Anything but common: why Van Diemen’s Land never had commons

ABSTRACT

It is sometimes assumed that the concept of the ‘commons’ was transposed directly from Britain to the Australian colonies, and that the term is interchangeable with ‘Crown land’ to describe lands not yet claimed by European settlers. This paper compares British commons with those introduced in the earliest years of the New South Wales and Van Diemen’s Land colonies, and asks why the latter failed to reserve land specifically for common grazing in its first thirty years. By comparing these two colonies, it becomes clear that each was driven by different environmental factors and priorities. Moreover, it shows that British commons and Crown lands in Australia were only comparable in a very shallow sense. This piece argues that calling unalienated acres claimed by the Crown in Australia ‘commons’ perpetuates the dispossession of Indigenous peoples from their lands by applying a framework founded in a thousand years of British common law and precedent.

Keywords:

• Commons
• land grants
• Van Diemen’s Land
• New South Wales
• colonialism
• Australian history

Acknowledgements

An early draft of this paper was presented at the Australian Urban History/ Planning History Conference in February 2020. The author thanks those who gave feedback received then, and on later drafts, especially Associate Professor Katrina Schlunke. The author also thanks the anonymous reviewers for their input.

Notes

1 In the late nineteenth century, several areas were designated as commons for recreational use, rather than the earlier pastoral use discussed here.

2 The Tasmanian Indigenous palawa language is written without capital letters.

3 A term for a convict who has finished their sentence.

4 Geographic Information Systems (GIS) allow us to measure the acres he drew, but in this instance I have not done that. I mention this to reassure you that the absurdity shown in this illustration is based purely on the data recorded in the Muster, and is not an error introduced by this author.

5 This is a very broad number that does not account for environmental variations, type of sheep, or other specifics. It is intended only to demonstrate a simplified level what overstocking looks like (Mokany et al. 2006).

6 , The map shows his named as ‘C.B. Forster’, but in 1839 the land was regranted to George Brooke Forster. Elsewhere it is spelled Brooks (Champ 1839).

7 In recent years, there are growing complaints that this legislation does not release enough land and a push to expand the scheme. One opinion writer goes so far as to call for a ‘decolonisation’ of the English countryside (Monbiot 2020).