This article examines the relationship between land endowments, public education, and the dispossession of Indigenous peoples in Australia and the Anglo-settler world.Footnote 1 This is a relationship that is present everywhere in the colonial archive, yet all but invisible in historiographies of schooling. Bringing it into view has the capacity to transform understandings of not only the history of education, but also the political economy of settler colonial democracies.
The use of land grants to fund public schooling in the United States is well known to historians of education, yet scholarship that places these grants in relation to Indigenous dispossession is only nascent.Footnote 2 Education, writes Nancy Beadie and her coauthors, “played a critical role in state formation in the North American West in ways almost wholly unacknowledged by the field.”Footnote 3 And land grants were not unique to the United States.Footnote 4 They were also a foundational feature of educational funding in Canada and Aotearoa/New Zealand, yet they have not significantly featured in educational scholarship of the last several decades in those contexts either.Footnote 5 In Australia the historiography of public schooling has traditionally centered on the story of denominational control, sectarianism, and secularization. What this focus has missed, however, and what this article shows, is that in several Australian colonies removing state aid to denominational schools was accompanied by the creation of educational land endowments. Yet educational land endowments are almost entirely absent from the existing Australian literature. Although there has been attention to the lands of the New South Wales (NSW) Church and Schools Corporation (which is discussed below), historians have not considered their connection with public education or instruction.Footnote 6 And, while a handful of older studies note the use of land endowments in passing, none of the major works on public education systems nor specialized studies address them.Footnote 7 The University of Adelaide’s 50,000-acre land endowment is sometimes noted, but this example is usually considered an outlier. Historian Caitlin Harvey has called it “one of Australia’s only instances of employing a land grant as a financial mechanism” for higher education.Footnote 8 In fact, historian Donald Dickson’s 1963 observation that “the whole subject of land endowment for education in New Zealand is still something of a mystery” remains largely true, and not only for Aotearoa/New Zealand but also for Canada and Australia.Footnote 9 Attention to Indigenous education is a growing subfield, and recent research on higher education has placed land endowments squarely in the context of settler colonialism. Particularly important has been work that has traced the Indigenous nations whose land was granted under the 1862 US Morrill Act to support colleges and institutions of higher education focused on agriculture and the mechanical arts. In light of these developments, it is incumbent on historians of education and schooling to reconsider the relationship between Indigenous dispossession and public schools.Footnote 10 Much basic work is needed. This article contributes to that undertaking by focusing on the use of land endowments to fund public and common schools in the Anglo-settler world.
This is an emerging research agenda for historians of education, and one that needs to understand the policy of educational land-granting in the United States as connected to the use of that policy in other settler colonies. Since the late 1990s scholars have examined settler colonialism as a distinctive form, characterized by the settler drive to control land. Its “dominant feature” wrote Patrick Wolfe, “is not exploitation [of Indigenous labor] but replacement.”Footnote 11 Rather than a one-off event, Wolfe argued, settler colonialism is a structure; the disavowal of Indigenous sovereignty becomes an organizing principle of settler societies, which works to turn Indigenous territory into Crown land and then into capital.Footnote 12 Although this frame applies to many contexts, the Anglo-settler world plays a central role in the theorization of settler colonialism.Footnote 13 As John Weaver has outlined, the countries now known as Australia, Aotearoa/New Zealand, Canada, and the United States were not only structurally connected through the British empire, they were also “exposed to a particular cultural understanding of land” that emphasized private ownership, improvement, and commodification.Footnote 14 Educational land endowments were one aspect of the process – and an oft-obscured one – by which value has been produced from Indigenous dispossession in the Anglo-settler world. Like so many aspects of settler colonialism, their use to finance the establishment of school systems was a transnational (and transcolonial) phenomenon.Footnote 15
Attending to the role of educational land endowments reveals how the settler appropriation of Indigenous land was central to establishing the public education institutions that were seen by contemporaries as crucial to the development of democracy in the era of responsible government and statehood.Footnote 16 In this period, settler societies laid the foundations of the democratic institutions that continue to this day. From the 1830s onward, Britain’s settler colonies made claims for more local political and economic control. After the Durham Report of 1839, the British imperial government began to meet these demands. Responsible government—the vesting of executive power in a cabinet drawn from and accountable to locally elected legislatures, and the requirement that governors act on ministerial advice—was achieved in certain Canadian colonies in the late 1840s, and in New Zealand and most Australian colonies in the 1850s and ‘60s. While in the United States the executive and legislature are separated, there self-government was achieved with statehood, which was granted across the mid- and northwest between 1858 and 1896.
Crucially, responsible government and statehood granted settler governments control over the management and distribution of land. This led to new waves of “closer settlement” (or more densely populated agricultural communities), with legislators seeking to break up large pastoral estates (which grazed sheep and cattle on tracts of licensed or leased land) and open it instead to purchase by “selectors,” or small family farms. It also led to new mechanisms for Indigenous displacement, in which education and schooling played a significant part. Residential schools and missions (which were established both before and after responsible government) were central to this process of displacement, but so too were public schools, from which Indigenous students were generally excluded.Footnote 17 The establishment of these schools was planned as part of land releases and designed to encourage families to settle the so-called “new” lands. They taught a curriculum infused with racial ideology.Footnote 18 Moreover, policymakers saw public education as crucial to enabling newly enfranchised settlers to take up their role as citizens in settler democracies. Funding public education systems with expropriated land was a way of achieving these ends without burdening the settler “democracy” with taxation. In the United States, it was built into western states’ constitutions.
This article advances research on the relationship between Indigenous dispossession and school funding in Anglo-settler contexts in four ways. First, it surveys existing literature on land endowments to map the evolution of the mechanism and chart its prevalence in the United States, Canada, and Aotearoa/New Zealand. Second, it establishes Australia as part of this picture, uncovering the importance of land endowments that leveraged appropriated Indigenous land to generate income to fund public education systems, showing the influence of US, Canadian, and Aotearoa/New Zealand models on these initiatives. Although largely unnoticed by Australian historians of education, the evidence for this lies in plain sight—in colonial legislation, in newspapers, and in the records of parliamentary debates. Third, to make visible the Indigenous history of educational endowment lands, the article identifies the Aboriginal peoples to whom portions of the South Australian educational lands belonged and explores their relationship to Aboriginal dispossession and displacement. South Australia is a revealing point of entry because it was a particularly enthusiastic adopter of educational endowments with an intensive and compressed program of land reform. Finally, the article argues that attending to educational land endowments forces historians to reconsider their approach to the political economy that underpinned democratic polities in Australia and the settler colonial world in general.
School Land Endowments in the United States, Canada, and Aotearoa/New Zealand
Land has been fundamental to the financing of education systems in the Anglo-settler world since the seventeenth century. Early colonists brought to New England the English practice of founding “free schools” and endowing them with land. Grants of lands from private individuals took place from the 1630s.Footnote 19 From the 1640s, towns began granting land to schools, and from the 1670s, colonial governments began to grant land to existing towns. Then, in the early eighteenth century, the “charters” that colonial governments used to establish new townships began to include “a definite provision [of land] for the support of religion and schools.”Footnote 20 By the end of the eighteenth century there had developed, as historian Alexandra Usher puts it, a “general consensus in favor of using the ‘public bounty’ for the support of common schools.”Footnote 21
In the context of the American Revolution, this consensus was formalized in the Land Ordinance of 1785 and the Northwest Ordinance of 1787. The first of these outlined how the area west of the thirteen colonies was to be surveyed and organized into territories. It explicitly provided land for public education, reserving “the lot No. 16, of every township, for the maintenance of public schools within the said township.”Footnote 22 Two years later, the Northwest Ordinance established a system of democratic governance for the new territories and the process for statehood application once their population reached sixty thousand free inhabitants. Declaring that “schools and the means of education shall be forever encouraged,” this ordinance was also the basis on which a requirement to support education was subsequently applied to every state as it entered the Union.Footnote 23 Together these two ordinances, in Usher’s words, “established a series of trust relationships between the federal government and the states, in which the government granted the asset (land) to be held in a trust and used to support a system of schools” in each state.Footnote 24
Beginning in 1803 with the creation of Ohio, all new states—except for the thirteen original colonies and West Virginia, Maine, Kentucky, and Vermont—received land grants from the federal government for the support of common schools.Footnote 25 The Northwest Ordinance meant that this provision was built into new states’ constitutions through their Enabling Acts. By the end of the nineteenth century, the land dedicated to this purpose amounted to 77,630,000 acres. (One acre is a bit smaller than the playable area of an American football field, and 77.6 million acres is about equal to the size of New Mexico.) This far exceeded the total of 21,700,000 acres that the US federal government ultimately gave states for universities, colleges, hospitals, asylums, and other types of public institutions.Footnote 26
Land endowments were also critical to educational funding in Canada. Evidence of land grants to support schools in Nova Scotia dates to 1759, when Governor Charles Lawrence provided for between four hundred and six hundred acres in each township for the purposes of maintaining a school and schoolmaster.Footnote 27 By 1813 these lands amounted to 16,625 acres. In Upper Canada, loyalist settlers petitioned the governor general in 1789, seeking the same kind of support for education they had known in New England. In response “eligible portions of land” were set aside, both for the support of a “seminary” or university and for the “future support of schools in all the new settlements.”Footnote 28 In 1826 the Legislature of Upper Canada assigned 190,573 acres to the Board of General Education to fund grammar and common schools, setting aside a further 2,050 acres in 1839 for the same purpose.Footnote 29 Only ten years later the newly united Province of Canada, in one of the early pieces of legislation passed following its achievement of responsible government, appropriated one million acres of “public lands” and stipulated that proceeds from their sale should be used to create a “Common School Fund.”Footnote 30 Finally, in 1872 the Dominion Lands Act, which set the conditions under which lands acquired from the Anishinaabe/Chippawa and Swamp Cree First Nations could be settled and developed, required that two sections of each township should be “set aside as an endowment for schools,” and income from the sale of these paid to the provincial governments. By 1930 the acreage that had proceeded to sale totaled 593,300 acres in Manitoba, 876,200 acres in Saskatchewan, and 563,200 acres in Alberta.Footnote 31 Therefore, at minimum 3.2 million acres of land once occupied by dozens of Indigenous nations was dedicated to the support of Canadian schools, with this figure almost certain to be a conservative estimate.Footnote 32
In Aotearoa/New Zealand, too, land was a major feature of school financing from the 1840s. Initially, land was purchased (often under duress) from Māori, or seized and then granted by the governor or the New Zealand Company to churches and missionary organizations for the establishment of schools intended primarily for the (Christian) education of Māori.Footnote 33 After the establishment of provincial governments in the early 1850s, substantial reserves were set aside for education more broadly.Footnote 34 In the province of Nelson, for example, “one sixth of the amount paid for land in the settlement was to be held by the Company for rendering it attractive of which 30% was to go to the schools,” and in both Canterbury and Otago the proceeds upon sale of land by the New Zealand Company were set aside as a land endowment for education.Footnote 35 Meanwhile, in Wellington, an area “not exceeding one-thirtieth part of the public lands” was to be reserved for education.Footnote 36 The 1856 Native Reserves Act made provision from Māori land reserves for the allocation of land for, among other things, the “special endowment of schools … for the benefit of the said aboriginal inhabitants.”Footnote 37 By the time the New Zealand parliament sought to consolidate this complicated picture with the 1877 Education Reserves Act, land endowments for education amounted to as many as 675,544 acres. By 1903 this figure had grown to 1,034,438 acres for primary and secondary schooling alone.Footnote 38 In 1907 the National Endowment Act set aside a further nine million acres for the purposes of education and pensions, of which 70 percent was allocated for education, which meant that by 1920, the total acreage set aside as land endowments for education in Aotearoa/New Zealand was at least 7,334,400 acres. This is more than 27 percent of the land mass of the country.Footnote 39
Altogether, in the United States, Canada, and Aotearoa/New Zealand (and excluding Australia) at least 88.1 million acres were granted or reserved as educational endowments to fund public school systems (see Table 1). That equates to an area about the size of Germany. Although the mechanisms by which land was expropriated differed across the settler colonial world, these acres all belonged to Indigenous people.
Estimated acres granted or reserved as endowments for public or common schooling in Anglo-settler countries
Table 1 Long description
The table reports estimated acres granted or reserved as endowments for public or common schooling in four Anglo-settler countries, with each figure tied to a specific calculation year. The United States has the largest estimate at about 77,630,000 acres, calculated around 1900. Aotearoa/New Zealand is next at about 7,334,400 acres in 1920. Canada is listed at about 3,200,000 acres in 1930, and Australia at about 2,689,393 acres in 1911. The total across all four entries is about 90,853,793 acres, meaning the United States accounts for the vast majority of the combined acreage. Comparisons should be made cautiously because the calculation years differ by country and the values are presented as estimates.
Sources: see footnotes, 26, 31, 36, 52, 59, 66, 82 and 93
Land Endowments and Public Schooling in Australia
Although overlooked by historians, land endowments were also a crucial feature of Australian public (or state provided) education funding. They were instituted in all the Australian colonies, except for Tasmania and the Northern Territory, albeit to different extents. The history of the use of land to support education in Australia begins with the Church of England’s role in the early decades of settlement. In 1826 the British government created a body called the Church and Schools Estate Corporation and granted to it one-seventh of the Crown Lands of NSW for the support of clergy and schools. Although not expressly stipulated, the assumption was that these schools would be run by the Church of England. However, opposition to the notion of an established church was fierce, and difficulties in surveying and allocating the lands meant that they failed as a source of income, leading to the dissolution of the Corporation in 1833. This is where the history of the Church and Schools Estate Corporation usually ends. However, although the Corporation was dissolved in 1833, its lands were conditionally vested in the Crown and managed by an agent.Footnote 40 On this basis, from 1833 onward five-sevenths of the revenue of the Church and School lands continued to be “applied to the promotion of religion and education among the four principal sects [Church of England, Catholic, Presbyterian and Methodist]” in NSW.Footnote 41 Yet discontent that the lands were out of public reach was bitter, and the government continued to seek legal advice as to their status.Footnote 42
Almost immediately after the colony was granted responsible government in 1856, and in the context of the creation in 1848 of a National Board of Education to run a system of (non-denominational) state schooling, the newly elected and liberal-leaning Legislative Assembly sought to gain access to the Church and School lands. In 1861 the secretary for lands introduced a bill that sought to declare them as “waste lands” (Crown land not sold or leased or under cultivation) in order to release them for sale, with the intention of directing the funds toward the purposes originally intended, namely religion and education.Footnote 43 But, although the measure passed in the lower house, it was blocked by the Legislative Council (the upper house), causing the governor to seek legal advice and write to the secretary of state for the colonies in London for instructions.Footnote 44 In the end the case was tested in the Supreme Court of NSW, which in 1864 found that the lands constituted a trust that was indestructible except by parliament.Footnote 45 In the absence of support from both houses of parliament, there was not much further that could be done, although a strong feeling persisted that the church and schools lands “belonged to the people.”Footnote 46
Closely following these debates were the settlers of Moreton Bay. Until 1859, when the colony of Queensland (QLD) was created and responsible government achieved, this area had been governed as part of NSW. In this period, two National schools had been established in Warwick and Drayton, both in the Darling Downs in the southeast, operating alongside only a handful of religious foundations. However, seeking to avoid the denominational difficulties that had beset its parent colony, in 1860 the newly established Queensland parliament passed an Act that created a Board of General Education that paid the salaries of teachers in both vested (or public) and non-vested (or church-run) schools, conditional on inspection.Footnote 47 From the outset, education in Queensland was to be free of what one member of parliament called “the demon of sectarianism.”Footnote 48 At the same time, the parliament made provision for secondary education through the 1860 Grammar Schools Act. It provided matching government funds to communities wishing to establish grammar schools that offered a liberal education.Footnote 49 And it also provided for land endowments (up to the value of £2,000) that the trustees of these schools were permitted to lease.Footnote 50 The intention was that, as the income from these lands rose, it would offset the annual government grant of £500 also promised in the Act. Citing Canadian examples and the endorsement of the colony’s governor, the QLD premier, Robert Hubert, made clear that the purpose of the land endowment was to provide a source of revenue “which would render government grants unnecessary.”Footnote 51 However, only three schools seem to have benefited from the land grant provision, receiving a total of 202 acres between them.Footnote 52 Although land endowments for education were occasionally raised in the press and although the QLD Education Act of 1875 made vague provision for them, the principle seems to have fallen out of favor as popular demand for access to land increased.Footnote 53
Meanwhile, in South Australia (SA) the 1860s efforts in NSW to reform the Church and Schools Estate were reported in the local papers.Footnote 54 It is hard to imagine that they were not also followed closely by the politician, merchant, and pastoralist Alexander Hay. In 1868 he led a Select Committee inquiring into the workings of the colony’s education system. It collected evidence on the endowed schools in the United Kingdom, as well as the much more recently endowed school systems in the US and the colleges established by the Morrill Act. Land endowments quickly became part of the public discussion about educational reform in SA. They were promoted by the SA Education League, which throughout the 1870s advocated for compulsory, free, and secular education.Footnote 55
The 1868 report that emerged from Hay’s investigation was influential in shaping a new Education Act, which passed in 1875.Footnote 56 In 1851, SA had become the first Australian colony to abolish state aid to religious schools. Its Education Act of that year included measures that supplemented the salaries of teachers in non-sectarian community schools and licensed “efficient teachers.” However, schooling was not compulsory and state and religious schools alike were supported mostly by fees, meaning that the churches maintained their dominance over education. The 1875 Act sought to remedy these problems.Footnote 57 It allowed for the establishment of public schools and stipulated that schooling for children aged between seven and thirteen was compulsory (though fees were not abolished). To operate this new system, the Act also created a body called the Council of Education, granting it as an endowment “one hundred thousand acres of … [the] waste lands [of the colony],” as well as making provision for additional future grants of up to twenty thousand acres per year. The Act stipulated that the Council “may demise and let any of the lands so granted … and the annual income derived there from shall be paid into the Treasury, and applied by the Treasurer in manner directed by the Council towards the erection of schoolhouses, payment of salaries, and other expenditure in carrying out the provisions of this Act.”Footnote 58 By 1890 more than 379,124 acres were held by the Council of Education for this purpose.Footnote 59
The parliament gave its enthusiastic support to the Act, with the land endowment principle smoothing its passage. Although state aid to religious education had formally been abolished in 1851, non-sectarian community schools had not developed, and religious dominance over schooling remained. It was only the 1875 Education Act that ultimately enabled a state-run secular education system to be established in SA. The politics of reforming education would likely have been a great deal more complicated if parliamentary representatives had felt their electorates would have to pay for the new expanded system via taxation.Footnote 60 In fact, such was the enthusiasm of South Australian politicians for land endowments as a mechanism of funding that, far from opposing or limiting them, the parliament increased the proposed endowment of 6,000 acres annually to an initial grant of 100,000 acres, plus an additional 20,000 acres per annum.Footnote 61
While reported on in the NSW papers, these innovations in SA do not seem to have been directly part of the new wave of agitation against the Church and Schools Estate that began at the end of the 1870s. Rather, it was the sale of portions of the lands, together with the “considerable increase” in the proceeds flowing to the churches as a result, that seems to have motivated renewed efforts at reform.Footnote 62 After a charge led by the radical parliamentarian David Buchanan, who had long campaigned for public education and opposed state aid to religion, in 1880 the NSW legislature was finally successful in its forty-year quest to gain access to the Church and Schools Estate.Footnote 63 The Church and School Lands Dedication Act was passed by both houses in June 1880.Footnote 64 It transferred the Corporation’s lands and revenues to the NSW government. To handle the sale and leasing of this land, the Lands Department set up an entire new branch.Footnote 65 The Act altered the terms of the original trust, specifying that “all [Church and School] lands and income shall be … applied for the purposes of Public Instruction only.” In 1880 these lands amounted to 221,351 acres, as listed in the Act.Footnote 66 It is no coincidence that in 1880 the NSW Legislature also passed a new Public Instruction Act.Footnote 67 Introduced by Henry Parkes, who had also sponsored the Church and Schools Act, it did not abolish fees, but it did create an education department led by a public servant who reported to a minister of education responsible to parliament. The Act also provided for the expansion of “superior,” or secondary, schooling, and—crucially—ended all state aid to denominational schools.Footnote 68 This led to the rapid expansion of state schooling. In 1879 there were 73,601 students in government primary schools in NSW. A decade later, this number had more than doubled to 163,743.Footnote 69 These two 1880 Acts went hand in hand. Removing state aid to denominational schools was also about changing the terms of the trust that governed the Church and School lands, which were redirected to fund the creation of the new system of state instruction. Moves to secularize land and moves to establish a public education system were inseparable.
In both SA and NSW, then, and to a lesser extent in Queensland, land endowments were central to diminishing the power of the churches over education and to establishing successful public systems. In seeking to utilize land in this way, Australian colonial parliaments were not only or even primarily influenced by the Morrill Act, but rather were appropriating, adapting, and secularizing the earlier practice of endowing religious and common schools in the United Kingdom, Canada, and the United States. As Bernard Hyams has pointed out, in all these contexts, divisions over the role of religion and over the role of the Church of England in education were also battles over land.Footnote 70 These legal battles were taking place as part of very real and violent Indigenous dispossession. From the 1860s on, this took the form both of a new wave of pastoral expansion inland and, by 1880, the conversion to freehold ownership of land previously held under lease or license, whose cultivation was now further intensified by settler farmers.Footnote 71
In Victoria the passage of the NSW Church and Schools Dedication Act was reported on by an interested press, which in 1881 noted that “the proceeds derived from the sales or leasing of these lands will constitute a sort of national endowment for education.”Footnote 72 Victoria had abolished state aid to religious schools as part of its 1872 Education Act. However, by the 1880s the new education department was already facing charges of disorganization, teacher dissatisfaction, and inefficiency.Footnote 73 Moreover, at £600,000 per annum (equal to approximately US$60.4 million in 2025) the costs to the Victorian Treasury for (nominally) free, secular, and compulsory schooling were starting to bite.Footnote 74 Not one but two separate education commissions were called to inquire into these problems.
For William Collard Smith, a recent minister for public instruction, land endowments were a solution to these problems.Footnote 75 Addressing parliament in 1881, Smith spoke of the educational reservations in Aotearoa/New Zealand and the system in California and Canada, as well as a much older (failed) Victorian attempt to endow newly established municipalities with land.Footnote 76 In the wake of his speech, land endowments began regularly to be raised in both the press and parliament, and when in 1884 the Royal Commission on Education shared its findings in a report, it suggested that “grants of Crown lands could … be made as endowments” as a way of reducing the cost to the state of providing free education.Footnote 77 Seeking re-election in 1886, the Gillies-Deakin (conservative-liberal) coalition government adopted the measure as its official election policy. Upon regaining office, it swiftly introduced a bill to endow the education commissioners with land.Footnote 78 After the initiative lapsed, a second attempt was made in the context of a new Education Act in 1889.Footnote 79 This legislation increased the number of compulsory days of school attendance per quarter by 25 percent and was accompanied by an increase in teachers’ salaries, but also reduced the maximum student age from fifteen to thirteen. This reduction was promoted as a cost saving, as was a land endowment that featured as a clause of the bill right up until its final reading.Footnote 80 However, parliamentary concerns about the governance mechanism proposed to manage the land meant the land endowment clause was split off with the intention that it be dealt with in a separate bill.Footnote 81
With a new Land Act also passed in 1889, the Victorian government decided not to wait for legislative approval, but went ahead and reserved lands to prevent them from being alienated [sold and converted into private property]. Several subsequent attempts to get an endowment bill through parliament all failed in the context of the 1890s economic depression; nonetheless, educational lands kept being set aside, with more than 2,082,000 acres reserved as a support for state education by 1910.Footnote 82 Owing to political difficulties in establishing a governing body, these two million acres were never leased, however, and therefore never functioned as a source of income for the cash-pressed Victorian school system.Footnote 83 Yet, as in SA and NSW, prospective income from appropriated land was seen in Victoria as part of a more general program of education reform that was intended to enable the newly established secular public system to function.
Western Australia (WA) came both early and late to this movement. Although it did not achieve responsible government until 1890, since 1871 its land regulations (proclaimed by its governor) had made provision for the reservation of “land for the endowment of schools and other educational institutions of a public character.”Footnote 84 This clause, which eventually made its way into the Land Act of 1898, was not invoked in connection with the colony’s 1871 Education Act.Footnote 85 However, in 1883, with new land regulations proposed for the Kimberley region following the discovery of gold there, the Legislative Council suddenly saw fit to utilize these 1871 provisions when it requested that the governor reserve land for the endowment of state schools.Footnote 86 The governor referred the matter to the Central Board of Education.Footnote 87 But, perhaps unconcerned about general revenue given the discovery of gold, for some reason the Board decided against the measure, much to the regret of future governments.Footnote 88 However, reforms in 1893 and 1894 created a new education department that oversaw a system of soon-to-be-free and compulsory schooling.Footnote 89 In the context of discussions about establishing secondary schooling, the abolition of fees, and the attendant acknowledgment that the “education vote [amount of money parliament agreed to dedicate to education each year] must of necessity increase year by year,” by 1906 land endowments again proved attractive to legislators.Footnote 90 Between 1906 and 1908, the ministers for education and lands unilaterally used the 1871/1898 land regulations to set aside 2,487 acres as educational endowment reserves and made additional provisions to further reserve areas in all new towns.Footnote 91 Learning perhaps from the example of other colonies, the areas they reserved were not in rural pasture lands, but in the more valuable vicinity of the capital city of Perth. In 1909 they took steps to formalize this arrangement, legislating for the creation of a Public Education Endowment Trust.Footnote 92 By 1911 approximately 6,705 acres were granted in WA as an endowment for public education. The trust operated until 2023.Footnote 93 This means that the total area granted or reserved as endowments to finance public schooling in Australia equaled approximately 2,689,393 acres, or an area about twice the size of Delaware (see Table 2).
Total acres granted or reserved as endowments for public schooling in Australia
Table 2 Long description
The table lists acres of land granted or reserved as endowments for public schooling in Australian colonies, with the year and legal instrument associated with each entry. Victoria is the largest contributor, with 2,082,011 acres reserved by the Minister, noted as the amount by 1910. South Australia is next with 379,124 acres under the 1875 Education Act, noted as the amount by 1890, followed by New South Wales with 221,351 acres under the 1880 Church and School Lands Dedication Act. Queensland records a much smaller 202 acres under the 1860 Grammar Schools Act, and Western Australia lists 6,705 acres under land regulations and a later public education endowment act, noted as the amount by 1911. The total across all listed colonies is 2,689,393 acres, with Victoria making up the clear majority. Several entries include later “by” dates, indicating the acreage reflects a later tally rather than the initial year alone, so years are not strictly comparable as single point-in-time measures.
Sources: see footnotes 52, 59, 66, 82 and 93
Aboriginal Land and the 1875 South Australian Education Act
In almost all these cases, the acts of parliament that made possible these endowments referred to land in the most general of terms, only specifying that tracts granted would come from the “Crown lands” or “waste lands” of the colony. It was often not until years later that actual tracts were allocated, when “hundreds” or “parishes” (cadastral units) were surveyed and released for sale. But nowhere were the Indigenous peoples who had long lived on and cared for these lands ever mentioned. This abstract framing of land was one of the mechanisms by which dispossession was accomplished.
For Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, relationship to “Country” is about far more than land ownership—it is, in the words of anthropologist Deborah Bird Rose, “the nexus of individuals, social groups, Dreamings [bodies of religious and philosophical knowledge], nourishing relationships, birth and death.”Footnote 94 Without yet a comprehensive picture of exactly where Australian educational endowment lands were located, it is impossible to give a proper sense of exactly to which Indigenous communities they belonged. The scale of the reservations in Victoria, the piecemeal nature of the endowments in SA and NSW, and the broad footprint of most holdings make this especially difficult. But this fragmentation is, as Ahtone and Lee have pointed out in connection to the Morrill Act land endowments, part of the reason the place of educational land endowments in “the violent history of … colonization has remained comfortably inaccessible.”Footnote 95 Therefore, this article begins the work of making visible the Indigenous history of Australian educational endowment lands through the case study of South Australia. South Australia was established in 1836 as a colony conceived on the Wakefield Scheme of land utilization, which held that land should not be granted, but rather sold in small sections at a “sufficient price” to pay for the ocean passage of migrants, who would then provide a source of labor (instead of the convict labor provided under the British penal system) until they too had sufficient capital to purchase land. The theory did not work in practice, and settlement in SA followed the pattern of other colonies, with most land initially taken up by large landholders. Nonetheless, SA parliamentarians clung to the “closer settlement” notion of a society of small agricultural landholders, which led to an intense program of land reform in the 1860s and ‘70s that included the globally influential introduction of the “Torrens title” system of land registration. This, combined with the commitment to education among the colony’s Protestant communities, meant that the SA legislature was an early adopter of systematic land endowments, and that the records for these are relatively accessible.
In December 1875 and March 1876, Governor Anthony Musgrave made concrete the Education Act’s grant of 120,000 nominal acres when he reserved holdings in thirty-three “Hundreds.”Footnote 96 These Hundreds are located on the lands of the people who are known today as Ngaduri, Nukunu, Narungga Nation, and Ngarrindjeri.Footnote 97 Some of the Council of Education’s lands were also located in places where Native Title does not currently exists, but which were understood by anthropologist Norman Tindale to belong to the Bungandidj (also called Buandig), Marditjali, Meintangk, Potaruwutj (also called Bodaruwitj), Kaurna, and Peramangk peoples.Footnote 98 The granting of their land for the purposes of educational income generation relied on earlier processes of violent dispossession. What Margaret Nash writes concerning the process in the United States applies equally to the process in Australia: Usually, decades had passed between the initial removals of Indigenous peoples and the granting of their lands to fund school systems.Footnote 99 Maps produced by two recent research projects – The Colonial Frontier Massacres and The South Australian Frontier and Its Legacies maps – show that the peak of frontier violence occurred twenty to thirty years before the passing of the 1875 SA Education Act.Footnote 100 Taking place with or without government sanction, this violence was frequently led by pastoralists and their employees, who were granted occupational licenses (beginning in 1842) and then land leases (beginning in 1851), or who occupied areas prior to the lands’ official release.Footnote 101 School systems that benefited from land endowments depended on this violent dispossession, because without it the sale and leasing of land (from which their income was derived) would not have been possible.Footnote 102
Moreover, it was only the sale and granting of these lands that formally alienated them. Pastoral licenses and leases did not transfer ownership of land away from the Crown, and in some cases the violence of pastoralism did not completely sever Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander ties with Country. Depending on circumstances, albeit under conditions of radical disruption, coerced labor, relocation to Missions and Reserves, and child and wage theft, some Aboriginal people were able to tenaciously maintain connection to their land under pastoral capitalism.Footnote 103 The sale of Crown land as freehold, however, was expressly designed to drive closer settlement and more intensified agriculture. Bringing settlers and roads and railways and fences, the legislation that allowed school systems to profit from their land endowments directly precluded the kinds of lifeways that some Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people had found ways of maintaining under pastoralism.
In the decade before the 1875 Education Act and in response to popular demand for land, the SA government introduced a series of new (albeit not always successful) legislative measures designed to make acquiring freehold land easier for small-scale settlers, expand the area available to them, and prevent its purchase by pastoralists.Footnote 104 First, in 1866 the Scrub Lands Act released blocks on a twenty-one-year lease; then in 1869 the Waste Lands Amendment (or Strangways) Act made the purchase of land available on credit, requiring the buyer to live on the land until the debt had been paid; and then in 1874 the Waste Lands Amendment Act released for sale the land immediately north and south of “Goyder’s Line.” This was a boundary mapped in 1865 by the surveyor-general of the Colony, George Goyder, beyond which he deemed that rainfall was too unreliable to support cropping (see Figure 1). From the late 1840s and early 1850s, this region had mostly been licensed and then leased to pastoralists, but a few good years of rainfall had convinced the colonial government that farming beyond the line in the upper mid-north was viable.Footnote 105 In only a decade, the total surveyed area of land in the colony nearly doubled.Footnote 106
A Section of the Plan of the Southern Portion of the Province of South Australia as Divided into Counties and Hundreds. (Office of the Surveyor General, 1880, State Records South Australia (GRG35/585 item 66), CC BY-NC-ND 2.0, https://www.flickr.com/photos/state-records-sa/26775572469).
Figure 1 Long description
The cadastral map of Willochra in South Australia details land divisions, roads and geographic features. It includes a grid system with labeled sections, indicating property boundaries and land use. A compass rose shows north at the top. Key features such as townships, creeks and roads are labeled, providing context for navigation and land ownership. The map borders are marked with labels indicating adjacent areas, enhancing geographic understanding. Symbols represent different land uses, though no legend is visible to define them. The map serves as a land-division survey, useful for understanding property layouts and regional geography.
At least eight of the Council of Education’s thirty-three allocations were in these newly released regions. These lands were divided and then leased, principally to farmers seeking to produce commodity crops. Before their settlement, these areas had been held under occupational license and pastoral lease, and leaseholders of endowment land were among the many settlers to attempt closer settlement in these locations. West of Goyder’s Line lay the Council of Education’s acres in the Hundreds of Pirie and Wandearah, which were on the lands of the Nukunu, whose territory is the starting point for the Urumbula songline, which extends more than 2,000 km (or nearly 1,300 miles) northward all the way to the Gulf of Carpentaria.Footnote 107 The coastal parts of these Hundreds were swampy, and when settlers came in the 1870s they found a hinterland covered in dense scrub of large and small mallee trees and shrubs, which they immediately set about clearing and burning to create land for wheat.Footnote 108 The settler population of the area grew rapidly. The government town of Port Pirie was surveyed in 1871, and five years later boasted a little under a thousand settlers.Footnote 109 The completion of the railway in 1888 from the mining town of Broken Hill in western NSW transformed Port Pirie into an industrial smelting center. Two public schools opened there in the 1870s, and another two opened in the Hundred of Wandearah in 1880. Also in Nukunu Country and also outside Goyder’s Line, but more than one hundred kilometers north, lay the Council of Education’s acres in the Hundred of Willochra (see Figure 2). Two towns were proclaimed within the Hundred’s boundaries: Wilmington, in 1876; and Bruce, in 1881, which had a public school beginning in 1882.Footnote 110 Other allocations to the Council of Education, recently determined by Native title legislation to be Nukunu Country, included acres in the Hundreds of Appila, Bundaleer, Crystal Brook, and Narridy, as well as acres in the Hundreds of Reynolds, Tarcowie, and Yackamoorundie, all of which were borderlands with Ngadjuri Country.Footnote 111
The Hundred of Willochra, 1881. Note the Council of Education lands marked “C.E.” at the top center and left of the map. (Willochra, South Australia. Surveyor-General’s Office, 1881, State Library of South Australia, B 1538151, public domain, https://www.catalog.slsa.sa.gov.au/record=b1538151~S1).
Figure 2 Long description
The map depicts the Hundred of Willochra in South Australia from 1881. It includes detailed markings of various regions and towns, with a red boundary line indicating specific areas. The map highlights Council of Education lands marked as ′C. E.′ at the top center and left. Towns such as Wilmington and Bruce are visible within the Hundred′s boundaries. The map also shows surrounding Hundreds like Pirie, Wandearah, Appila, Bundaleer, Crystal Brook, Narridy, Reynolds, Tarcowie and Yackamoorundie. The map provides a detailed view of land divisions and allocations, reflecting historical land use and settlement patterns in the region.
Wandearah is purportedly an “Aboriginal” word meaning “big trees”; Willochra was supposedly an “Aboriginal” word meaning “a flooded creek, where green bushes grow”; and the place now known as Port Pirie was called Thalpiri by the Nukunu.Footnote 112 At the time of colonization their population was estimated to be in the high hundreds.Footnote 113 It is thought that the Nukunu were badly affected by the spread of smallpox in the 1820s, and the arrival of stockmen and sheep in the 1850s brought conflict, including raiding of sheep by the Nukunu and violent reprisals and killings by the newcomers.Footnote 114 Luise Hercus records that after the establishment of pastoralism, Nukunu gathered together in small groups around Orroroo, Melrose, Wilmington (in the Hundred of Willochra), Stirling North, and at Baroota.Footnote 115 Skye Krichauff suggests it is possible to understand Doughboy Creek in the Wirrabara district as existing as a “frontier zone” into the twentieth century.Footnote 116 Writing in the Chronicle newspaper in 1932, an author described the 1870s and 1880s as a time when Aboriginal people “were numerous.” They camped by the creeks in Willochra “when they came in to the stations to receive rations,” an event that they “celebrated with a ‘big phellar corroboree,’” and then “disappeared into the bush with the same mysterious silence they showed in emerging from it.”Footnote 117 But pastoralism decimated Nukunu lifeways, and the transformation of their land for wheat dislocated them.Footnote 118 Those who survived mostly moved to Port Augusta or to Baroota, where they camped around the creek until, in 1895, in keeping with the brutal logic of settler colonialism, the government created for them a 109-acre Aboriginal reserve, from their own land.Footnote 119
The Council of Education lands also included acres in the Hundreds of Black Rock Plain and Terowie, which—also north of Goyder’s Line—were located on the lands of the Ngadjuri, whose territory follows the range of the peppermint gum. It had first been gazetted [officially announced through publication in a government publication called “a gazette”] only a few years earlier in 1871. John Aver Mitchell, recently arrived from Cornwall, bought one of the original agricultural plots in the Hundred of Terowie after it was surveyed, and in 1875 cut it up to form town plots. In 1877 a public school was opened and in 1880 the railway arrived.Footnote 120 There were other allocations to the Council of Education recently determined by Native Title legislation to be Ngadjuri Country, including acres in the Hundreds of Andrews, Ayers, Mannanarie, Anne, Belvidere, and Hanson as well as Crystal Brook, Reynolds, Tarcowie, and Yackamoorundie, which were borderlands with Nukunu Country.Footnote 121
Throughout the 1840s and 1850s the Ngadjuri, whose numbers were also in the high hundreds at the time of colonization, sought to resist the invasion of squatters and pastoralists and sheep but, like the Nukunu, they suffered terrible reprisals.Footnote 122 Krichauff, whose work is based on detailed archival and oral histories with both Ngadjuri and settlers, argues that by the period of agricultural settlement the frontier violence had ended.Footnote 123 The establishment of ration depots in Bungaree, Melrose (just north of the Hundred of Appila in Nukunu Country), and Bimbowrie, as well as informal provisions from homesteads, worked to draw Ngadjuri “away from disputed land [and] reduced them to a state of dependence.”Footnote 124 The opening up of copper mines at Burra in Ngadjuri territory in the 1840s and the exodus of settlers to the Victorian goldfields in the 1850s, and the subsequent demand for labor on the pastoral stations, also provided alternative employment options.Footnote 125 Krichauff records family stories of Aboriginal people gathering for corroborees and settlers providing food for the events in the 1890s.Footnote 126 However, although Nukunu managed to remain on their lands near Baroota, by the end of the century very few Ngadjuri remained in the upper mid-north.Footnote 127 By the 1890s almost all their land had been alienated.Footnote 128 Norman Tindale records that a group remained living in the Mimbara northern bushland until 1905, but as the numbers of Ngadjuri declined, they clustered on the boundaries of Nukunu Country near Quorn, at Riverton, and on the Willochra Creek, or moved south to Adelaide, west to Point Pearce, or north to Adnyamathanha Country, where rations were available near Blinman.Footnote 129
Just as the lives of the Nukunu and Ngadjuri peoples were violently transformed in the decades between the 1840s and the 1870s, so too was their Country. Not only did sheep and fences and settlers invade their land, but agriculture transformed it. When drought struck in the 1880s the land was devastated—stripped of its native vegetation, leading to long-term land degradation and soil erosion.Footnote 130 Many of the farmers who had flooded into the upper mid-north were unable to meet their payments and abandoned their holdings. Today, little more than a handful of houses remain in the once-hopeful townships of Appila, Hornsdale, Tarcowie, Yatina, Black Rock, Telowie, and Bruce, all of which lie within the Hundreds of the upper mid-north. The walls of roofless stone cottages and schoolhouses punctuate the landscape. Goyder’s Line remains a generally recognized marker of the limits of reliable rainfall.
The vision of using land endowments to support public education in SA did not survive long either. Educational landholdings were swiftly exhausted by the very settler famers whose children were intended to benefit from them, and the amount the landholdings returned only ever covered a fraction of the cost of the public school system. In 1893, returns from rent on educational land amounted to a reported £8,000, of a total annual educational expenditure of £154,402.Footnote 131 In the context of drought and the economic depression of the 1890s, the SA educational endowment lands were converted into perpetual leases or sold. Yet the secular system of public education they helped bring about lives on. As a mechanism that generated funding for schools, educational land endowments in SA (as in other colonies) were frequently short-lived and of limited financial value, but as a policy that facilitated the politics of education reform, Aboriginal dispossession, and land settlement, they were hugely successful.
Conclusion
In the period up until 1930, at least ninety million acres were set aside as endowments or reservations to fund public schooling in the United States, Canada, Aotearoa/New Zealand, and Australia. This article has identified the extent of land endowments as a funding mechanism for public and common schooling across the Anglo-settler world. It has provided the first examination of land endowments for public education in colonial Australia and established their crucial importance in the politics of creating and expanding public school systems there: Although income from land endowments was never sufficient to replace cash grants from colonial treasuries, the prospect that it might be, significantly assisted the passage of Education Acts in multiple contexts. And, through the case study of South Australia, this article has revealed the entanglement of public schooling in dispossession and land settlement and made visible the very material consequences that the allocation of abstract endowment acres had for the Nukunu and Ngaduri, and their Country.
These findings have significant implications for historians’ existing understandings of the relationship between democracy, public education, and dispossession in Australia and the Anglo-settler world. It is well established that in the middle and latter part of the nineteenth century, education was seen by reformers as essential for colonial democratic citizenship. As outlined above, in the United States support of education was mandated as part of the process of statehood. In the Australian colonies, the extension of responsible government in the 1850s and 1860s created a broad (and then universal, although overwhelmingly White) male franchise. These voters elected new colonial legislatures that swiftly passed education acts of various descriptions.Footnote 132 An educated electorate was seen as central to responsible governments. As the editor of a Victorian newspaper put it in the context of the 1872 Education Act: “In order that a people May [sic] govern itself, it must be educated.”Footnote 133 Of course, public education systems also helped to make “the democracy” more governable. As well as advancing secularization, they also universalized and systematized education, professionalized workplaces, regulated and mandated curricula, and standardized school timetables.Footnote 134 In doing so, they expanded state bureaucracy and its reach, increasing, as Tracey Steffes argues with regard to the US, “the institutions and authority of government.”Footnote 135 In this way, public schools were expressly designed to help fashion a common settler citizenry and build the settler state in the era of responsible government.
Making land visible in our histories of education makes clear that these two ends—the democratic and the settler colonial—were indistinguishable. In the Australian settler colonies, democratic citizenship and control of what was sometimes called “the land endowment” were born together. Not only did responsible government create a broad male franchise, it also gave to elected governments power over land. Indeed, Land Acts were among the first pieces of legislation passed by Australian colonial legislatures. Yet for the most part, what is missing from the existing historiographical focus on the mechanisms of public education systems in the Australian colonies is an understanding of their deep entanglement in what Nancy Beadie has called “the political economy of settler colonialism.”Footnote 136
First, public education helped incentivize and legitimate closer settlement. Schools were part of the package that drew people to settle newly released lands. The process through which land endowments for public education unfolded varied across global contexts. In Manitoba, public schools were established after the population reached a certain density, and in the western states of the US, they were often created by territorial legislatures before income from educational land was realized, but in South Australia schools were mapped out as part of the system of surveying territory before its systematic sale.Footnote 137 As with legislation passed in other Australian colonies, the SA Land Acts of the late 1860s and early 1870s were explicitly directed at settling the land with family farmers, and public schools helped attract them.Footnote 138 Prospective school locations were clearly marked on survey maps and, as can be seen from the above discussion of the SA Council of Education’s lands in the upper mid-north, schools were quickly established following the gazetting of townships and parishes. Moreover, as Kay Whitehead and Bernard Hyams have shown, “provisional” schools in rural SA locations were expressly designed as a form of off-farm employment for local young women teachers.Footnote 139 These schools were not intended for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students. Although not officially barred from attending, in practice they were excluded.Footnote 140
The curriculum taught in these schools also worked to make “the democracy” a more moral and “civilized” entity, in opposition not only to Aboriginal people whose prior claims to the land needed always to be disavowed, but also to various racialized others (notably the Chinese) who, from the 1850s on, began to be actively excluded by colonial parliaments.Footnote 141 Settler-centric descriptions of geography and factual accounts of explorers and imperial conquest, as well as poems and fictional stories emphasizing “empire, noble deeds, adventure, exploration, race, honour and duty” featured in children’s school reading material in this period. So too did a nascent Australian identity marked by a focus on wool and wheat exports, local geography, and wildlife, as well as the popularity of The Children’s Hour, a long-running South Australian serial about life on a selector’s farm.Footnote 142 Throughout this period, as Angélique Stastny has shown, the legitimacy of settler colonialism was sustained “through a racialist and racist discourse about the superiority and necessity of settler colonisation and the perceived inferiority and needy quality of Indigenous people.”Footnote 143
The second way in which public education and settler political economy were entangled was financial: closer settlement helped fund public education. As shown above, legislation that established, broadened, or reformed public education systems in NSW, SA, Victoria, and WA was accompanied by or cojoined with legislation that established land endowments. This financing mechanism offered settler societies a political path to secularize and broaden educational provision in contexts of declining public revenue and a broad White male franchise. For most of the nineteenth century, government income was derived from two sources: land sales and customs duties. During the era of the gold and copper booms in Victoria, SA, and WA, this latter source could be considerable, but really it was the sale and lease of expropriated Indigenous land that underpinned the settler colonial political economy. For much of the middle part of the century, the abundance of both these sources of revenue drove the legislative confidence of colonial parliaments. As J. B. Hirst long ago pointed out, one of the reasons that “the colonists, and particularly the wealthy among them, had so cheerfully allowed governments to undertake so much [in establishing education systems] was that it did not cost them anything in direct taxation.”Footnote 144 However, by the last quarter of the century not only were the mining booms abating, so too was the amount of land available for future sale. The only alternative for governments wanting to increase their revenue was taxation, and this was something that democratically elected legislatures wanted to avoid. Land endowments provided what seemed to many parliamentarians a way to square this circle. They were, as the South Australian Register put it in 1873, a way of “lightning the burden of taxation.”Footnote 145 By reserving from sale tracts of land and granting them to trustees or commissioners or education departments to lease, colonial legislatures hoped to provide in perpetuity a funding source that would maintain provision of the universal education they believed would not only sustain and equip settler populations for democracy, but also extend the domain of settler governance and control.
That these were endowments of Indigenous land was not something that gave colonial legislatures or education commissions pause. But the direct nature of the relationship between the alienation [or sale] of Indigenous land, the inauguration of democratic institutions under responsible government, and the creation or expansion of public education systems in Australia and other settler colonies should cause historians to do so. As Adam Dahl has written, Indigenous “dispossession was not an unfortunate by-product of modern democracy… . Institutions and ideologies of conquest and colonization … were closely linked to the development of democratic ideals and institutions.”Footnote 146 Attending to this relationship should have implications for the ways historians in these contexts think about the history and present state of the democratic institutions and the settler political economy they still live with and within.
This article has established the importance of educational land endowments in Australia and located them within a broader Anglo-settler practice of using expropriated Indigenous land to fund public education. There has not been space to fully explore the differences and similarities between the South Australian case and that of other colonies and societies. Nor has there been room to examine in any detail the workings of the SA Council of Education, its management of school lands, the income it did (or did not) generate, and the impact this had on educational provision, nor to trace the longitudinal history of these educational lands, either before they were granted as endowments or after they were resumed or sold in the 1890s. How, for example, does the history of endowment lands in South Australia and elsewhere intersect with the histories of environmental degradation, railway development, mining, the creation of national parks, land consolidation, and the complex politics associated with them? Conspicuously absent from this article are contemporary Nukunu and Ngadjuri understandings of their land.Footnote 147 Addressing these lacunae—in Australia and beyond—requires attending to educational land endowments as a critical dimension of settler colonial democracy and political economy: a mechanism whose institution in different contexts was shaped by British imperial policy but answered to local exigency, even as it borrowed from and was influenced by initiatives in other settler contexts. Educational land endowments, this article suggests, had consequences for the creation of democratic cultures and institutions and the transformation of landscapes in the Anglo-settler world, in ways that have had long-lasting and collective impacts for Indigenous peoples and for us all.Footnote 148
Tamson Pietsch is Associate Professor in Social and Political Sciences and Director of the Australian Centre for Public History at the University of Technology Sydney. Her work focuses on the history and politics of knowledge in the context of empire, with particular emphasis on education and other institutions of knowledge. She is grateful to the reviewers of this article for their valuable feedback.
