Another brilliant piece from a GUNNAS WRITING MASTERCLASS writer
It was an extraordinary decision – perhaps brave, possibly foolish – but certainly extraordinary. George and his wife Elizabeth were tenant farmers, leasing land near Gillingham in Dorset where they had both been raised, where both their families and extended families had always lived, and where they knew of nothing else. The owner of their Estate died, and government death duties required that the property be sold to pay these dues. The new owner didn’t require tenant farmers and George needed to support his young and growing family. Thomas Peel was proposing a settlement scheme at the new Swan River Colony in Western Australia, speaking of the land in glowing terms and exciting young George with the idea that one day he too could be a landowner. Peel had negotiated a deal with the newly appointed Governor to the colony. If he were able to land several hundred new settlers and their goods on or before an appointed day then vast tracts of land would be allocated to his scheme. George signed up as an indentured labourer, intending to work off his term with Peel before obtaining his own small grant of land. They were, in reality, the first economic refugees or boat people to land on these shores – fleeing a country that no longer offered them a livelihood or any prospects of one for them or their children. They believed the Swan River Colony offered hope of a secure future, and the opportunity to own land – the significance of which was the voting power, status and respectability that brought. Sadly, Peel’s ships arrived late and the Governor had already allocated their promised land to other settlers. Peel’s settlers disembarked on a beach in Cockburn Sound where they established an encampment in the adjacent sand hills that they named Clarence, and began exploring further inland for productive soils in which to grow crops. George, Elizabeth and their fellow families struggled to survive these early months on scant provisions, and as many as forty people died during that time. They were part of a group that finally wrote to the Governor requesting to be released from Peel’s indenture scheme that had obviously failed, and asking the Governor to provide an escort of soldiers to assist them to walk to the Perth settlement and establish themselves on land there. Hard working and enterprising from the start, George worked as a sawyer cutting timber and soon earned sufficient money to buy a plot of land near the river in Perth. The family all helped George build the first 4 roomed cottage in the settlement from local timber cut on Mt Eliza (later to be Kings Park), and clay and shale they collected in boxes from the hillside to mould into rough, rubble walls. They had become landowners a world away from all that they had ever known, and they would not look back.