‘They have the strongest interest as capitalists in searching, deep into the foundations of economic science. They have the best kind of school the world can afford for such inquiries; a young community, […] it was as if political economy were being acted out on a stage - for in a colony we may witness the growth of human society, as plainly as we can observe the operation of bees through a glass hive’ (Lowe 1844).

In 1817 On the Principles of Political Economy and Taxation was first published. In the same year European settlement in Australia remained confined to a semicircular disk, centred on Sydney, with a radius of 50 km. But, only shortly before, the labyrinthine ranges that had for 30 years hemmed in the Sydney settlement were sufficiently traversed to make out the open tablelands that lay beyond, and which would revolutionise world's wool trade, and make Australia ‘rich and free’.

In anticipation of exploitation of the new Canaan's ‘boundless champaign’, Australia's first bank was formed in 1817. In the same year Governor Macquarie, perhaps stirred by the quickening of prospects, successfully proposed that New Holland be henceforth known as ‘Australia’. Thus, Ricardo's Principles appeared at a critical moment in Australia's economic history.

Ricardo's work offered food for thought for both the Colonial Office and colonists. Rent had nothing to do with land's productivity as such, and might be as free as air. And a ‘new society’, the Principles insinuates, would experience high average productivity of land and labour, scant rents and moderate wages, with the consequent high profits stimulating capital growth. Finally, the Principles contained a pregnant proposition, which would especially engage an essentially agricultural community: ‘A tax on rent would affect rent only; it would fall wholly on landlords, and could not be shifted to any class of consumers’ (I: 358).

The Colonial Office, further, had a particular cause to give notice to thoughts of about land or revenue in ‘new societies’; the cost of New South Wales (NSW) to the British government was in the post-Napoleonic period swelling alarmingly, from £583,000 in the 12 years before 1817, to £2,242,000 in the twelve beginning that year (Butlin et al. 1986: 37).