The agrarian movements of this period are particularly interesting: in New South Wales there was the struggle between the squatters and the Governor, which gave victory for the time being to the former; in South Australia the Wakefield theory had its first opportunity of being shown to the world in operation, and in Western Australia the colonists had to face the problems arising out of the alienation of land in large blocks without corresponding settlement.

Allusion has been made to the ineradicable tendency of the colonists in New South Wales to push out into the unknown regions of the north and west, in search of land better than they saw around them in the settled districts, and the efforts of the Government to check their dispersion. The policy of the Governors had been, from the beginning, to mark out a defined area for colonization and endeavour to restrict settlement to that area until it was fairly well occupied; then in an orderly way to throw open another area and proceed to its occupation. That this policy could not be carried out, after the passage of the mountains had opened illimitable fields to the enterprise of the settlers, never seems to have been fully realized in England; and when Lord Glenelg, who presided over the Colonial Office from 1835 to 1839, gave his attention to the land question, he thought he saw, in the low price at which land was being sold in New South Wales, an incitement to the colonists to disperse themselves unduly, which would be checked by raising the minimum price to 12s. an acre.