ABSTRACT
This chapter aanlyses the emergence of Western Australia's Homestead Act of 1893 as a means of better understanding the processes associated with policy mobility in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This act, designed to stimulate intensive agricultural development in Western Australia through the provision of land to new settlers under specific terms and conditions, has a long and spatially complex history and is largely a replication of the Canadian Dominion Lands Act of 1872. The Western Australian Homestead Act can trace its origins to a series of homesteading policies that emerged in the United States and Canada during the middle part of the nineteenth century. The emergence of homesteading policy in Western Australia was the result of a number of interrelated factors. The defining characteristics of Australian land settlement policy is the way in which it has freely borrowed and adapted approaches used in other parts of the world, most notably the United States, Canada and New Zealand.
