White Society in

the 19th

Century

The Story of Your Place:

South-West Australia

The plough was usually single-furrowed and drawn by one or two big, powerful horses or bullocks. Most successful settlers produced their own milk, butter and cheese from their dairy cows; their own pork and bacon from their own pigs; their own beef; their own figs, mulberries, grapes, apples, potatoes, and so on, from their own orchards and gardens. If you weren’t planting or shearing, your day would be spent in such tasks as picking fruit, weeding the garden, bringing water from the well, gathering kindling for the hearth and setting the table for dinner.

In the middle of the nineteenth century ‘a farm’ meant a hut, (or a small stone house if you were lucky) to live in, a well for water, a shingle-roofed shed for the fowls, a yard for the horses, land to graze sheep and cows on, and land to grow wheat on.

Some explorers made initial treks into the hills they saw to the east. When these men set out in their little parties, with their horses and pack saddles full of flour, rice, pork, dried biscuits and water, and their dogs and guns, they were heading into complete mystery.

On the other side of the Darling Scarp they might find caverns, waterfalls, bleak dunes baking in the sun or a further range of even grander mountains.

They didn’t know.

No white person knew.

It was a mystery, and that was why they were setting out into it.

They did receive help from the first Australians (Aboriginals) at various times in their journeys.

Why might Grey, the explorer, have a different view of ‘the bush’ to many of the settlers?

Many of the white settlers did not like the look of ‘the bush’ when they arrived. However some people did. George Grey was a white explorer with a mission to survey and explore much of Western Australia in the 1830s.

One warm December night by a lake, Grey recorded the scene before his eyes:

“Our bivouack, this night, had a beauty about it, which would have made any one possessed with the least enthusiasm, fall in love with a bush life. We were sitting on a gently-rising ground, which sloped away gradually to a picturesque lake, surrounded by wooded hills, - whilst the moon shone so brightly on the lake, that the distance was perfectly clear, and we could distinctly see the large flocks of wild-fowl, as they passed over our heads, and then splashed into the water, darkening and agitating its silvery surface; in front of us blazed a cheerful fire, round which were the dark forms of the natives, busily engaged in roasting ducks for us; the foreground was covered with graceful grass trees, and at the moment we commenced supper, I made the natives set fire to the dried tops of these, and by the splendid light of these chandeliers, which threw a red glare over the whole forest in our vicinity, we eat our evening meal; then, closing round the fire, rolled ourselves up in our blankets, and laid down to sleep.” (Grey, Vol 1, 298)

Looking at the Perth landscape what might these people be thinking?

Looking at the Perth landscape what might these people be thinking?

Perth from Kings Park

Whites arrived in their hundreds in 1829.

Rural settlement followed the alluvial banks of the rivers. Wandering cows looking for green pasture worked out that there was more fertile land at the base of the Darling Ranges, and soon people had farms there, and orchards up into some of the valleys of the Ranges. Later in the 1830s sheep were moved out to the Avon valley.

In the 1840s there was a depression.

The arrival of convicts created a building boom in the 1850s, but it was still a small time boom. Perth was still small. In 1881 Perth had just 932 houses.

Then came the gold rush of the 1890s. This period marked a big shift in our history. Till the 1880s white Western Australia was just a quiet little bunch of agrarian folk waving Union flags, surrounded by human cultures they often failed to understand, and by thousands of kms of ocean, woodland and desert. From the 1890s capitalism, communications and government had all sped up, and the place was beginning to look a bit more like a modern Western state.

The Nyoongars here stand in King’s Park and look down on Perth and the changing WA.

Drawing from The Colonial Eye, p.74. Photos copyright Tom M. Wilson.