Squatters and separation: a synoptic overview

Squatters and separation: a synoptic overview

The Separation of Queensland from New South Wales in December 1859 was an indirect consequence of three upheavals in post-Napoleonic Europe: firstly, the collapse of the Spanish wool flocks, the protection of the Saxon flocks and the industrialisation of the British textiles industry with increased demand for cotton and, more pertinently, merino wool; secondly, a radical, democratic insurgency against restored conservative regimes that produced abortive revolutions and socialist ideology in
continental Europe and Chartism in Britain; and thirdly, as a direct result of the preceding two factors, the large-scale emigration to the Australasian colonies of an entrepreneurial, ambitious, capitalist middle class and an
impoverished, dispossessed working class – each of which, aspiring to an improved lifestyle, had a dramatic impact on the shaping of the Australian colonies. This paper, drawing on the established historiography, surveys the role that the squatters played in the Separation of pastoral Queensland from a democratising New South Wales. Hence, while avoiding a white triumphalist interpretation – I have published elsewhere on frontier conflict – it might be subtitled 'in praise of squatterdom'.

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