Agricultural education in South Eastern Australia began with a vision somewhat akin to that of the United States although it was destined to falter as a consequence of the times, nature of the new country, and the type of agricultural development taking place. Maunders and Jaggs (1989) in their history of Longerenong College introduced the prelude in terms of the expansion of farming in South Eastern Australia.
After faltering in the period immediately following the official discovery of gold in 1851, farming expanded to serve the rapidly expanding markets generated by the rush, at the cost of substantial soil degradation. By the end of the decade, government was under considerable pressure to 'unlock the lands' currently held on pastoral leases to accommodate new arrivals and farmers who wanted to move from exhausted land.
Pressure for an agricultural policy which would favour farming over squatting interests was applied during the 1860s and later by a loose but powerful alliance between farmers, would-be farmers and elements of Melbourne's growing business class, linked by common vested interests and antagonism towards squatters. Among its weapons was a powerful ideological tool, the vision of a new ideal society founded on small independent farmers, a yeoman democracy. It was a form of rural populism peculiarly suited to the times, tapping memories of the pre-industrial past, and offering promises of freedom from wage slavery. However it was underpinned by thoroughly utilitarian considerations, and as Maunders and Jaggs (1989) suggested, it was a...
'belief that man by the process of civilising the wilderness as a small farmer could through his own efforts (and with a little help from the state) reach that state of bliss which would enhance not only the future of his family, but also the prosperity of the state.'
Like all myths, the myth of the yeoman farmer had implausible aspects which in no way diminished its appeal. Like many other myths it also became embedded in the field of public policy, as the history of agricultural education was to show.
In the event, demands that government 'unlock the lands' were largely successful. Land Acts of 1862 (Duffy Act), 1865 (Grant Act) and 1869 (Grant's second Act) made provision for pastoral leaseholds to be subdivided for selection by persons of modest means. Selectors were required to peg and fence their selection, build a homestead and buy the freehold at an agreed price and time. Squatters attempted a rearguard action. In addition to straightforward intimidation of selectors, they developed a range of tactics to circumvent the law and to get freehold possession of their previous leasehold land. These included 'dummying', that is, making use of fraudulent applicants who would turn over their selection as soon as it was registered. Nevertheless, by the early 1870s, 'squattocracy' was irrevocably in decline.
Genuine selectors were by no means universally successful. Many fell prey to adverse conditions, sickness and debt, but the mystique of the yeoman survived. Together with the myth of the noble bushman it was to be fostered by Henry Lawson, Banjo Patterson, Joseph Furphy, Steele Rudd and others as an integral element of that emerging national identity which Vance Palmer has called 'the legend of the nineties'. A majority of Australians had lived in towns since the early days and continued to do so, but the 'real' Australian was increasingly portrayed as an independent, sunburnt countryman who bowed the knee to God but called no man master.
The extension of farming provided the essential conditions for the introduction of agricultural education, but did not itself create the demand. For this we must look to a wider range of national and international factors which coincided between 1870 and 1885. At the highest level, they included the expansion of international trade and a consequent recognition by all advanced governments that nations' prosperity must increasingly depend on cost-efficiency in all aspects of production. Knowledge, especially the technical knowledge on which cost-efficiency depended, could no longer be regarded as a private possession but as national capital.
After the first, disorderly period of the gold rush, Victoria responded to international free trade by adopting policies of protection for fledgling industries and encouraging agricultural exports. Both were endorsed consistently and successfully by the Argus and The Age. Support for agriculture primarily took the form of encouraging closer settlement through the Land Acts and providing railways at public cost to carry produce. However, an erratic thread of concern for technical advance had existed from an early period. Progenitors of the Royal Agricultural Society were started in the Western District and Port Phillip in 1840 and 1842 respectively and received small government grants to improve farm practice by staging agricultural shows, while a Board of Agriculture operated an Experimental Farm at Royal Park from 1858 to 1869. Its director, Thomas Skilling, used his first annual report to suggest that it be converted into a 'Training Establishment' for
'imparting agricultural ... (and) ... literary education to persons desirous of following farming pursuits in this colony.'
Nothing came of Skilling's recommendation but the principle of government support for technical development survived, albeit in an attenuated form. In the year the farm closed, the second Grant Act made provision for land to be reserved for experimental purposes.
A more vigorous movement for systematic agricultural education emerged in the 1870s. It was carried in the first instance by three men: A. R. Wallis and the brothers J. L. and T. K. Dow. Wallis, a graduate of the Royal Agricultural College, Cirencester in England, was appointed foundation Secretary when a Department of Agriculture was established in 1872. The Dow brothers were agricultural journalists for The Age and Argus newspaper groups. Behind them lay powerful mercantile and political groups which continued to promote farming, rather than grazing.
The movement's beginning can be placed at 1871, when Wallis (writing as 'Ackermann') produced a series of articles for the Australasian, calling for agricultural education. In the same year a Royal Commission on Foreign Industries and Forests made a survey of rural councils and agricultural societies. The Commission reported that agricultural education should be carried out in elementary schools rather than colleges. It further recommended, reservations for tree culture to demonstrate 'what trees would succeed on the arid, waterless plains in the Wimmera and Mallee districts'.
Despite this recommendation, no provision was made for agricultural studies when 'free, compulsory and secular' education was introduced in 1872. Wallis continued to press for it, without success, but also argued for the introduction of specialist colleges. Referring to reports of American experience and his own observations in central Victoria, Wallis argued that light soils in low rainfall areas were already at risk of exhaustion, especially where farmers followed the 'suicidal practice' of cropping cereals year after year without fertiliser or fallowing. He argued that Victoria must recognise that overseas countries were gaining incalculable advantages from their systems of agricultural education. The prelude to agricultural education in South Eastern Australia largely revolved around Wallis' views.
Aldridge & Kneen (1986) in their history of Dookie College discuss Wallis further (Refer to the box).
Alexander Robert WallisAlexander Robert Wallis was born in 1848, the second son of the Reverend Alexander Wellington Wallis, of Gazipur, India. He was educated at Lancing College, near Brighton, Sussex. Determined upon a career in agriculture he had himself 'attached' to a farmer in Worcestershire for three years, then entered the Royal Agricultural College at Cirencester where he studied the theory and practice of agriculture for three years. In his final year he topped his class in Agriculture, Agricultural and Organic Chemistry, Land Surveying, Therapeutics and Pathology, Botany and Plan Drawing. He was awarded a Certificate of Honour. Later that year (1869) he took the examination set by the Royal Agricultural Society in London, qualifying in chemistry, book-keeping, land surveying, geology and veterinary science. He then studied forestry at Stuttgart Polytechnic and frequently visited the Hohenheim Agricultural College, one of Europe's showplaces in agricultural education and experimentation. Wallis was scarcely 23 years old and still studying at Stuttgart when he was offered the foundation Chair of Agriculture at the newly-formed Cornell University at Ithaca, New York State. He refused. But on being offered a position as an agricultural journalist with the 'Australasian' by the Victorian newspaper magnate Edward Wilson, (editor of the 'Argus') he took the job. |
Despite his youth, Wallis took the long-term view in the establishment of an agricultural education system in Victoria, that agricultural colleges would come, but only when the intellectual climate was right. Before that, a series of basic experimental, research and information-exchange programmes had to be in place.
He began with the existing system of Agricultural and Pastoral Societies, a ready-made structure for gathering and spreading 'scientific data'. By adroit manipulation of Government prize-money, he encouraged the amalgamation of smaller societies and a professional approach in larger ones. Government-assisted prizes were not to be awarded for 'sporting dogs, lap-dogs, rabbits, ferrets, cats, guinea pigs, hunters, fancy needle-work, Berlin wool-work and suchlike', but only to 'legitimate agricultural exhibits.' While weeding out the smaller show societies, he encouraged the formation of local farmers' clubs where agriculturalists could meet and discuss related matters . . . thus promoting the social well-being of the farmer and ameliorating his isolation.
He retrieved the collection of books and pamphlets of the original Board of Agriculture (disbanded 1869) from the Melbourne Public Library and used it as the core of a museum and library he set up in his already-cramped office. He collected raw data throughout the State on meteorology, entomology, soil types, fencing, vine-growing, farming practices, and acclimatisation. In his first three years as Secretary (1873-5 inclusive) he published his annual report to his Minister in book form. The 1874 book, well over 300 pages, included not only his report to the Minister, but also a report on the Victorian State Forests (for which he had been given responsibility) and as many as 20 other scientific papers of interest and use to the man on the land - many of them penned by the Secretary himself. These reports were distributed to all Mechanics Institutes, Public Libraries, Pastoral Societies and prominent farmers and land holders in Victoria. Interstate and overseas government agencies also received copies.
As if this were not enough, Wallis kept up a voluminous correspondence with overseas colleagues, exchanged and distributed seeds, judged at shows, mounted exhibitions in his office, conducted lectures, and advised his Minister on policy when required.
Wallis' vision-splendid was of an Agricultural Department created and defined by an Act of Parliament, with himself at the head, answerable only to his Minister. It was reasonable for him to expect that such a thing would come into being and would grow as the State's agriculture developed. The reality was insultingly different. Wallis was given a small room in the offices of his 'rival' department (Lands) with one 'eager but inexperienced boy' as his staff. At one stage, nearly two years after his appointment, his office furniture was 'temporarily' requisitioned for use in another Lands Department branch.
Neither the Government nor his Minister supported Wallis in his gargantuan one-man task. For instance Wallis was allowed to establish a Chemical Branch for soils analysis, staffed by another Cirencester graduate (W. E. Ivey). Almost simultaneously Wallis' Minister became Minister for Agriculture and Industries and a year later (1874) Minister for Agriculture, Forests and Industries. Ivey was lost to Wallis for months on end in forestry duties while Wallis was not only burdened with the administration of the existing forests boards, but also required to write a lengthy memorandum to his Minister on a proposed forests bill. His advice was largely ignored.
Wallis' main public mouthpiece, his comprehensive annual report, was scrapped in 1875 when the Government decided it was too expensive to print. By 1876 questions about the efficiency - even the usefulness - of the Department of Agriculture were being asked by the Press and in Parliament. Forestry policy was also under fire.
It was against this background that the Agricultural Colleges issue came to a head. It must be remembered that the 1870's were boom years for the Colony of Victoria, which by that stage rivalled New South Wales in wealth and population. Roads, railways and reservoirs were being constructed apace, telephonic communication had arrived, steam power had supplanted the horse in industry and much of commercial transport. Accelerating change was the order of the day and Wallis' commitment to painstaking research, proper planning and steady development was ill-suited to the tempo of the times.
In 1874 the Minister (Casey) had reserved at least two sites selected by Wallis for experimental or model farm purposes; one at Trentham, one at Dookie. In 1876 the new Minister (Duncan Gillies) met a deputation from Western District agricultural societies which demanded the immediate creation of a 'central College of agriculture'. The Minister sought Wallis' advice. Wallis referred him to his essay of 1873 (the one that won him his position as Secretary for Agriculture) in which he had distinguished between two groups which had to be considered in the question. The first was the adult, established farmer whose need was for visual instruction on how best to utilise and conserve his resources. The other was 'the youth' who were blessed with time to be taught both theory and practice of agriculture. It would be premature, he said, to establish a 'central College, having its full complement of professors, its experimental grounds, its laboratories, its veterinary hospital and other indispensable appurtenances' before catering for the first group.
He advised his Minister that one central and two or three branch experimental farms be developed in various regions to investigate crop-rotation on Australian soils and fertiliser application rates. He said sites with differing soils, climates and vegetation should be chosen. In addition to Dookie and Trentham, he suggested sites in the Wimmera or Gippsland and another at Macedon. Gillies accepted Wallis' premise that test farms fulfilled the immediate needs of agricultural education, but decided upon a single farm where Wallis had recommended three or four. That farm was Dookie (refer to Chapter 3).
The Wallis Legacy... even allowing for ... a less than complete understanding of the bureaucratic and political environments of colonial Victoria, the dynamic climates of opinion which infused spatial organisation and physical resource use, and the more volatile impact of personality, Wallis' work cannot be ignored. He attempted to professionalise the agricultural societies, to educate the rural community through annual shows and 'test' farms, to encourage practical experimentation in such diverse fields as frozen meat preservation, flax machinery, stock diseases and horticulture, to provide scientific advice to the rural worker through soil analyses, to develop a central library and to disseminate seeds. He also strove to place state forestry on a more logical organisational footing and to lead the fight against Phylloxera vastatrix. All of these efforts underline a significant, single-handed contribution to Victorian rural development. Quite as important was the less tangible but ultimately more fundamental philosophy which he brought to bear on everything he did in Victoria: Wallis tried to lay the foundations for a theoretically sound, practically relevant, scientific approach to agriculture and the use of land. He was abrasive, he was moralistic, he was dogmatic; and in 1882, he was also very badly treated. (Wright, 1982) |
In 1880, accompanied by Wallis, Minister Duffy visited the Dookie farm within a month of his appointment, and within three months, 15 students (selected from 46 applicants) were admitted to the farm for training in 'the practical branches of agriculture.'
It must be remembered that Dookie, on the fringe of a region only recently taken up by selectors, was established as a test or experimental farm for the benefit, primarily, of northern settlers. Students were of secondary importance both to Wallis and to the farm manager, Thompson, whose diary bears scant reference to book learning.
The students worked a five day week on the farm, assisting with all the tasks of running and developing the institution. Their learning was by 'ocular demonstration' but Thompson later said he took good care to explain to them the reasons for the different tasks and farm management decisions. However, a test farm on 'second class land' on the edge of a financially poor small-holders' settlement, 130 miles from Melbourne, was a far cry from what the agricultural establishment had in mind for its sons. Politicians from other rural constituencies were similarly unimpressed. They wanted a college with a capital 'C' and an influential group of them wanted it at Trentham or Macedon. Thwarted by the Government and a succession of Ministers, they set out to belittle the farm and ridicule both Wallis and Thompson. Their criticism ignored, almost without exception, the spirit and letter of Wallis' recommendation of Dookie as the centre-piece of a series of farms, leading to a collegiate institution with a full complement of professors in years to come.
Charles Young, the MLA who had previously described the farm as a 'sop' and a 'sham' became Minister in July 1881. He was the sixth Minister for Agriculture in nine years. From the outset Young thwarted and humiliated Wallis publicly. On his first day in office he berated Wallis before a deputation from the National Agricultural Society for not passing on funds which Wallis knew were not available. In the following months he overturned many of Wallis' standard practices and pointedly ignored his Secretary's advice and experience. In the words of a former Minister, he was 'offensive, arbitrary and despotic'.
This was not the way to treat the talented but overworked and testy Wallis, who at this time had an office staff of two - a clerk and a boy - to administer the experimental farm, the State forests, the supervision of stock and horticultural disease prevention, the State soil analysis service, the distribution of seeds, and the battle against phylloxera. It was phylloxera - the dreaded grape vine parasite - which led to Wallis' demise. In what began as a minor squabble over compensation payable to a few Geelong district grapegrowers, Wallis ended up in front of a Board of Inquiry instituted by his Minister. The board substantially cleared Wallis of misconduct. However, the government of the day, acting on the Minister's advice, 'resolved to abolish the office of the Secretary of Agriculture and determined to allow Mr Wallis to retire ...' which he did, with 10 months' salary, on March 25, 1882. The Press which had supported Wallis throughout the controversy protested loud and long, but Wallis was not re-instated.
With the resignation of Thompson and the dismissal of Wallis - the farm's two driving forces - Dookie fell upon its darkest days, becoming a training farm for boys from the so-called 'Industrial School', an orphanage and reformatory which trained wards of the State for farm and domestic service. Farm diaries exist for only a few months of this five-year period, but they are enough. Life there was basic in the extreme, the dormitories were almost certainly infested with bedbugs, there was no warm water for ablutions, the diet was mainly mutton and cabbages. The boys worked six days a week, mainly grubbing stumps, clearing, picking up sticks, hoeing and the like. Although it is recorded they had 'a very good fife and drum band'.
During this time the Minister, encouraged by some sections of the Press, entertained ideas of selling the farm to parties interested in setting up a private agricultural college. The 'Australasian' (edited by J. L. Dow MLA) floated the idea of a College set up and run by a company of trustees free from political interference, stating 'there are no grounds for believing that the institution would yield satisfactory results to the State management ... in some way or other it must needs be divorced from direct connection with the Minister of the day.'
Maunders and Jaggs (1989) introduced the careers of some of the founding fathers of agricultural education in the following terms. They were to varying extents associated with Alfred Deakin, were involved in land and irrigation schemes and believed that farming must play a strong part in Victoria's future prosperity - and their own.
John Lamont Dow, son of a weaver, was born in Kilmarnock, Scotland, in 1893 and arrived in Geelong with his family in 1848. His father became a station manager and Barrabool shire councillor. John was brought up to farming and stock management and claimed to be a gun shearer who had averaged '98 big wethers, not bare-bellied ewes' a day during one season. In 1862 he went to the Gulf of Carpenteria with a pastoral company and became a pastoralist on the Herbert River tableland. When gulf fever drove him back to Victoria he worked on the land before joining The Age in 1873.
Dow entered parliament in 1876 as member for Kara Kara. He was elected on the selector vote, and nursed his electorate by helping selectors peg out claims. He also remained a practising journalist, thereby keeping his feet in both the urban and the rural camps. Among his interests was a system for graduated taxes on land, an idea similar to one put forward by Californian Henry George in his Progress and Poverty (1879), a work which achieved some popularity in Victoria in the 1880s and 1890s. During a visit to America with his brother T. K. Dow in 1883, they examined agricultural education as well as irrigation schemes. Like Wallis a dozen years earlier, they were impressed by the American system of land grant colleges supported on the proceeds of reserved public land leased out to private farmers.
J. L. Dow went on to hold the portfolios of Lands and Agriculture in the Gillies government (1886-90) and in that capacity helped put through the legislation which gave the Chaffeys control of Murray waters at Mildura. His own financial affairs were, on the most charitable estimate, dubious. When the heady days of apparently unlimited expansion came to an end with the disastrous crash of the 1890s, Dow, along with many of his associates, fell into financial disgrace. When he went bankrupt for 26,000 pounds in 1893, with assets of 12 shillings, it emerged that he had been paying creditors from his parliamentary salary and had borrowed from the Chaffeys. He had also been borrowing money for personal land transactions from pious, profoundly dishonest James Mirams, MLA for Collingwood, early member of the YMCA and builder of a grandiose temperance hotel called the Federal Coffee Palace. In addition, he had been a director of Mirams' Premier Permanent Building Society, one of the depression's most spectacular failures. Another of Mirams' schemes had been connected with irrigation in the Goulburn area. It had involved sub-divisions for small fruit-blocks, sold on extended terms. Another scheme involved him in creating a company (with associates) which bought land from him at an inflated price, then creating another company to buy the original one to avoid the original promoters being liable for calls on their shares. J. L. Dow was involved in these schemes as well.
Mirams was brought to trial, along with all the other directors of the premier Building Society, except Dow, and sentenced to twelve months imprisonment. Dow did stand trial later but was acquitted, largely due to the efforts of lawyer Theodore Fink, who was to be associated with agricultural education a few years later as chairman of a Royal Commission on Technical Education. Despite his questionable business practices as Minister of Lands and Agriculture, Dow initiated schemes of great value to the colony. He tripled forest reserves, established Wilson's Promontory as Victoria's first national Park and expanded wheat and pastoral development in the Mallee. In 1888, he sponsored government bonuses for dairying, fruit and wine development. This led to the establishment of cooperative butter factories with an export income of one million pounds by 1895, making dairying a major Victorian industry.
Dow's less flamboyant brother, Thomas Kirkland Dow, was born in Scotland just before the family migrated. He taught in a state school near Ballarat from 1870 to 1877, then joined the Leader newspaper. In 1881 he went to the Australasian newspaper and stayed until 1890. Like his brother he fell into bankruptcy, in his case through speculating in mining shares. Between 1890 and 1896 he was principal at Longerenong College then joined the Age as foreign correspondent.
Frederick Derham, another founding father of agricultural education, was Postmaster General in the Gillies government, a friend of Alfred Deakin and son in law of Francis Swallow, founder of the biscuit firm of Swallow and Ariell. Derham became a director of the firm, giving him a strong interest in wheat production. He was also involved in a 'colossal, outrageous series of land boom transactions' and went bankrupt for 550,000 pounds in 1892.
J. F. Levien, another minister in the Gillies government, was director of several companies and owner of a seed farm. He became chairman of Chaffey Brothers Ltd and his family firm became one of the largest produce growers in the Mildura scheme. When the scheme collapsed in 1895, riven by dissension and prevented from getting produce to market by low water in the Murray and the incomplete state of the railway, a royal commission found Levien's affairs to be like
'an abominable stagnant pool, with stenches so strong and dreadful in its muddy and mysterious depths, that one almost recoils from disturbing it further.'
Other figures included a Dr. Andrew Plummer, after whom one of the Longerenong houses was named, and Charles Yeo, who served on the council until 1917. But it is clear that they played lesser parts and that the lead came predominantly from Wallis, Derham, the Dows and their associates. The financial affairs of the main figures, except Wallis, were insalubrious, but in recognising the importance of farming their judgement was sound. The value of farm products had overtaken wool by the 1880s and farming was to go forward again after the depression, employing one quarter of the adult male population (over 76,000) by the time of Federation.
Although Dookie began to accept students in 1879, management problems and political wrangling nearly brought the development of agricultural education to a premature halt. Wallis was dismissed from the Department of Agriculture in 1882, while Dookie lost its fee-paying students and was used as a training establishment for neglected boys under court orders. The reemergence of agricultural education as an issue, as well as its subsequent organisational structure, owed much to the Dows' visit to America.
In October 1884 Frederick Derham introduced an Agricultural Colleges Bill into parliament. The Bill was modelled, to a large degree, on United States Congressional legislation, the Morrill Act of 1862. Under this Act the United States government granted national lands to the states, to be leased out to fund agricultural colleges. These 'land-grant colleges', as they were known, later developed into universities offering a wide range of studies as well as agriculture.
Agricultural education, Derham claimed in his second reading speech, had become essential. Agriculture was now 'universally admitted to be a science' and it was
'most necessary that those engaging in the vocation in this country should thoroughly equip themselves so as to be able to fight on equal terms with other parts of the world'.
Furthermore, Derham added a dig at pastoral interests, noting that the annual value of farm products (£11,000,000) was twice the value of the wool clip and much more important to the business and professional community. The intention was for curricula to be determined by a Council of Agricultural Education, but American experience suggested that it should include a good deal of practical work, to put knowledge into action and develop students' muscles. Colleges were to be financed on the endowment system, using 14 and 33 year leases. In that way the land would remain in government hands. The Bill passed.
The Agricultural Colleges Act 1884 provided for the reservation of 150,000 acres, under the control of trustees, as an endowment for agricultural colleges and experimental farms. It also provided for the establishment of a council of eleven members, comprising three trustees, the Secretary of Agriculture, five representatives of agricultural societies and two members appointed by the governor in council. Members were to receive sitting fees and expenses, and the council's accounts were to be audited. The schedule to the Act listed five possible sites for colleges. They included Polwarth (2,800 acres) near Apollo Bay, Gunyah Gunyah and Jumbuk (2,500 acres) in the Yarram area of Gippsland, Jung Jung and Longerenong (2,386 acres), Dookie (4,889 acres) and Bullarto (817 acres) near Daylesford.
An amending Act passed the following year widened the agricultural societies' franchise to include all paid-up members. It also made provision for state school boys to be selected for free places by a competitive examination, to be held every three years in each of the colony's five agricultural divisions.
The council's first meeting was chaired by J. F. Levien, who was also a trustee, along with Frederick Derham and Charles Yeo. Government nominees were James Buchanan MLC and J. L. Dow MLA. The agricultural societies elected W. Madden, MLA for the Wimmera (later Horsham), Dr A. Plummer, J. Baird, J. Knight and T. K. Dow. Levien, Plummer and Derham held the office of chairman for considerable periods over the next twenty years.
Regular meetings began in 1885. Initially the council favoured the idea of one central college with associated farm schools in various parts of the colony, proposing the old Model Farm at Royal Park for the central unit. Pressure then came from interests all over the colony, each anxious to have the college in its area. Shepparton Agricultural Society wanted Dookie reopened to fee-paying students. Stawell Shire Council invited inspection of a site near the town and Trentham Farmers' Union advocated Bullarto. Council's response was to recommend the re-opening of Dookie. Government agreed. Royal Park was then made over to the Corporation of Melbourne for a public park, although the council, on a motion by T. K. Dow, objected.
The Council of Agricultural Education took the view that agricultural education should not be confined to the college. It had extensive discussions with officials of the Department of Public Instruction (particularly Thomas Brodribb, Chief Inspector of Schools) 'to secure the teaching in all state schools in rural areas of the rudimental principles of agriculture'. A prize of £20 was offered for the best paper containing easy reading and object lessons on the rudimentary principles for state school children. Support was given by the Council of Boards of Advice. Brodribb took some time to act on it, for it was not until July 1889 that he submitted to the council a 'proposed series of agriculture lessons for state schools'. Little seems to have come of this.
The Council of Agricultural Education also agreed to:
'establish a farm school to educate young women in all duties appertaining to dairy, farm accounts and other duties, whereby they might assist in the development of the agricultural interests of the colony'
But nothing came of this either. Dookie intermittently provided short courses for farm women in the next century but it was not until the 1970s that women were admitted to full-time courses at agricultural colleges.
The Council visited Dookie and reported:
'The land for the most part is only of a fair grazing character, but there is a moderate quantity of good agricultural soil. As a representative area of the class of land in the Northern district, however, the property is, for the purposes of the experiment, all that can be desired. The fences of the outer boundaries and subdivisions, also quarters for a manager, servants' quarters, stabling etc. were kept in good condition.'
Notwithstanding an offer of £1000 from the now private investor Wallis, Thompson yielded to pressure for him to return to Dookie. Both the Shepparton Amalgamated Agricultural Horticultural and Pastoral Society and the Moira Agricultural Society resolved at separate meetings to press Joseph Knight to
'use his influence to secure the reinstatement of Mr J. L. Thompson as manager of the Dookie Experimental Farm'.
Knight, who was familiar with Thompson as Farm Manager, show society committee member, lecturer in ensilage and livestock judge, would have needed little encouragement. Six days later the Council met and elected Thompson Farm Manager. A meeting of the National Agricultural Society of Victoria held on the same day under the Presidency of Dr Plummer received the announcement 'with unanimous applause'.
Agricultural administration was to change hands yet again before the College opened its doors on October 4 1886, for Levien was replaced as Minister by J. L. Dow (co-sponsor of the Agricultural Colleges Act of 1884), on February 18, 1886. But the die was cast: the half-realised experimental farm of Wallis' planning was to become the Dookie College of the agricultural establishment's imaginings.
Wallis, the first Secretary of Agriculture in Victoria, was also instrumental in raising the profile of forestry. Wright (1982), notes that -
'The forestry question had been a topic of some controversy for more than a decade for it was manifestly obvious that the demands of mining, construction, domestic use and the myriad other requirements that wood could serve in a pioneering society were denuding Victoria of its timber. A series of government reports, and regional public meetings, together with constant newspaper agitation, had led first to the creation of a number of local forest boards and then, on 6 March 1874, to the establishment of a Central Forest Board to oversee the entire system. This board originally comprised Robert Brough Smyth, Clement Hodgkinson and Ivey as secretary, but five days after his appointment Hodgkinson retired and was replaced by Wallis and the new Secretary for Lands, W. H. Archer. This Board operated from within the Department of Agriculture and through a network of local caretakers and the regional boards strove to bring a semblance of order to the disorganised forest system of Victoria. Finally, the government decided to legislate on the matter.
Wallis immediately set down his ideas. On 20 May 1876 he wrote a long memorandum of 'draft headings',
"of a Bill designed to confer such powers as my experience teaches me ...will be necessary ... to deal with the complicated question of the conservation and better management of our State Forests and timbered lands."He then proceeded to outline in great detail the kinds of regulations he thought would be needed, the gazettal procedures necessary to ensure proper methods of definition and alteration to state forest and timber reserve boundaries - always a vexed question - the hierarchy of field staff and their powers, the connection between town development, soil and water conservation, and the absolute necessity of permanently reserving the colony's timber resources. Most importantly, he urged that a separate Department of State Forests, led by its own minister and staffed with its own personnel, be established. Sadly, Wallis' influence was already in decline and his ideas, some of which were many years ahead of their time, were ignored. When Victoria's first State Forest Act was passed in 1876, it did little more than formalise the existing system of local forest boards. In 1879 the forest board method of timber management was scrapped and Wallis was left in sole control of too few foresters over too many acres; Victoria had to wait until 1919 before a separate Forests Commission was formed. In the meantime Wallis and his department had to bear the brunt of criticism of policies and regulations which they were largely powerless to alter.'
Horticultural education in South Eastern Australia originated with the Horticultural Society of Victoria's (HSV) development of what became Burnley Gardens.
In December 1860 some twenty-five acres of the Survey Paddock were permanently reserved for the use of the HSV, and in 1862 a portion of Richmond Council's land (the remaining portion of which later became Richmond Park) was granted to the HSV for 'experimental gardens'. The further submission of 1860 to both council and government gained additional land, so that the total held by 1865 extended to some thirty-five acres. Though the boundaries have seen some alteration, the overall extent of the property has not changed greatly over the decades.
Preparations and negotiations reached fulfilment when the following advertisement appeared in the Richmond Australian of 27 December 1862:
'Horticultural Society of Victoria Opening Day, grand flower show in Society gardens, Survey Paddock, Richmond, Jan 1st, 2nd 1863. Trains to and from Richmond, Hawthorn and Picnic stations every half hour. Ferries at end of Power Street and Riversdale Road.'
An important part of the opening celebrations was the planting of a Californian redwood, Sequoia sempervirens, wheeled over from Scott's Nursery at Hawthorn by an employee of the nursery, one Charles French (later to become the first Victorian Government Entomologist). For over a hundred years this tree has dominated the gardens at Burnley as a central feature of their design. Many other plants were wheeled across by young Charles in the months preceding the official opening.
The Society began to develop the area almost immediately. It launched a programme of highly successful experiments: acclimatising fruit trees to Victorian conditions, developing new varieties and improving breeding stock. Such was the success of this work that as early as 1873 a collection of fruit was sent to the Vienna International Exhibition. This was followed by a consignment to a botanical conference in Florence and a similar display in Paris seven years later. These early shipments were experimental and they helped pave the way for regular export of perishable produce. By 1886 such trade had become firmly established by growers such as James Lang of Harcourt who were gaining world-wide recognition for their produce.
Although ornamentals were planted from an early date, it was the development of fruit-tree varieties which preoccupied the HSV in the early days. In 1868 the society published a catalogue listing some 1400 varieties of a wide range of fruits. The catalogue included 319 apple varieties, 354 pears, 147 plums, 111 cherries and others. In 1868 cuttings of fruit cultivars arrived from England and were successfully granted onto local stocks.
A Mr Phillips was the first curator of the Burnley Gardens (as they appear to have been commonly known) from 1863 until his death in 1868. Following him, W. Clarson was honorary director (the new title for curator) from 1868 until 1876 when George Neilson was appointed to the management position which had reverted to the title curator. Neilson remained in this position when the Department of Agriculture took control of the gardens in 1891, and continued until his death in 1897.
In 1883, having received assurances that the land would be permanently reserved, the HSV committee decided to save rental charges by building a pavilion in the gardens at Burnley for the shows which the society conducted. Despite its financial problems, the society borrowed the sum of £1000 and the pavilion was built in 1884. This large wooden building allowed many successful shows to be staged. The money was raised by the issue of £100 debentures, an arrangement which was to cause financial distress to the HSV when debenture holders insisted on repayment in 1890. Royal recognition and public approval did not eliminate the society's financial worries and the RHSV declared bankruptcy. It thus met a fate shared by many sections of the community at the time. The trustees resigned and the Victorian government took control of the horticultural gardens at Burnley.
Despite the financial strains of the times, officialdom recognised the importance of continuing the development of horticultural and agricultural education and the Department of Agriculture officially took over the site at the beginning of 1891. Next to the experimental farm and integrated with it, the new operators established a school. It was opened by Daniel McAlpine as the School of Horticulture - a name it retained until 1917.
Maunders and Jaggs (1989) note that in 1889, a Royal Commission into Technical Education was appointed under the chairmanship of former land-boomer Theodore Fink. By this time, the worst of the depression had passed and Federation appeared certain. The depression had seen severe cuts in state education, even to the extent of closing Victoria's sole teachers' college. Federation drew attention to Australia's relations with the wider world, reminding those in authority that countries which had the highest level of educational development had the highest rates of economic success. No one was more aware of this than David Syme, who campaigned for improved technical education in the Age. In response, Alexander Peacock, the Minister of Public Instruction, employed a well-tried tactic to defuse political pressure: he set up a Royal Commission.
The Fink Commission went beyond its terms of reference to examine elementary education, on the grounds that it formed the foundation of technical education. It gave extensive attention to agricultural education, recognising it as the first area of technical education to be taught through specialist colleges. It also thought the subject so important that recommendations were made for; students in state schools in rural areas to be instructed in the rudiments of agriculture and horticulture, and school gardens established where practical. The Council of Agricultural Education had developed similar proposals in the 1880s but they had not been implemented. However, the commission was not impressed by the colleges' record to date. After looking carefully into the operation of Dookie and Longerenong it pronounced the latter a failure, 'chosen in ignorance of the conditions essential for success.'
Whilst it is arguable that the Council might well have given more freedom of action to principals, it had difficulties of its own. Some members were elderly and preoccupied with other affairs. It was also constantly short of money. The allocation of endowment land was far less generous than in the United States and Treasury contributed next to nothing, as the colleges had barely started before the onset of the depression caused public expenditure to be cut drastically. Longerenong was built with loan funds and the Council was faced with demands for repayment, at times when proceeds from the endowment lands were poor. It was forced to run an overdraft and for a time even had to contend with its bank temporarily stopping payment in 1893.
Though the management of the colleges may have left much to be desired, Longerenong's (temporary) closure was probably due to circumstances beyond the Council's control. Evidence about student experience and attitudes suggest that Sir Frederick Derham was right when he pointed out that students' interest was not strong enough to survive bad times.
'As long as the seasons were good and the operations remained interesting, the students remained, but when the long drought came on we could not carry on the place and get good results; the students seemed to get discouraged and the attendance gradually fell away...'
Agricultural education was established at the time when an emerging Australian sense of identity was manifesting itself in literature and art as well as in everyday language. The true Australia was embodied in the bush; true Australians were those who lived in and battled with the bush. But the bush was also a place for agriculture, where 'The straining bullock flicks the harpy flies' and 'The distant cow bell tinkles o'er the rise'. For Bernard O'Dowd, whose son entered Longerenong in 1908, the bush was
'... the brooding comrade of our way,
Whispering rumour of a new Unknown,
Moulding us white ideals to obey,
Steeping whate'er we learn in lore your own,
And freshening with unpolluted light
The Squalid city's day and pallid night,
Till we become ourselves distinct Australian'.
The ideal of the bushman and the independent farmer persisted into the twentieth century. Longerenong's reopening and subsequent directions were testimony to its tenacity.
