School of Historical and Philosophical Studies - Theses

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Start date: 1960 × Subject: Beech Forest × Subject: settlement ×

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    'That place': nineteenth century land selection in the Otways, Victoria, Australia
    Minchinton, Barbara Helen (2011)
    The Cape Otway forest was opened for selection under Victoria’s late nineteenth century land acts. There were few applicants for the heavily timbered country until the government produced a map in 1886 showing the forest cut into neat oblong blocks, when many hundreds of people, mostly labourers with a nest-egg of savings, applied for allotments. Before the applications could be assessed, there was such an outcry about the prospective waste of timber resources that although the government allowed the existing applications to go ahead, the forest was closed to further selection. This see-saw between settlement and timber reservation continued for decades. By 1900, in broken terrain with very high rainfall, the selectors in the Otways were failing in droves. Yet in similar but more isolated country in Gippsland, under arguably more difficult selection legislation, selectors had apparently done better. This micro-study of settlement under the Land Act 1884 and subsequent acts shows some of the ways in which the legislative and administrative framework unintentionally influenced the mindscape of a developing community. Gippsland selectors took up land under the Land Act 1869, and pegged out their selections next to friends and relatives, so that communities began with some ready-made roots. Under the Land Act 1884 in the Otways the Local Land Board deliberately restricted families to one selection each unless there were no other applicants for the land, so that communities had to be made from scratch. Leasing arrangements under the Land Act 1884 meant that selectors in the Otways did not have to reside on their land, so that neighbours might not see each other from one year to the next. When they used fire to clear their blocks they frequently set off bushfires which burnt their neighbours out. Changes to the forfeit regulations, too, undermined community-making in the Otways because those who reported on their neighbours’ non-compliance had first option on obtaining the forfeited land. Worst of all, numerous individual selectors in the Otways blocked the building of much-needed roads. When so many put their own interests ahead of the wider community, few were able to thrive.