Macarthur and the Squatters’ vigorous opposition could
not stop the tide in Australia, however. The demand for
representative institutions was strong and could not be
suppressed. Until 1823 the governor had ruled New South
Wales more or less on his own. In that year his powers
were limited by the creation of a council appointed by the
British government. Initially the appointees were from the
Squatters and nonconvict elite, Macarthur among them, but
this couldn’t last. In 1831 the governor Richard Bourke
bowed to pressure and for the first time allowed ex-convicts
to sit on juries. Ex-convicts and in fact many new free
settlers also wanted transportation of convicts from Britain
to stop, because it created competition in the labor market
and drove down wages. The Squatters liked low wages, but
they lost. In 1840 transportation to New South Wales was
stopped, and in 1842 a legislative council was created with
two-thirds of its members being elected (the rest
appointed). Ex-convicts could stand for office and vote if
they held enough property, and many did.
By the 1850s, Australia had introduced adult white male
suffrage. The demands of the citizens, ex-convicts and their
families, were now far ahead of what William Wentworth
had first imagined. In fact, by this time he was on the side of
conservatives insisting on an unelected Legislative Council.
But just like Macarthur before, Wentworth would not be able
to halt the tide toward more inclusive political institutions. In
1856 the state of Victoria, which had been carved out of
New South Wales in 1851, and the state of Tasmania
would become the first places in the world to introduce an
effective secret ballot in elections, which stopped vote
buying and coercion. Today we still call the standard
method of achieving secrecy in voting in elections the
Australian ballot.
The initial circumstances in Sydney, New South Wales,
were very similar to those in Jamestown, Virginia, 181
years earlier, though the settlers at Jamestown were mostly
indentured laborers, rather than convicts. In both cases the
initial circumstances did not allow for the creation of
extractive colonial institutions. Neither colony had dense
populations of indigenous peoples to exploit, ready access
to precious metals such as gold or silver, or soil and crops
that would make slave plantations economically viable. The