Pistons of Prosperity

In the half century after the start of the gold rushes, economic progress in Australia was swift. In 1890 the population reached three million, having been multiplied by seven in forty years. Parliaments, juries, and free institutions had taken root in a land which back in 1850 still received British convicts and still bowed, on most major issues, to decisions made in London.

The new machinery and the gadgetry of ease could be seen everywhere – in the railways that stretched far inland, the tall blocks of offices in larger cities, the ships and cranes at the wharves, the gasworks and refrigeration chambers and the hydraulic power which propelled the passenger lifts to the upper floors of the new hotels.

An unusual blend of circumstances had created this age of prosperity. Perhaps the strongest piston of prosperity was the abundance of new natural resources. Australia’s pace of development owed much to the wide grasslands, the virgin soil ready to grow cereals, the untapped deposits of gold and copper, coal and tin and silver-lead, and to the forest which yielded building materials and firewood. Here was a bonanza, and most of its choicest parts were used for the first time between 1840 and 1890. These natural resources had been little used in the Aboriginal epoch but in the half century to 1890, they were exploited, often with energy and ingenuity. Rarely in history had people explored, occupied and used such a vast terrain so quickly.

The strenuous application of new techniques was possibly the second piston of the long era of prosperity. Much of the prosperity came from fatter cattle and heavier fleeces and more appropriate breeds of wheat. It came from hundreds of labour-saving devices, from the post- and-rail fences which replaced the shepherds, from the wire fences which replaced post-and-rail fences, from the corrugated iron spouting and water tanks, from the artesian bores and the creaking windmills which supplied underground water on the plains, and the new irrigation schemes of the 1880s.

Fewer hands produced more wheat because of the devising of new ploughs, strippers, mechanical harvesters and the travelling steam threshing-machines. At harvest time, in the kitchens of the larger farms, the dining table seated perhaps only ten men where once there were thirty, and those ten men with the aid of horsepower and steam power did more work each day than the vanished team of thirty.

The rise of the machines
Almost everywhere steam was doing work which was once performed by the sheer physical strength of teams of workers. Visitors to the mills and factories saw the steam or smoke from a distance, heard the throb of the pistons and crushers and mills, and once inside they saw a criss-cross of overhead belting which conveyed the energy from the working engine to the scattered machines.
Those who did not visit factories knew, from the advertisements in newspapers and the painted signs on delivery carts, that this foodstuff or that commodity was now miraculously made by labour-saving machines driven by steam. Eat our steam biscuits. Take your suit to our steam laundry.

Most steam was produced by firewood in the interior or coal on the coast, and nearly a thousand ships a year by the 1880s carried the coal away from Newcastle. There on the crowded wharves the handling of the coal was increasingly mechanised, as readers of A New Geography for Australian Pupils learned in 1885: “The noise is stunning, for yonder come trucks of coal running down to the edge of the water. Great cranes seize them, whirl them into the air, swing them over the hold of the vessel, turn them upside down, and so empty coal into the ships below.”
Transport had been transformed since 1850. In that year many travellers had to walk long distances, the roads were poor, and strong horses were few. Even the horse-drawn mail coach did not make long journeys. The strength of the wind was far more important than the steam engines in propelling ships and not one mile of railway was open. By 1890 the fast steamship dominated the passenger routes to Europe, and the long and often-stormy voyage past Cape Horn had given way to the calmer passage across the Indian Ocean to the Suez Canal and the Mediterranean.

The international telegraph had replaced the mail steamer as the fastest way of sending important news, and the mail steamer itself was twice as rapid as the fast sailing ships of 1850 in crossing the world. Within the larger cities the trams, trains and cabs provided cheap and regular transport in streets where, in the late 1840s, nearly everybody walked and only the wealthy could call on riding horses or a horse and carriage. And in capital cities the first telephones were installed in the decade 1878 to 1887, though calls outside the city were still impossible. Mechanised transport now saved human labour on a huge scale.

In a continent possessing few navigable rivers and no inland canals, the railway was the great miracle. It filled old pioneers with wonder. Whenever a new railway was opened, old settlers were there, sitting stiff-backed on the platform amongst the top hats, and reminiscing how they had been amongst the first white men to ride through country where the black locomotive now rushed.

When the railway between Melbourne and Sydney was completed in 1883, and a banquet of food and speeches was set out in the locomotive shed at Albury, the new Edison electric light shone on an old man who had crossed the silent Murray in 1824 with the explorers Hume and Hovell.

The sense of wonder at the railway comes down clearly over the years. But the wonder was not simply at its speed and its predictability. The railway so cheapened the cost of transport that it created industries where previously there were none. It gave birth to distant wheatlands and new dairying districts, and opened forests to the timber-miller.

The railway enabled low-grade or remote mining fields to treat ores which, without a railway, were unpayable. It saved pastoral districts in time of drought and sent their wool quickly to market. Between 1875 and 1891 the railways grew from 1600 miles to more than 10,000.

There were also gains from using ancient modes of transport more effectively. Draught horses of improved breeds replaced bullocks on most farms and farmers used large teams to pull the plough, thus reducing the labour costs for each acre. In the dry outback the camel was introduced at first by explorers and then by carriers.

Sir Thomas Elder, a rich pastoralist, imported 124 camels and 31 ‘Afghan’ camel men in 1865 from the port of Karachi in the present Pakistan, and the pack camels increasingly became carriers of wool, station supplies, mining equipment and food and alcohol In the dry outback. At one time half of the continent and its sparse, struggling population relied on pack camels.

Let there be light
In 1850 the central streets of only one city, Sydney, were illuminated by gas lamps, but by 1890 most towns of a few thousand people were lit by gas. In smaller towns the household lamps burning kerosene – a word coined in 1854 – supplanted the old tallow candles in the sitting room. A whole range of night meetings and activities had become more convenient, night work had become safer, and in most houses people could read or sew at night without undue strain to their eyes: gaslight and kerosene lamps were thus the allies of compulsory education.

We had our own inventors, mostly men of little schooling who fastened their mind on new problems and would not let go. In the farmlands, hundreds of part-time inventors devised new or improved old machines. South Australians between the 1840s and 1870s invented a range of simple and effective machines which prepared and tilled and harvested the wheatlands with more speed and less labour.

They invented the stripper which, drawn by horses through the tall wheat crop, combed the wheat from the stalk and partly threshed it. They invented the Mallee roller which rolled over the Mallee scrub and so saved much of the slow work of using the axe or the grubber. They invented the stump-jump plough which neatly jumped over buried roots still left in the roughly cleared ground. They devised and manufactured, at small foundries and the wayside shops of implement-makers, the ploughs and the drills which were more suited to hard dry soils than the damp soft soils which their European ancestors had farmed. Victorians in the 1880s led in developing the combine harvester. In the slow evolution of this machine which now harvests much of the world’s wheat, Australians contributed the most.

Even in those problems which European inventors were facing, Australians working patiently in isolation still had hopes that they would transform the way the world did its work. In Geelong the newspaper editor, James Harrison, was a brilliant pioneer of mechanical refrigeration but was almost too far ahead of his time. His important cargo of hard-frozen meat was shipped to London in 1873 in the sailing ship Norfolk, which possessed no refrigerating plant and so could not adequately preserve the meat.

In the 1870s a young Melbourne watchmaker, Louis Brennan, invented a retrievable torpedo which he eventually sold to the War Office in London for the huge sum of £110,000. In Sydney in 1893 Lawrence Hargrave, son of a Sydney judge, made a vital step in aeronautical engineering when he invented the box-kite, thus advancing knowledge of the vital question of how a flying machine could be made stable while in flight. And a decade later the young Melbourne engineer, A.G.M. Michell, was working on his revolutionary device, the thrust bearing, without which the huge ocean liners and oil-tankers would be impracticable.

A willingness to use and experiment with machinery was thus one of the causes of the high standard of living. A large volume of commodities produced by few hands: that was the secret of colonial Australia’s prosperity. In turn the willingness to import machines or even invent machines was spurred by the frequent shortage of labour and the abundance of capital. British capital financed much of the mechanisation, including the railways.

The colonial legacy
Other factors promoted the prosperity of Australians. The years 1850 to 1890 were unusually peaceful; Britain fought in only one major war, the Crimean War of 1853 to 1856, and the war was short and victorious. All the dislocations of a major war were thus avoided. Moreover in this long period most of the expense of defending Australian ports and sea lanes was still paid by the British taxpayer: ironically Britain collected an income tax but no Australian colony tried to collect an income tax from its citizens until the 1880s.

Economic life experienced boom after boom, and after each boom the slump was short. Tasmania was the main exception, and was relatively stagnant from the 1850s until the early 1870s. The absence of major economic slumps is one of the unusual facets of the period, and part of the explanation is simply luck.

The banks possessed, if a crisis should arise, no central bank and no emergency legislation to help them through the troubles; and yet somehow until the 1890s the network of banks was spared the panics of depositors and those financial nightmares which were felt In England, France, Germany, Austria and the United States in almost every decade.

The willingness of the colonial governments to spend money on public works in lean years and the willingness of British investors to lend that money at low interest also helped to give economic life an unusual level of stability. Above all, gold was a wonderful insurance in economic life. Whenever the economy began to slump, the search for gold and the mining of gold were intensified. The price of gold was fixed internationally at £3.17s an ounce and so gold was attractive when the price of wool, copper, wheat, or other exports declined. Gold was ballast in the storm: it provided stabilisers for the ship.

One spur to the high prosperity was not appreciated at the time. From the late 1840s to 1890, the main rural districts experienced favourable weather, measured against the following half century. We are only now beginning to realise how favourable was the climate in the south-eastern corner of Australia for those grazing and cropping industries which were so important then to economic life.

In good years in the far outback, pastoralists were tempted into country so poor that in the end they had to retreat. In vast expanses of poor land too many sheep and cattle grazed, and the pastures and the scrub deteriorated. Railways were built to districts which did not have enough traffic – and never would have enough – to pay for them.

Breakwaters and stone harbour works and long piers were built for ports which then faded away. Permanent towns were built on gold-fields and then the gold ran out, leaving fine churches, schools, banking chambers, shops and even town halls to serve only a fraction of the people for whom they were built. Noxious weeds and pests were introduced and flourished, wiping out part of the hard-won gains of pioneers.

The forty years had been blessed by an unusual assortment of advantages. We had virgin soil, rich mineral deposits and many untouched natural resources to reward the first comers. We did not have to depend on one dominating export, and so we did not stumble if the price of that export fell. We were quick to adopt or adapt the new ideas of a great era of invention in the North Atlantic. We were at peace with the outside world, and in the more populous parts of the country the weather was relatively favourable.

Throughout the forty years the world’s richest money-lender, Great Britain, sent out capital, enabling us to enjoy a high standard of living at the very time when we were spending heavily on railways and reservoirs, on opening up the land, the building of towns and a variety of debt-incurring works.

Through hard striving by people in every section of society and through an unusual combination of conditions the country had achieved much. But now the striving in boardrooms and in offices as well as on workfloors was easing a little, at the very time when the other advantages were falling away. And the pride in the forty years of achievement was itself an increasing hazard, because serious setbacks were virtually unimaginable and therefore would be more damaging when eventually they came.
Extracted with permission from A Land Half Won (Macmillan, 1980).

About the author: Geoffrey Blainey is probably Australia’s best known historian. He has written over 35 books, including The Tyranny of Distance, A Short History of the World, and The Rush that Never Ended. The National Trust lists him as one of Australia’s ‘Living Treasures’.