Historical development of our administrative structure

The early settlers, in their efforts to supply food for the new colony, developed land use practices by trial and error, using European agricultural practices which proved to be totally unsuitable for the Australian conditions.

Initially the settlers had considered the Australian bush to be a harsh, cruel environment incapable of sustaining adequate production and they therefore set out to clear and ‘develop’ the land as quickly as they could. Even in the early stages of the colony, it was not long before this development brought problems to the environment. As early as 1803, Governor King proclaimed that the removal of trees from the river banks in the Sydney region was prohibited.

By the late 1890s the combination of inappropriate land use management, the spread of the rabbit, and a severe drought had seriously degraded large tracts of the arid and semi-arid regions, to the extent that many landholders were forced off the land. The subsequent Royal Commission of Inquiry into the condition of Crown Tenants in the Western Division of New South Wales, completed in 1901, was perhaps the first real attempt to deal with land degradation in Australia. The Western Lands Commission of New South Wales was formed shortly afterwards as a direct response to the Royal Commission's findings.

The Constitution of the Commonwealth of Australia came into being in 1901 and the responsibility for management of the land and its resources was effectively retained within individual states.