ABSTRACT
Lord Grey, however, was temperamentally no believer in 'salutary neglect'; and ,in this case there were questions indirectly affecting New South Wales which could not be neglected. The return of prosperity reminded South Australians of their claims to representative government; and resentment at the contemplated reservation of mineral royalties by the Crown gave point to their petition.2 Gladstone was ready to admit the claim, and Grey agreed with him. The case of Van Diemen's Land, which had more than once asked for the same concession, had been generally considered to stand on a different footing owing to the presence of convicts. But Grey, in his instructions to Governor Sir William Denison, dissented from this view. It seemed to him to be merely a question of taking securities against any insubordination among the convicts and 'retaining in the hands of the Executive Government such powers and resources as are requisite for the general welfare of the colonists at large'.3 There was a third problem which must be solved soon, and might well be solved at the same time as the others. Port Phillip was vehemently demanding separation from New South Wales. The district had attained to a population of 26,000, and to a revenue of £60,000 a year, and was grazing 230,000 cattle and 1,800,000 sheep. Many of the settlers had arrived not overland but from Van Diemen's Land or from Great Britain, and Sydney meant nothing to them; they felt it virtually impossible to be effectively represented at such a distant centre; and they claimed that they were not receiving their due share of immigrants. The logic of events seemed to demand separation. From 1836 on, separate accounts had been kept of the revenue and expenditure of Port Phillip; from 1839 it had had a 'Superintendent', Mr. Latrobe, with a measure of
executive authority; in 1840 Lord John Russell had proposed to give it a different land system from New South Wales proper and to make statutory provision for future separation, and though both these proposals had been abandoned there had since then been separate land funds. In August 1844the six Port Phillip members in the new Legislative Council at Sydney, headed by the stormy petrel of New South Wales, Dr. Lang, raised the question of complete separation, and winning no support, made petition to the Queen. Back went the petition to New South Wales for a report from the Governor and his Ex:ecutive Council. They, by a majority, recommended separation. Sir George Gipps himself was inclined to oppose on general principles 'the dismemberment of any colony which, like New South Wales, may be of a size hereafter to become a nation': nor did he agree that there was any administrative grievance sufficient in itself to justify the change. But there was a real grievance in the virtual impossibility of finding qualified persons willing to make the journey from Port Phillip to Sydney and represent the district in the Legislative Council; and the failure of the district council scheme of the Act of 1842 had tended to centralize power unduly in the Legislative Council and made it impossible, in Gipps's opinion, to hold so large a colony together. I If, in short, New South Wales could not be decentralized in one way, it must be decentralized in another. Gipps did not think ,Port Phillip yet ripe for representative government, but that was clearly a different question. On the question of separati.on, Lord Grey found Gipps's arguments convincing.
