Immigration Qld 1867

montgo

Taking advantage of the recent £1 offer with BNA, I spotted the attached advert on the Limerick Reporter/Tipp Vindicator.

30 acres free must surely have been an incentive to choose Queensland or did NSW/Victoria have similar offers? Some of my ancestors family decided on NSW and they did extremely well with substantial farms (with little/no money to start with) and there had been no family there previously.

I was surprised to read that some small villages had agents for the shipping company but no one listed for Tipperary town.

Peregrinus

Queensland was separated from New South Wales and established as a distinct colony in 1859. They had trouble attracting migrants to the relatively undeveloped colony; the comforts of Sydney and Melbourne were more attractive. So they instituted a scheme whereby migrants who paid their own fares would receive on arrival a "land order" entitling them to claim 18 acres of crown land plus, if still resident in the colony two years later, a second land order entitling them to claim a further 12 acres. If a migrant arrived who hadn't paid his own fare, the shipowner got a land voucher for 18 acres. (The idea here was to enourage shipowners to provide free or subsidised passage.) The Black Ball Line, mentioned in the advertisement, was the principal (and for a time the only) shipping line that participated in this scheme.

The scheme worked perhaps too well. Lots of people who came to Queensland had no interest in farming, and rather than taking up their right to land they simply sold their land orders. The Black Ball Line, too, had no interest in building up a vast land bank in rural Queensland, and it sold its land orders. The result was a glut of land orders in the market. While you could buy land direct from the Colonial government for one pound an acre, for most of the 1860s you could buy land orders that enabled you to take up land at a net cost of less than ten shillings an acre. The result was a big fall in revenue for the colonial government, which largely relied on land sales to fund the construction of road, harbours, etc in the colony. Plus, the original idea had been to attract immigrants interested in farming, but since the land orders could be freely sold they attracted many migrants who had no interest in (or talent or aptitude for) farming; they just saw the sale of the land order as providing a useful sum to start a new life in Queensland, without necessarily being too clear about how that life was to continue. Matters reached a crisis when a financial collapse in the UK in 1866 (which lead to a big jump in migration to Queensland) was followed by a slump in Queensland in 1867 (which led to a big jump in unemployment). The scheme contracted to practically nothing, and was formally wound up in 1870.

Jellybaby1

But if you had a farming background, what a fantastic offer which would have been hard to refuse considering life here at the time although Australia probably had its hardships too. I wonder why they didn't stipulate farming experience essential. Seems a terrible waste to give land to people who wouldn't work it. I think if it had been me I might have given it a go. There are several of my branches out in Australia and New Zealand and probably this was the incentive - none of their ancestors were farmers.

Peregrinus

I dunno. Queensland is not like Ireland; much of it is pretty poor land. The 18 acres that you would have for the first two years would not provide even a basic subsistence living. Even 30 acres, if you stuck it for two years, would be pretty miserable. I think the idea was to attract settlers with a bit of cash who would buy more land, and also have the capital to acquire stock, implements, etc and build a small house. But many of the migrants who took up the deal had none of these things; the intended to sell the land voucher to recoup the costs of the passage. It might have worked better if, instead of offering 30 acres for free, they had offered sixty acres for half-price, or something like that.

pedroeibar1

There was a huge exodus (assisted) from King's county to Queensland in the 1860's using a scheme run by a priest - Fr. Dunne? Some had been evicted by Thomas Trench, the local agent (a son of the Kerry Lansdowne Estate Trench).
Quite a few left of Tipperary in the 1850's, (mainly for NSW) and one of the main clerics who went with them was William Lanigan from Templemore who was later appointed Bishop and was responsible for the cathedral at Goulbourne.

montgo

Many thanks for your very informative replies. Apologies for delay in responding.