ' Yes, master,' I says, ' it's my principle never to ill use a dumb animal, for they've got their own feelings and sense in their own way, the same as one of us; many a time I've seed them bullocks look quite glad when I've come and took the whip away from that Cockney Bill, and drive'em myself.' 'Right enough,' says the master, ' but now let's hear what wages you'll expect' ' Why,' says I, ' I can't do it, as things is going, for less than forty pounds a year and my rations.' ' Was'nt you asking me, one time,' 'he says again, 'if I'd let you have a piece of ground ou a clearing lease, when you got free V Well, that was true enough, only I forgot about it just at the minute, through bis taking me so sharp about the wages; so that I told him I'd do that if he liked, and work half my time for him, for half the wages, and so have the other half to work on my own ground. "Next day he drawed out the agreement, and gave me a,copy, and. kept another himself. I was to have ten acres of land for seven years free of rent, for clearing it and fencing it in, and putting up a two roomedjiut on it. But if I kept to it after the seven years, I was to pay a pound an acre a year rent, and not be turned off as long as I chose to stay on it. So from that time we went on in that way ; and as he wasn't a bad man, if you didn't cross him, and I always.did my work, ani performed my part of the agreement about the ground, we done very well together. " Working three days a week, I knocked down my ten acres of timber'within three months. Then, as soon as the sun had made it a little dryish, I put afire-stick into the weather end of it, one night whan there was a good draught of air; and, my word ! there was a bonfire that would have made the people at home open their eyes if they'd seed it of a bonfire night. I mean to say some of the flames ria up in the air very near as high as the top of the Little Mountain. You may depend upon it that night's blaze cleared away. There did'nt want much more doing beyond cross-burning the big logs into jinks, ami cross-cutting the big limbs that the fire left, and rolling them up in heaps. That was the

hardest part of the work, and I was obliged to pay a man to come and help me: and when the logs was altogether too heovy—and there was some boomers, I must say—some of the other men round used to come and give me a hand for a couple of hours, after their own work was done. " Altogether it took me six months to clear the piece of ground; but when it was cleared, it was worth the trouble ; for it was as good soil as need be. " No sooner was the timber off,than I lost no time, but got the cove to plough it for me—that is, I ploughed it myself with his team in his own timej and gave him the ten pounds for the six months' wages I had in his hands, for the use of the plough team. That was the regular price; a pound an acre. Tnen I let it lie and crumble itself, being new ground, till close to corn-planting time; and then I gave it another good rouse over with the harrow. After that, in about a fortnight, I set to and planted the whole ten acres with corn.(maize). It took me a fortnight. " Up to this time I used to live up at the cove's farm, in my old hut, where I'd spent my seven years ; but a> soon as the corn was in, I was obliged to put up the hut on my own land ; for it bein«- all bush round, them rascals of bandicoots, and 'possums, and kangaroo rats, used to come in droves, and scrape the corn out of the holes, and leaieit after they'd eat the soft part of every grain—lyin^ all about as if somebody had been scattering it over the ground out of the bag. But I soon stopped that game ; I got a little Scotch terrier and a couple of the kangaroo dogs off the farm, and took them down, and slept there every night. The bandicoots and all the rest of the bush warmints kept at a proper distance afterwards. Only I had to go round and plant all the holes afresh that lay ni°-hest the bush. " Well, what sort of a crop do you think I got ? I got close on seven hundred bushels of shelled corn. After all expenses were pai-i, I took betwixt sixty and seventy pounds for it in Sydney market. I mean to say that wasn't bad, within eighteen months' time of getting to be a freeman. And with best part of twenty pounds for the last twelvemonth's wages, out of the year and a half, I paid a pair of splitters to get me the stuff for the fence and the hut. And I put the hut and the fence up myself, when once the stuff was on the ground, just as I happened to have time. " After that I got on like great guns. There was all my rent paid, you may say, for the seven years; for the ground was cleared, and the fence was done, and the hut was up. I'd got nothing more to do but crop the ground and put the money in my pocket for the other five years and a half. Well, having got as much ready money in hand as was able to keep me for two whole years, I considered that I'd only work out the other odd half-year for the cove, and then take to my own bit of ground entirely. " Next year, accordingly, I got seeds of all sorts as I thought was worth having. I only put in five acres of corn, and four of wheat; the other acre I bestowed in tobacco and other oddments. For now I'd got plenty of time to attend to it. The corn having took the rawness off the new ground, it was just the thing for wheat as the season happened; and my first four acres fetched me close on eighty pounds; for, by good luck, there was a great drought and scarcity that year, and the wheat up at ten ar.d twelve shillings a bushel. Of course corn was dear too, as it always is when wheat is high. I made forty pounds more by the corn, beside keeping about fifty bushels of the worst of it to fatten a pig or two, Then, ofF the wheat stubble, which I planted with corn as soon as ever the wheat was off, I got another crop of corn, that came in a few weeks after the early corn. The stubble corn wasn't so good, you know, as the early corn—it never is; and, moreover, the harvest being in all over the country, the prices were down again. Nevertheless, that little bit of trouble of four days' work to plant the wheat stubble with corn, fetched me a hundred odd bushels of corn. And when I came to keep it well on into next y rear, it sold for close on to twenty pounds. My first crop of tobacco wasn't by any means such a favorable one. The half-acre only brought about three hundred weight of leaf, whereas it ought to have yielded at least five or six. Fifteen pounds sterling, and all I smoked myself and gave away, was what I got for it. I could just say it was worth the labour I bestowed on it, Then I bad all my early corn ground planted with pumpkin vines between the rows of corn. There was a couple of hundred pumpkins, big and little; some no bigger than your hat, and some as big as a bucket. With these and the corn, and the cabbage trees I cut out of the bush, I fed up about five hundred weight of pork ; and that I got sixpence a pound for, beside salting down as much as did me a whole year, with fresh meat from the farm when they killed. " So, altogether, I made that year, off the ten acres, about a hundred and fifty pounds clear money. I never made as much as that afterwards. But, taking one year with another, the ground was worth seventy pounds a year to me, after paying all

expenses,

" But I never bethought me of {jetting a larger piece of ground till my lease was nearly out. I used to lay out my money as fast as 1 got it, in breeding cattle, and give the cove the regular proportion of the increase for letting them run with his herd. At lasc, one day, just about when the seven years was up, he says, ' Mister Jack, how many cattle are you going to have ? Here you are, year after year, keeping sending up to the station eight, and ten, and a dozen fresh head. I'll be shot if I'm goinc' to keep a station for you. And as sure as eggs are eggs, the herd is getting so big, that I'll have to get another stoukman, and draft part of them cff to a fresh station in another year's time, at this gait of going. Dont you buy any more cattle.' 'Very good, master,' I says, 'so far as this here, I shall buy just as many cattle with my own money as I like, and if you don't like my cattle to be on your station any longer, why, somebody else will. You're paid the common price of the country for the run of them, and what more do you want?' ' Well,' says he, ' I'll be hanged if I have any more of 'em.' ' Very good, master,' I says, and with that off he goes, and off I goes; for I'd heard a little before of the man that this land I'm now on was first granted to being selling it in twenty-five and fifty acre lots, at ten shillings an acre. So, without more to do, I buys this fifty acres of him, and sets to, and begins all over afresh on ground that nobody (thank Providence and my own two arms !) can take from me. And as for the cattle— for, oh, the cove was wild, end no joke, when he found I'd took him just as sharp as he took me—l was obliged to have a man ready to take them off his ground up in the new country directly ever the year was up. But the shift on to new feeding ground was a benefit to them, after all. They prospered better than ever they had done before. " Well, then, a couple of years after that, I got married, and here I've been ever since. A man can't live all his life, you know, standing alone like a gum tree. He must have some sort of consolation for his latter days. But little did I think that morning at the sessions, when the chairman gave me my sentence, that I should come to be a little farmer on 50 acres of my own land, and plenty of everything about me by that day 20 years. But this I will say—if I'd been a man that was afraid to work, I shouldn't have had what I've got." Such was the general tone, and, to a great extent, the very words in which the old settler was in the habit of telling and retelling the history of his progress. A couple of main comments upon it will immediately present themselves to any one generally well informed as to Australian affairs. First, it will be remembered, that this man, when he commenced farming, was already a good farming hand ; and moreover well versed, by his colonial experience, in the sort of work required in clearing and fencing-in a tract of new gr-.und. The latter knowledge unquestionably must be the result of a colonial apprenticeship. But that apprenticeship is one and the same thing with the process by which I am, at the very offset of my suggestions, supposing the young adventurer to acquire his capital. I take it for granted that the preliminary part of the career is some four or five year's bushwork of various sorts ; and long before the expiration of such a period as that the necessary proficiency would be obtained. In other words, the term which is necessary for earning the capital for commencing would amply suffice for supplying the knowledge-how to use it, up to the point of clearing and fencing the ground and erecting a good dwelling-place. Second : prices were formerly so much superior to what theyr are now, that the pi-esent adventurer's progress could not be by any means so as that of the individual whose history I have given. With this remark nothing needs to be done beyond admitting it, and defining its exact value. For the latter purpose I will retrace the processes, and show what form they would bear at the present day. And what is said of to-day may very safely be said of five years hence. J take, then, the case of a young man beginning as a bushman at the present time, and standing eventually possessed, by his labour, of two hundr d pounds. The great stock-masters in the colony, who are the very parties that originally urged on the restrictive system of the sale of land, are now the most loud in their appeals to the Colonial-office for an alteration, of the system. And it seems impossible that they should obtain the modifications they desire without the lowor class of capitalists obtaining such as are favourable to them. For the latter are as strongly and universally supported in their claim by the public press, both within the colony and in Great Britain, as the former are by personal influence with members of the legislature, and agents in their interest, specially maintained to watch it, in England. It may therefore be confidently assumed that if the division of the land into blocks for sale should not go to the extent of a reduction to as low as ten acres, it will certainiy proceed to the extent of a reduction to as low as fifty acres, at one pound per acre. A two-hundred pound capitalist, under the circumstances all along taken as the terms of thereasoning, would then find it his best course to proceed

pounds.

so far into the interior as to be beyond the thickly populated country. He would there be on ground for the most part very scantily timbered, varied by entirely treeless plains of great extent. This clearing would be easy work. He might do it all himself with the help of one man. The best site for him to select would he ground at the foot of a mountain, and sufficiently watered. Wood and water are two indispensable elements of farm operations in the colony. Moreover, by keeping a tract of mountain or otherwise broken country at his back, he secures a perpetual run for his cattle ; for, of course, no one would come and take possession of such a ti'act for a farm. Let it be allowed that the purchase and clearing of his ground should exhaust one hundred pounds. Fifty pounds of the remainder laid out in cattle, or a small flock of sheep, would secure to him a ra-pidly-increasing live stock. Fifty pounds would purchase two hundred really good breeding sheep ; and with fair success these would supply him amply with meat, and double their number every third year. The wool would go a good way towards meeting the expenses they involved. The increase would more than do the rest. The numerical increase might fairly be taken to represent the profit. If he preferred cattle, his best plan would be to consign the twenty head of cows that he might procure for fifty pounds to some neighbouring stockholder, giving him half the increase in payment. (It is a great deal too much, but it is the present rule: formerly one-third was the ratio.) And then he could, after three years, draft off a young bullock for his own supply of meat from his own herd ; and would have from seven to ten young female cattle adding themselves yearly to its number. His crops off twenty or thirty acres, at once subjected to cultivation, would amply meet the demands of his household for food ; and by sales of surplus, afford him the small funds which are requisite to meet the simple demands of life in the interior. Australian farming is just as simple as British farming is complicated. The soil, for at least one man's life requires no manuring; the ground, very little working. I have seen the new green sod just turned over with the plough, six or seven inches deep ; potatoes planted in the ground in the rudest manner—in short, laid in the furrow, and the sod hooked back on them'with.the hoe —and the produce abundant and of the fullest growth. I have seen the little settler, instead of breaking up his entire piece of new ground, merely break up the earth of the holes, three feet apart each way, for Indian corn, and plant his grain, and have an abundant crop. With such a system of agriculture, who could not grow grain ? But if the inexperienced settler should fancy he needs instruction, let him ask any ordinary working man, and he will readily obtain all the subject involves. With such agriculture, and with live stock with respect to which it may safely be stated as the law, that it will double itself every three years, how can the adventurer do otherwise than progress ? And beyond such progress as has been shown to be fully within his power, what, for some twenty years, could a young man commencing at one-and-twenty desire? Such progress at the end of the period specified would leave him a rich man. He might then, at forty-Jive or fifty, either retire from farming occupations, and live a town life, or continue them, as he should feel most agreeable. Does home-life present any such prospect ?