Introduction

Inspired by the Bigge Report of 1823, with its emphasis upon encouraging the inflow of capital to promote rural enterprise, the Australian Agricultural Company was formed in 1824, through a combination of Act of Parliament (5 Geo IV., cap. 86) and Royal Charter, to acquire a large area of land in the colony of New South Wales. According to a German writer of the 1930s, with the entry of this enterprise into the field, ‘The actual opening-up and development of Australia began’. The primary and overriding objective of the Company was to employ convict labour to produce superfine or high-quality merino clothing-wool for export to Britain. As James Macarthur, one of the directors and chairman of the local or ‘Colonial Committee’ of the Company, observed in 1828: ‘if the success of fine-woolled sheep in this colony be doubtful, the main object for which the Company was instituted is at once swept away, and with it the very existence of the Company’.

At the time of its establishment conditions appeared ideal for the Company to flourish. Extraordinarily high and yet rising prices were being paid in Britain for superfine merino clothing-wool, which was entirely imported from Spain and especially from central and northern Germany. Within Europe, from a combination of the climatic requirements for the production of superfine merino wool and the relatively dense and rapidly increasing population, creating an increasing demand for foodstuffs and other agricultural raw materials apart from wool, the possibilities were severely limited for expanding, or even maintaining, the area devoted to extensive sheepfarming.