Those who walked along the country roads or waited in the train at the small sidings still heard, more than any other sound, the bleat of sheep. The bleat was becoming more widespread, for the land was now stocked intensively. A series of Land Acts in the 1860s and 1870s threw open the original squatting runs for public sale, and the graziers acquired – often at too dear a price – most of the land which was fit only for livestock and some of the land which was fit for ploughing. Their new bluestone mansions were visible across the plains: the mortgage was less visible.

The many big graziers now had an unpopularity which the few rich mine-owners did not share. The most denounced of the ‘squatters’ – the name persisted – was W. J. T. Clarke, a former Somerset drover who first shipped sheep from Tasmania to Port Phillip in 1837. A big, tempestuous man with a pronounced limp, he became the richest person in Australia, owning in the early 1870s an estate worth, today, hundreds of millions of dollars on any conversion table.

‘Long’ Clarke was once limping his way towards the platform at Spencer Street when the train to Sunbury began to move. Instantly he raised his walking-stick and called out, ‘Stop that train!’ The train was stopped. This was the essence of the public complaint against the squatters: their power to stop the train. They were seen as too powerful: too powerful in the legislative council; too powerful because of their ability to borrow from banks on whose boards they sat; and too powerful because they bought, sometimes trickily, vast areas of land which, in the public eye, should have supported a thousand farmers instead of half a million sheep. This last complaint was based on the mythology that the western plains of Victoria could be a paradise for the small settler with a horse and plough, a couple of cows, and three small paddocks. Not until decades of speech-making, legislating, cartooning and lampooning had passed was it realised that such a paradise could not exist on most parts of the plains.