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An 80-acre section was built for 80 pounds, and this entitled us to the steerage passage of four adults. I was under the statutory age of 15. The difference between steerage and intermediate fares had to be made up, and we sailed from Greenock in July, 1839, in the barque Palmyra, 400 tons, bound for Adelaide, Port Phillip, and Sydney.
The immigrants were not bound to work for any special individual or company, unless by special contract voluntarily made. They were often in better circumstances after the lapse of a few years than the landbuyers, and, in the old days, the owner of an 80-acre section worked harder and for longer hours than any hired man would do, or could be expected to do.
He said he felt as if the garden of Paradise must have been in King William street and that the earliest difference in the world that between Cain and Abel was about the advantages of the 80-acre system.
With a better rainfall and equally good soil, Victoria had neither the farms nor the vineyards nor the orchards nor the gardens that had sprung up under the 80-acre section and immigration systems of South Australia. It had been an outlying portion of New South Wales, neglected and exploited for pastoral settlement only.
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