stood at 9d. a lb. In December, 1816, the Governor, finding that the herds and flocks were greatly increased, reduced the price to 6d. from the 24th of the following January.[1] Tenders which had been made at 9d. were declared null and void and new tenders at 6d. called for.[2] Riley described the results of this measure in 1819.[3] "I consider," he said, "that they (the settlers) have also suffered severely by the reduction of the price of meat … by which the property of every stock-holder in the Colony was most considerably lowered, so much so, that many settlers, when sued to pay their debts to Government for cattle purchased at £28 per head, were incapable of finding a market for them at £10; it was a measure that injured the property of every individual in the Colony. …"
In 1818 the price was further reduced to 5d. a lb., and Macquarie congratulated himself on the savings he was making for the Government. These amounted to no less than £9,000 for the year; but it is doubtful whether, when the effects on the settlers are taken into account, the real saving amounted to anything at all. It was, as Riley said, "a very expensive economy".[4] Macquarie's own theory differed rather from his practice. Thus he wrote in 1819:[5] "Such is the overruling influence that this Government must necessarily possess in the market, that were a Governor to order the price of animal food to be reduced from its present rate of 5d. per lb. to 2d., and that of wheat from 10s. to 5s. a bushel, I have no doubt the grazier and cultivator would furnish the stores so long as their present stock on hand would enable them; but such would be the inhuman policy of doing so, that in less than two years' time there would not be a bushel of wheat grown for the supply of the stores, nor further attention paid to the increase of herds or flocks, and the country, so far as it depended on the free population, would be abandoned and once more become a desert."
As it was, Bigge thought the cattle were being slaughtered in too great a number, and that the herds were not increasing rapidly enough. The great number of convicts arriving in
