The State Library of New South Wales contains a curious document (Figure 1). Baker’s Australian County Atlas, as this document is known, presents carefully illustrated maps of each of the 19 counties in the colony of New South Wales between 1843 and 1846 (Figure 2).Footnote 1 Drawn at a scale of approximately 1:250,000, the maps provide various types of information that together form a comprehensive overview of the state of settlement within the colony at the time. Major and minor roads connect townships, passing through properties and traversing long stretches of Crown land. Watercourses and topographical features intersect with a square cartographic grid that distorts to accommodate the cadastre map of each county (Figure 3). Property holders’ names and acreage sizes are recorded against each parcel of land depicted, while solid red lines delineate police districts and fainter, dotted lines indicate parish boundaries. Town plans of important settlements are reproduced at the edges of the map for each county, occasionally accompanied by small vignettes depicting its identifying characteristics (Figure 4).
Figure 1. The cover page of Baker’s Australian County Atlas, which documents the parishes, townships, grants, purchases and unallocated lands throughout the colony of New South Wales. Source: W. Baker, Baker’s Australian County Atlas: Dedicated by the Publisher to Sir T.L. Mitchell … Showing the Various Parishes, Townships, Grants, Purchases and Unlocated Lands (Sydney, 1843–46).
Figure 2. The format of the Atlas, illustrated by the Northumberland, Bathurst, St Vincent and Gloucester county maps. Source: W. Baker, Baker’s Australian County Atlas.
Figure 3. Roads, rivers, reserves and property holders’ names shown in the map for the County of St Vincent. Source: W. Baker, Baker’s Australian County Atlas.
Figure 4. Map of Mudgee included in the margins of the map for the County of Wellington. Source: W. Baker, Baker’s Australian County Atlas.
Not quite novel but also unlike anything that seems to have preceded it, Baker’s Atlas raises questions regarding its provenance, intended audience and ultimate purpose, as well as the particular moment in the colony’s development in which it was prepared and disseminated. Most importantly for our purposes in this article, however, the Atlas also discloses important information pertaining to Aboriginal dispossession in the colony of New South Wales in its material and processual specificity. Naturalized within the representational space of the document are the concerted efforts of a colonial state to entrench a very particular political economy, one based ideologically and strategically on the wholesale displacement and removal – if not elimination – of Aboriginal people from the land in order to extract the economic value latent within it.
Foundational to the political authority and territorial jurisdiction claimed by the British Imperial Government in New South Wales were seventeenth-century ideas regarding property in land. In 1770, Lieutenant James Cook took possession of the eastern Australian landmass on behalf of the Crown on the basis that it was wasteland belonging to no one. Although hundreds of culturally and linguistically diverse Aboriginal groups – numbering between 300,000 and 1.2 million people – had occupied and managed the Australian continent for approximately 65,000 years at the time of Cook’s declaration, their appropriation of natural resources and management of land failed to meet British criteria of ownership.Footnote 2 This article bridges the gap between high-level geographical studies of the British invasion of New South Wales and historical analysis of settler colonial property formation. We join others in aiming to destabilize the self-evidence of private landed property in Australian urban discourse by examining the manifold techniques – legal, technical, aesthetic, spatial, material – that worked together to sanction and enact British land theft on a continental scale.Footnote 3 We argue that the inherent visuality of Baker’s Atlas sets it apart from other media in nineteenth-century New South Wales, revealing the shifting footprint of a settler colonial property regime and the urban and architectural forms it prescribed. In particular, we suggest that the compromise made in the Atlas, between topographic accuracy and cartographic abstraction, connects the multiple scales at which settler colonialism dispossessed – from the overall political space of the colony to the privately owned individual lot. If Baker’s Atlas affords a rare view of how political and economic power was organized in mid-nineteenth-century New South Wales, it also elucidates the extent to which urbanization itself functioned to consolidate Britain’s claim of sovereignty over Aboriginal land.Footnote 4
Historians have had little to say about the role of the built environment in processes of Aboriginal dispossession and territorial governance in the Australian colonies. While important studies have focused on the buildings and town plans produced by architects and surveyors either employed by the colonial state or by companies and notable colonists,Footnote 5 as well as the architecture and settlement patterns of Indigenous Australians,Footnote 6 scant scholarship has considered the role of design and construction in the invasion, dispossession and commodification of Aboriginal land.Footnote 7 This is despite an established and comprehensive body of transdisciplinary scholarship on the relationship between property, dispossession and urbanization throughout Britain’s settler colonial empire generally,Footnote 8 as well as recent shifts in historical understanding of dispossession in the Australian colonies specifically.Footnote 9 In contrast, urban geographers, historians of planning and economic historians have undertaken robust analyses of the role colonial infrastructure and land administration practices played in dispossessing Aboriginal people of Country into the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.Footnote 10 Studies have interrogated the forms of Aboriginal resistance,Footnote 11 intensities of racial violence,Footnote 12 intra-imperial financial flows,Footnote 13 patterns of commodity extractionFootnote 14 and transimperial labour practicesFootnote 15 involved in expanding the settler colonial project in Australia, leading to new conceptions of the topographies of colonization and an emphasis on the ‘frontier’ as a space of violent contest and dispossession.Footnote 16 Notwithstanding a long tradition of critical scholarship that has interrogated urbanization as a dynamic process of expansion and circulation – inexorably linking city to countryside and vice versa – urban histories of settler colonial contexts have tended to restrict their examination of ‘the urban’ to the metropole, overlooking the larger patterns of accumulation, development and governance that transcended the urban–rural dichotomy.Footnote 17
An analysis of Baker’s Atlas provides an opportunity to better understand the intimate relationship between property, urbanization and dispossession in historically and materially specific terms. As we attempt to demonstrate, the publication of the Atlas was coeval with the rise of an abstract property market in New South Wales based on freehold land tenure. Libby Porter has argued that the private ownership of land created ‘the particular morphology of settled Australia’, fostering closer settlement and the design of townships as a ‘means of further entrenching patterns of urbanisation’.Footnote 18 The Atlas documented this process and, in doing so, actively formalized the property market in New South Wales at a critical juncture in the colony’s development towards self-government. Widespread urbanization in turn necessitated greater regulation of how lands were being appropriated and occupied throughout the territory, leading to an ever-more explicit legal codification of ‘improvements’ within successive land acts over the nineteenth century. For the urban historian, the increased legal role played by improvements at the time Baker’s Atlas was produced suggests a move away from how individual buildings and townships facilitated urbanization towards engaging the built environment more broadly as a medium for the ‘legalized’ theft of Indigenous land. As the historian Robert Nichols has argued, property is dispossession,Footnote 19 raising broader questions of causality and materiality that have driven our analysis: How does the law engage the built environment in the creation of settler colonial real estate? How does the built environment instantiate and mediate the law? And to what extent does Baker’s Atlas reflect the colonial state’s reliance on the diffuse yet coherent process of urbanization to mete out Indigenous dispossession?
The discussion begins with an overview of the state’s attempts to govern land use and white occupation in New South Wales before considering the role of surveying and town planning in instituting a land market in the colony at the time Baker’s Australian County Atlas was published. The analysis then tracks the evolution of legislation aimed at regulating private property relations and the conditions of land alienation in New South Wales. The increasingly detailed definitions of improvement presented in this legislation relied on the built environment as a form of legal evidence for conferring private ownership of land and recognizing legal title. As the article concludes, the legal obligation to improve ultimately fixed the aspiring landowner to their property and regulated their manner of occupation, enacting a juridical and material process of dispossession that remains central to ongoing settler colonial urbanization in Australia.
Territory as technology
Understanding the purpose of Baker’s Atlas requires comprehending the specific and changing objectives of land administration in the territory of New South Wales in the course of the nineteenth century.Footnote 20 Prior to 1850, land policy in the colony can be broken into two main periods: an initial, largely haphazard, phase between 1788 and 1831, when land was generally obtained via grants or sold on a discretionary basis;Footnote 21 and a second phase from 1831 to 1850, beginning with the introduction of the Ripon regulations, which established a minimum upset price for land sold to selectors at public auction.Footnote 22 The Ripon regulations ended the period of land grants and inaugurated a comprehensive real estate paradigm in which land price was used as a means of shaping the political community of the colony in line with the principles of ‘systematic colonization’ popularized by Edward Gibbon Wakefield. Too high and the price of land could stifle economic development; too low and colonists would be incentivized to abandon their positions as wage labourers to work for themselves on their own properties, effectively robbing the colony of its already limited labour force.
An effective land price, however, was only one part of the problem when confronted with a territory as vast and disparately developed as New South Wales around 1830. Wakefield’s concept of constraining the spread of occupation to artificially increase labour supply – known as ‘restriction’ – thus became central to the Ripon regulations and was given official form by Governor Darling with the introduction of the so-called Limits of Location in 1829.Footnote 23 Darling’s order confined the settlement of New South Wales to 19 counties concentrated on the east coast, dividing the colony into ‘two regions, the settled and the unsettled, and [giving] legal sanction to a meaningless line that was to affect the entire course of settlement for decades’, according to the historian C.J. King.Footnote 24 In the same year, Darling issued regulations on the planning of towns (known subsequently as the Darling regulations) that pertained to the granting of urban allotments. Towns were divided into four classes, all of which are present in Baker’s Atlas: Sydney, Sea Port Towns, Towns situated at the head of Navigable Waters and Inland Towns. These classes determined the rates for quit rents for grants. In addition, Darling detailed the dimensions of typical block sizes in the townships, protocols for the reservation of Crown land for civil infrastructure or public use, building setbacks for private dwellings, typical sill heights and a complex bookkeeping, approvals and revenue-collection system that vested the final right of refusal for any town plan or construction project in the governor.Footnote 25
The Limits of Location and the Darling regulations were therefore part of a multi-scalar effort to exert centralized control over the patterns of urbanization taking place in the colony. As Viscount Goderich (the Earl of Ripon) later opined to Governor Darling, however, these measures had come too late and the development of New South Wales would have been far more successful ‘if the settlers, instead of spreading themselves over so great an extent of territory, had rather applied themselves to the more effectual improvement and cultivation of a narrower surface’. This was because, in keeping with the restriction principle, ‘the result of the same labour would probably have been a greater amount of produce; and the cost of transporting it to market would have been a less heavy item in the total cost of production’.Footnote 26 This combination of density, concentration and biopolitical management effectively recoded land as abstract space and, according to Nichols, approached ‘colonial expansion and land acquisition as a political technology’ for managing population and economic growth in keeping with the new political economy of the early nineteenth century.Footnote 27
By the 1840s, the attitude of the government had shifted from ‘restriction’ to viewing the transformation of land into property as a source of wealth generation. In its report of inquiry into the 1842 Waste Lands Act, released a year before Baker’s Atlas was first published, the Select Committee noted that in ‘the great territory of Australia, [there is] an important element of national wealth, lying, for the most part, dormant and unemployed’, which, if colonists were further induced to purchase land, would see them ‘spread over the face of the vast interior, forming farms, settlements, and townships – each a nucleus around which population would gradually condense’. ‘Without permanent occupation,’ the Committee concluded, ‘without, in fact, actual property in the soil, men never apply themselves to the arts of settled industry, or study to develop the latent capabilities which a country may possess.’Footnote 28 Under the Ripon regulations and subsequent policies, then, the territorial structuring of the colony was designed to secure adequate labour for the ongoing development of New South Wales, while also instituting a land market that would strategically locate where and how colonial occupation would occur – an urban pattern based on an interconnected network of highly planned townships and rural properties that it seems Baker’s Atlas intended to both document and facilitate. It was through the technology of cartography and the production of maps, specifically, that land policy, property formation and territorial knowledge ultimately intersected, driving the state’s successive attempts to reduce land to paper as accurately as possible.Footnote 29
The cartographic abstraction of property
The process of translating colonial land policy into an organized territory had in fact commenced under Governor Darling’s predecessor, Thomas Brisbane. In 1825, Brisbane received instructions to begin a survey of New South Wales for two purposes: the subdivision of the colony into counties, hundreds and parishes, which would in turn facilitate a ‘general Valuation of the Land throughout the Colony’.Footnote 30 However, this survey was only commenced in 1828 by Major Thomas Livingstone Mitchell, shortly before his appointment as surveyor general and the introduction of the Limits of Location.Footnote 31 Completed in 1834, Mitchell’s Nineteen Counties map was a tour de force of topographic detail, displaying the intricacies of landform and waterways around which the county borders were arranged. Two years after its publication, Mitchell’s assistant, Robert Dixon, published his own version of the map, drawn up independently from his own survey records, de-emphasizing topographic detail in favour of land holdings.Footnote 32 From his experience in the Survey Office, Dixon must have been especially cognizant of the lack of detailed information available to investors and to settlers who were now being targeted by the colonial office through Wakefieldian immigration schemes and the standardization of land policy through the Ripon regulations.Footnote 33 Legal historian Isabella Alexander has analysed the ensuing conflict between Mitchell and Dixon through the lens of the evolution of copyright law in the nineteenth century. The ownership of maps was significant, she argues, as ‘the question of who was allowed to make the map is intimately linked to the more important matter of establishing the Crown’s authority to determine property rights’. Furthermore, ‘in colonial [New South Wales], where land ownership could not arise from possession or use – which was indeed constructed out of dispossession – trust in the accuracy of the map was key’.Footnote 34 The reputation of Mitchell’s map appears to have been important in lending credibility to Baker’s Atlas. A statement beneath each county map contained in the Atlas reads: ‘Dedicated by Permission to Sir T.L. Mitchell KNT Surveyor General of New South Wales’. For Baker, gaining Mitchell’s approval to partially reproduce his Nineteen Counties map not only implied the highest level of accuracy but also skirted the legal issues of piracy that had soured the relationship between Mitchell and Dixon.
Indeed, at first glance, Baker’s Atlas appears to be a continuation of the progression from Mitchell’s detailed topographic survey to the abstract cadastral map initiated by Dixon less than a decade prior (Figure 5). The details of the landscape have been further reduced, with hills and rivers now minor elements and property information foregrounded. In addition, each of the county maps is overlaid with a one-mile grid, further abstracting land into quantifiable space. However, this apparent trajectory belies the fact that the Survey Office maps upon which Baker relied in his production of the Atlas most likely preceded Mitchell’s complete Nineteen Counties map. Moreover, the grid found throughout the Atlas originated earlier still, prior to the county system, in Governor Brisbane’s 1822 implementation of rectangular survey for new settlements, which led to numerous disconnected regional grids being developed that were intended to regulate the granting of land in each county. These grids were originally laid out on the ground but gradually, as survey staff became stretched, were applied only to the maps.Footnote 35 The difficulty of distributing land according to an abstract grid in what was highly variable and often rugged terrain was not lost on Mitchell, and where the realities of the landscape contradicted the logic of the grid – along rivers, for example – property boundaries were adjusted to the land itself, ignoring the grid. ‘Within the “Limits of Location”,’ suggests geographer Dennis Jeans, ‘little care was taken in establishing the rectangular grid survey. Feature survey instead was made to serve as primary land survey, and the rectangular grid system was added as a means of allocating land.’Footnote 36 This perhaps explains why Baker adopted the gridded county maps in the Atlas: although they were almost obsolete by the time the Atlas was published, they demonstrated a logic of land allocation that was legible to investors unfamiliar with conditions in the colony.
Figure 5. Comparison of the County of Cook as depicted in maps created by Thomas Mitchell (left), Robert Dixon (middle) and William Baker (right). Sources: T. Mitchell, Map of the Nineteen Counties, 1834, State Library of New South Wales; R. Dixon, Map of the colony of New South Wales exhibiting the situation and extent of the appropriated lands, 1837, Fergusen Rare Map Collection, National Library of Australia; W. Baker, Baker’s Australian County Atlas.
The abstraction of space evident in the representational methods of Baker’s Atlas is also consistent with British territorial claims more broadly. Geographer Robert Sack argues that ‘from the territorial perspective, what stands out so starkly to modern eyes about the very beginning of the “Discoveries” is the abstract geometrical nature to the claims of sovereignty over area. These claims appear to be the natural precondition for clearing a place for community and authority and for molding further and more specific social organizations’.Footnote 37 The Atlas (re)enacts this abstract ‘clearing’ of Aboriginal land as supposedly empty space but does so specifically for the purpose of recording and potentially converting Crown territory into private title.Footnote 38 As James C. Scott similarly contends: ‘Land maps in general and cadastral maps in particular are designed to make the local situation legible to an outsider. For purely local purposes, a cadastral map was redundant.’Footnote 39 Baker’s deliberate exclusion of available topographic details therefore suggests he did not intend that the project would assist settlers with the localized challenges of improving land within the 19 counties. Moreover, the maps included in the Atlas were not confined to the Limits of Location alone: additional information was provided for Port Phillip (Melbourne), Gippsland, Moreton Bay (Brisbane), the squatting regions of northern New South Wales and New Zealand, reflecting the expansion of the colony in the period between the production of Dixon’s maps in the 1830s and the Atlas in the 1840s.Footnote 40 Despite the ambiguity of purpose and the abstraction of the land for ease of acquisition, it can therefore be seen from the maps in the Atlas that the creation of private property largely followed a logic derived from real environmental conditions: the occurrence of rivers and other sources of water; the creation of roads; and the difficulties of cultivating rough terrain can all be discerned in the patterns of coloured blocks (Figure 6).
Figure 6. Distortion of the cadastral grid to accommodate topographical features, especially watercourses, in the County of King. Source: W. Baker, Baker’s Australian County Atlas.
While there are very few records of Baker’s intentions, they appear to have traversed a perceived public good and commercial enterprise, situating the Atlas within a model of colonial techno-governance prevalent in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that operated through private ventures as well as official channels.Footnote 41 Our suggestion here is that the timing is important: the individual maps that were eventually compiled as Baker’s Atlas and sold on a subscription basis – both within and beyond New South Wales – began appearing shortly after the introduction of the initial Waste Lands Act in 1842. On the one hand, as evidenced by newspaper articles in the 1840s, Baker’s Atlas was marketed to existing landowners in the counties as a record of tenure and ownership.Footnote 42 On the other, it was promoted as providing useful information for potential purchasers and investors.Footnote 43 The Atlas therefore functioned as a kind of private, yet widely accessible, prototypical land registry in response to the state’s attempts to institute an incipient land market in New South Wales. The capitalization of land on colonial frontiers required creditors and colonists to feel secure about the future commodity potential of the land in question, such that the Atlas bolstered the structural acquisition of Aboriginal land by strengthening confidence in the legality and inevitability of continuing urbanization and widespread land ownership in the colony.Footnote 44
The specific conditions of the New South Wales land market in the 1840s reveal yet another possible objective of Baker’s Atlas. In the mid-to-late 1830s, speculation in landed property had become rife within the colony, fuelled by the easy availability of loans from local and British banks.Footnote 45 This availability of credit was an entirely new phenomenon in Australian land sales and can be considered the beginning of a real estate market in the Australian colonies.Footnote 46 Importantly, development around Port Phillip (Melbourne) increased rapidly in this period, further fuelling investment in land. In 1839, the minimum upset price for the alienation of Crown land was raised from 5s to 12s in order to restrict purchases within a highly speculative market.Footnote 47 However, as Burroughs notes, this increase probably only served to draw the attention of yet more investors towards available land in towns and cities where property values were higher, as well as to the Port Phillip district where quality grazing and agricultural land was still available for selection.Footnote 48 The inclusion of the inset town plans in the Atlas (Figure 4) – adhering to the planning controls outlined in the Darling regulations – not only served as a further development on Dixon’s map in terms of promoting the commercial appeal of land in the colony, but was also indicative of the growing importance of townships for advancing a property regime in the first half of the century. As Jeans observes, 53 new towns and villages were planned in New South Wales between 1829 and 1842 alone, largely within the Limits of Location.Footnote 49
By the early 1840s, the property boom in New South Wales had given way to an economic depression ushered in by a severe drought in 1838–39, the drying up of British credit following the 1839 financial crisis and falling land prices. The effects of this depression were felt for a number of years and it was not until 1848 that Crown land sales began to recover.Footnote 50 It was precisely in this slump that Baker produced the Atlas, raising further questions as to the motivation for the project: if little land was changing hands due to the depression, then why sell maps depicting the distribution of land ownership and the location of available lots? One answer, we suggest, is that in the absence of an overheated, speculative land market during the 1840s, there was greater desire for increased information on the availability of land that could in fact be productively developed and cost-effectively improved by property-owning colonists.
The technology of territory
If the Limits of Location demarcated an overall pattern of urbanization in New South Wales, a pattern that Baker’s Atlas allows us to see comprehensively, and the mechanism of land price was used in an attempt to organize a property-owning and labouring class within that pattern, then it was the doctrine of improvement that served to connect these larger political economic objectives to the development of individual lots within the districts open for settlement. Improvement both underpinned the ideology of a productive, well-ordered society – leading back to racialized seventeenth-century labour theories of property – and was a key rationale in and justification for the violent dispossession of Indigenous people throughout the British empire more broadly, shaping attitudes towards the future as a domain for state intervention through planning.Footnote 51 ‘In an embedded cultural sense,’ Weaver argues, ‘improvement meant humankind’s duty to tame wilderness, rescue wasteland – even more, to deliver itself from want and indolence.’Footnote 52 Settler colonial urbanization was, in this sense, a process of ‘improving’ territory by increasing its productive capacity and, subsequently, its economic value. At the other end of the spectrum, the actual material practices of improvement – clearing, draining, tilling, planting, fencing, stocking, building – also mediated the state’s claims to authority and jurisdiction over land in specific locations (Figure 7). The Atlas’ representation of property formation in the colony as a series of nested grids spread across decreasing scales of occupation already implied this systematic progression of improvement, but through its methods of abstraction, the Atlas also obscured the concrete reality of these processes and the Aboriginal dispossession they ultimately enacted. In this section, we therefore consider the various forms of improvement presupposed in the Atlas.
Figure 7. Cleared timber was typically repurposed in enclosing selections and for general construction purposes. Source: E.C. Close, New South Wales Sketchbook: Sea Voyage, Sydney, Illawarra, Newcastle, Morpeth, c.1817–1840, State Library of New South Wales.
Insofar as settler colonial urbanization depended on the reduction of land to paper, it also required the material reality on the ground to reflect what was depicted in the survey as closely as possible. This process centred on the individual parcel of land. The archaeologist Denis R. Byrne observes that in nineteenth-century New South Wales, ‘wire fences made the cadastral grid a visible, tangible reality on the ground where, previously, it had existed for the most part only on paper and in the minds of white settlers’.Footnote 53 Advice provided to newly arrived colonists from 1831 reveals the confusing exercise of projecting the invisible cadastral grid onto the land itself:
It must be confessed that the difficulties attending the selection of a grant, in the present circumstances of the colony, are sufficiently discouraging; as, from the backwardness of the surveys, it is often a matter of no easy attainment to discriminate, by natural marks, a piece of land which may remain ungranted, from other portions in its neighbourhood, which may have been selected and may still remain unimproved; or from those portions of land which the surveyors may have marked off as eligible for future villages, or for church reserves; and which, in conformity with the King’s instructions, are accordingly reserved for these purposes.Footnote 54
Moreover, following selection, the early process of enclosing and improving land through clearing and fencing did not exhaust or preclude Aboriginal occupation of Country, producing what Byrne describes as ‘nervous landscapes’ in which processes of urbanization were routinely confronted by Indigenous resistance and sabotage.Footnote 55 Writing about the Sydney region, the historian Stephen Gapps describes the ‘irregular warfare … conducted by [Aboriginal] forces – at times disparate, at others allied – against the colonists’ expansion’.Footnote 56 Aboriginal raids frequently targeted colonial improvements: killing stock, destroying fences, burning timber dwellings and moving through the settled districts of the colony in what was understood by colonists at the time as an elaborate ‘system of warfare’.Footnote 57 As Lisa Ford has suggested, governance in New South Wales up to the period in which Baker’s Atlas was published adopted ‘a hybrid system of personal jurisdiction overlaid with very flexible territorial claims over very modest areas’ that were repeatedly exploited by Aboriginal resistance fighters.Footnote 58 Gapps likewise argues against the notion that Aboriginal attacks were only retributive and retaliatory, demonstrating instead that the patchy but constant conflict taking place throughout the colony was directed at limiting the expansion of white-occupied territory by targeting real estate in particular. Inasmuch as ‘the cadastral grid worked’, according to Byrne, ‘to train Aboriginal bodies to function within the geometry of the new economic order’ of the colony, it also delineated the contested territory of colonial urbanization and Aboriginal sovereignty.Footnote 59
Having selected, located and commenced the improvement of their lot, the aspiring landowner entered an extended legal process of colonial property formation. The state prescribed the specific practices of improvement necessary for the recognition of legal title. This is a legal fact, or a series of legal facts, spanning the early phase of land grants to the so-called Robertson Act of 1861. Instructions to Governor Phillip in 1787 enabled him to grant land to emancipated convicts, ‘provided that the person to whom the said land shall have been granted shall reside within the same and proceed to the cultivation and improvement thereof’,Footnote 60 while alienation under the Ripon regulations required colonists to ‘erect the necessary permanent Buildings … to the value of Twenty Pounds sterling, within the stipulated period of two years’ – a formula maintained in subsequent legislation.Footnote 61 The colonial secretary was responsible for conducting ‘the closest enquiry’ of improvements ‘to ascertain beyond all doubt’ that they had ‘been actually performed’ in keeping with the surveys produced for each lot.Footnote 62 In New South Wales, improvement was therefore advanced along two intersecting lines: at once a string of legal evidence spanning cadastres, title deeds, surveys and registries; and the construction of buildings and other interventions in the land through which processes of legal design organized a material reality that the law otherwise merely described.
As urbanization intensified in New South Wales and the colony’s property regime continued to be rationalized, what the law in fact recognized as improvements also became more explicit: from ‘the bona fide expenditure of capital’ on permanent structures and routine cultivation ‘to the amount of five times the estimated value of the Grant’ in 1837,Footnote 63 to ‘residing … erecting any hut or building [on] … [or] clearing, enclosing or cultivating’ land in 1838,Footnote 64 through to ‘any work or erection of a fixed character such as would render more beneficial the occupation and use of the said land and which shall have been constructed, erected, placed, made or maintained … provided that such improvements have not at any time before been used for a like purpose’.Footnote 65 Later legislation became still more explicit, defining improvements as effectively any intervention that would increase the productive capacity and hence the economic value of land.
Handbooks published in light of these changing legal definitions performed the cultural work of naturalizing an evolving property regime. James Atkinson’s An Account of the State of Agriculture and Grazing in New South Wales (1826), for example, provided the prospective colonist with an overview of the challenges and obligations attached to land selection and property ownership five years prior to the introduction of the Ripon regulations. This commenced with ‘several methods of land clearing’, from the most expensive practice of ‘grubbing’ trees up by the roots to the cheaper method of lopping them at the base and hiring labourers to remove and burn the dead wood.Footnote 66 The best plan, Atkinson advised, was to ‘clear the old forest entirely away’ before planting bushier shade trees for stock, taking care ‘not to destroy all the wood and leave the farm without firing, as has been the case with some over-zealous improvers’.Footnote 67 Advice followed on the ‘immense’ benefits of draining and irrigating cleared land in New South Wales, even though few colonists were ‘in possession of sufficient capital to attempt expensive improvements of this nature’.Footnote 68 Turning to fencing, Atkinson became emphatic, describing the enclosure of land as the ‘greatest and most important improvement that can be effected upon it … since, without doubt, it is the foundation and basis of every other improvement to be afterwards expected’.Footnote 69 A cost-benefit analysis of three- versus four-railed fences accompanied Atkinson’s detailed description of the tools and techniques involved, including the process of selecting and harvesting wood and the technological sophistication and intensive labour involved in preparing timber posts and rails. The agricultural historian John Pickard has argued that, prior to the introduction of wire fencing in the 1850s, post and rail fences met all criteria for both urban and rural improvers: low cost, made from readily available material, stock- and kangaroo-proof and highly durable.Footnote 70 According to Atkinson, a well-constructed post and rail fence could be expected to last 20 years ‘and with a new set of posts, and a few new rails, may be again set up for a further term’.Footnote 71 If access to wood, labour or capital proved too difficult or time-consuming, popular alternatives to the post-and-rail method included palisade, ditch and brush fences.Footnote 72 The latter methods were also preferred in instances where security of tenure was less certain to avoid over-capitalizing on improvements.Footnote 73
Architectural production, too, was approached through the overlapping lenses of cost, materiality and legal obligation. ‘The time and expense bestowed upon setting up the requisite buildings,’ observed Atkinson, ‘are among the greatest drawbacks upon the success of a new Settler.’Footnote 74 The trade-off, as he saw it, was to first construct a suite of provisional buildings – bark and slab huts with earthen floors – that would enable the colonist to earn a profit from their selection as quickly as possible:
The capital that would be required to build a good house and offices at the first commencement of a Settler’s career, if invested in livestock, and employed in the cultivation and improvement of his land, would soon afford him the means of erecting those buildings out of the mere proceeds; whereas if sunk and expended in that way first, unless his funds are large, he will stand a chance of wanting the means of supporting himself.Footnote 75
The ultimate objective was to establish a ‘decent dwelling’ without ‘grandeur and ornament’ yet able to deliver the ‘comforts and conveniences of a good house’.Footnote 76 Atkinson advised that the colonist, once ready to move from their bark hut to a more sophisticated dwelling, ‘will do well to sketch a plan of his proposed buildings, and to let everything he undertakes be part of this general plan; his improvements and buildings will then have an uniform and regular appearance, and much future trouble and labour will be saved’.Footnote 77 To assist, Atkinson provided a generic floorplan of a three-bedroom timber house with sitting room, kitchen and store room (Figure 8). The design was based on a stone foundation into which were rammed green timber posts harvested on site. Wall plates partitioned the building into its various rooms, which spilled out onto a large veranda running the full length of the front elevation. Weatherboards were preferred as external cladding, and the interior was to be plastered and lime-washed if possible. ‘The expense,’ assured Atkinson, ‘will not exceed seventy or eighty pounds, when completed and shingled, and it may be executed by any man of common ingenuity, without the aid of either carpenters or bricklayers.’Footnote 78 However, even this more accomplished dwelling was not expected to last the colonist forever. Instead, ‘as his surplus produce and means of maintaining labour accumulate’, Atkinson advised, ‘his first temporary buildings of wood, may be gradually replaced with more substantial and convenient edifices of brick or stone’.Footnote 79 By the late nineteenth century, earlier and less sophisticated dwellings could be found alongside newer, industrially produced buildings on the same parcels of land (Figure 9). The result of sustained improvement was therefore the means to achieving ownership and occupation of land on a permanent basis. Later handbooks reiterated Atkinson’s advice, warning colonists against over-improving their selections while they were still meeting their obligations under the law, and covered topics such as site selection, mortgage finance, cultivation techniques, labour laws and construction methods for housing and agricultural facilities, as well as furniture and other household items.Footnote 80
Figure 8. Plan and elevation of a rudimentary dwelling recommended for colonists of modest means in rural New South Wales. Source: J. Atkinson, An account of the state of agriculture & grazing in New South Wales (London, 1826).
Figure 9. Weatherboard house with white picket fence surrounded by earlier slab dwellings and post and rail fences in Trunkey, New South Wales, c.1870. Source: American & Australasian Photographic Company, ON 4/Box 51/no. 106, State Library of New South Wales.
Architectural production in nineteenth-century New South Wales was understood by colonists as a property-making practice, connecting the material transformation of the individual lot to the improvement of colonial territory more broadly. John Macarthur has argued that building handbooks worked to regulate order and civility in settler colonial contexts, emphasizing the importance of the domestic environment for social reproduction, morality and progress.Footnote 81 By democratizing architectural knowledge, colonial populations – spread across sparsely governed areas – could self-regulate their form of living, in turn bolstering wider claims about the supremacy of European civilization used to justify British invasion and Indigenous dispossession. The well-constructed and efficiently planned home was thus a technology for improving both its inhabitants and the stolen land it occupied – and, by extension, the process of urbanization as a whole. The radical instrumentality of the slab huts and other structures found throughout the open districts of New South Wales at the time Baker’s Atlas was published can therefore be contrasted with the increasingly complex ways in which they addressed the objectives of colonial law and planning, a phenomenon that was also apparent in other Australian colonies in the early nineteenth century (Figure 10).Footnote 82 Here, land took on multiple roles, as Nichols argues, ‘functioning both as an active, productive agent, a commodity and a spatial horizon’ for managing the distribution of populations under the conditions of colonial capitalism.Footnote 83
Figure 10. Typical timber slab hut initially erected by colonists in New South Wales as an ‘improvement’ to their selections. Source: R. Hoddle, ‘Pumpkin Cottage, Illawarra, the first family residence of Henry Osborn in New South Wales’, 1830, State Library of New South Wales.
Baker’s Atlas worked in conjunction with (and presupposed) the intensity of material transformation and ‘improvement’ outlined in the colonial handbooks authored by Atkinson and his contemporaries. Urbanization thus dispossessed across scales and between media, connecting land to paper to fence to dwelling. Importantly, the effects and reach of urbanization in nineteenth-century New South Wales are likely to have been uneven across different districts, in keeping with a property frontier that was always multi-sited and patchworked, rather than uniform and linear. Likewise, the improvement of the colony was not solely the outcome of white colonists’ labour: pastoralists and farmers routinely relied on Aboriginal labourers to improve their runs and lots in keeping with their legal obligations (Figure 11). The colonial record is replete with examples of construction projects undertaken by selector-colonists involving skilled Aboriginal labour – carpentry, plastering, pisé rendering, limewashing, fencing, roofing, etc. – for housing, schools, hospitals and churches.Footnote 84 Highly exploitative forms of remuneration, mistreatment and discontinuous work discouraged Indigenous Australians from engaging in regular ‘employment’ in the nineteenth-century construction industry, or the economy more broadly.Footnote 85 The role of Aboriginal labour in enabling colonists to meet the legal responsibilities of land ownership – that is, to improve their selections – requires further research.Footnote 86 Similarly, instances of Aboriginal land ownership and improvement within the colonial property system constitute a compelling yet understudied social history of property and race relations in the Australian colonies (Figure 12).Footnote 87
Figure 11. Scene depicting an Aboriginal man and child labouring on behalf of white selectors. Source: S.T. Gill, ‘The Colonized’, c.1860, State Library of New South Wales.
Figure 12. Anonymous Aboriginal family standing in front of their house on their own selection near Tilba Tilba in southern New South Wales. Source: W.H. Corkhill, ‘Aboriginal family outside their house’, c.1900, National Library of Australia.
Baker’s Atlas is merely one, albeit highly unusual, instrument introduced to advance settler colonial urbanization in nineteenth-century New South Wales. However, as the preceding discussion has attempted to demonstrate, the Atlas discloses important information about the place of improvements – and, therefore, architectural and urban forms more broadly – within the wider structuring of the colony as political territory. In this way, a history of Baker’s Atlas reveals once again that dispossession is irreducible to a ‘single event or legal doctrine’ and must instead be traced between a matrix of colonizing practices that worked together to clarify and maintain the institution of landed property in the colony.Footnote 88 Improvement encompassed a series of such practices, the outcome and final instantiation of a scalar sequence of dispossession spanning the individual lot to the space of the colony as a whole, over which the state claimed sovereign authority. As a mode of representation that made connections across these scales, Baker’s Atlas negotiated some of the ideological binaries inherent to the settler-colonial project in mid-century New South Wales: of state regulation of land, on the one hand, and a liberalism that advocated for an unobstructed land market, on the other. The regressive abstraction of existing surveys presented in the Atlas rendered the colony into what Nicholas Blomley calls an ‘object of calculation’, accelerating the conversion of land into a commodity for speculation, and superseding the Wakefieldian principles of systematic colonial expansion based on productive cultivation.Footnote 89 At the same time, however, the shift towards a real estate market in which land was valued in the abstract for its potential to yield capital gains was counterposed by the increasing legal codification of improvement across successive land acts. Where speculation threatened to destabilize the organized development of the colony, it also diminished the potential for transforming its so-called waste lands into economically productive territory. The legal obligation to improve ultimately fixed the aspiring landowner to their property and regulated their manner of occupation, relying on buildings and other structures less as ends in themselves than as discrete operations within a more pervasive and abiding process of dispossession through urbanization (Figure 13).
Figure 13. A portrait of settler colonial improvement in New England, New South Wales: conjugal family, house, outbuildings, road, dam, fence, livestock and felled trees. Source: C.H. Kerry, ‘A Selector’s Home – New England’, c.1880, State Library of Victoria.
Competing interests
The authors declare none.
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