Setting the scene for change

Their first inclination, of course, was to rely on the technologies and farming systems that they brought with them. They quickly learned, however, that the soils, climates and vegetation of their new environment demanded new methods of husbandry and, although many found the task insuperable and were defeated by those forces of nature (flood, fire and drought) which still make Australian farming hazardous, others, during the hundred years that ended with the First World War, were responsible for the series of developments that made farming in Australia viable and, on the whole, profitable.

By the early 1820s farmers in the first colonies of New South Wales and Van Diemen's Land (Tasmania) had formed Agricultural Societies for the purpose of developing and extending the use of improved methods of husbandry. Such societies were to proliferate as settlement extended into the other colonies. For example, following the first permanent settlement on the southern coast of Australia, by Edward Henty in 1834, and Major Mitchell's exploration of the western and central districts of Victoria in 1836, squatters rapidly occupied the region and, by 1859, they had formed the Western District Pastoral and Agricultural Society. This Society was to amalgamate in 1873 with the neighbouring Ballarat Pastoral and Agricultural Society.

The lives of those pioneers who ventured into the new lands were extremely hard and 'apart from the often paralysing loneliness, the main discomforts of life were the bushrangers, destruction of stock by Aborigines, the delinquencies of assigned servants'[16] and, later, of employees. Their problems were exacerbated by the changing policies and conditions governing land occupation. It was not until the 1846 Waste Lands Occupation Act was passed that the government was able to improve its control over the squatters by issuing various types of leases while, at the same time, enabling the squatters to improve their control over the land. From the 1860s onwards opportunities arose in the various colonies to purchase the freehold of large areas of land under the various land settlement acts, even although the intention of these Acts was that land should only be purchased in small areas.[17]

If, in fact, 'necessity is the mother of invention' Australian farming in the middle of the nineteenth century represented a combination of environmental, technological, economic and social circumstances which were ideal for experimentation, innovation and discovery. Critical to the successful development of successive inventions and their widespread adoption was the circumstance that many of the settlers were literate and a sufficient number of them were well educated. Some, moreover, were well supplied with a variety of technical publications (books, journals and newspapers) from overseas and increasingly from Australia. Collectively they were politically influential and generally well supported by government policies and programs, and they nicely combined the independent individualism of the pioneer with the interdependence of a 'mateship' culture.

Australian Academy of Technological Sciences and Engineering