Will Brehm 1:15
Tamson Pietsch, welcome to FreshEd.

Tamson Pietsch 1:20
Thank you for having me, Will.

Will Brehm 1:21
Congratulations on the new article. It really was sort of eye-opening for me in many ways, and I’m looking forward to the conversation today. And I think to start, maybe we could ask, or you could explain what a land endowment is, kind of generally speaking.

Tamson Pietsch 1:36
I just want to say I’m coming from Sydney, which is on Gadigal land in Australia. And that’s relevant to this article, as I hope we’ll get into. But a land endowment is a mechanism to finance not just educational entities, but also charities of various kinds, that was very common in Britain, where a king or major donors donated land instead of cash. And the land was then either owned by the entity in question or reserved for it, with the income from rent flowing to those organisations via various different governance mechanisms.

Now, if you’re listening from the United States, you might be familiar with the land grant colleges. They’re probably the most well-known educational institutions that have been financed by land. But the system there was slightly different. Some universities and colleges, particularly in the eastern states, were given scrip, which was basically a kind of voucher for land in the western states. And they could then trade that voucher, which is what they often did. Sometimes they retained it, sometimes they sold it on. So it wasn’t necessarily the title to the land itself, but it was a kind of voucher entitling them to a parcel of land. So there are various different mechanisms, which actually have quite different consequences in a longitudinal sense, but we can talk about that too.

Will Brehm 3:00
So if we could turn to Australia, where you and I both are located currently, in this case, it was crown land. It was the British Empire that was perhaps not actually their land, but they were claiming it to be their land. And they were giving it on to these different charities. How in Australia did it work when it came to land endowments and schools, as you were looking at?

Tamson Pietsch 3:22
I mean, this is a sort of area of the history of education in Australia which is almost entirely unattended to. And it was quite shocking to me when I first came across this, because in some cases, the grants of these land assets are in the education acts themselves. So they’ve been hiding there in plain sight for over 100 years. And we’ve kind of not noticed them. So there’s another question there about why we haven’t noticed them.

And of course, when land grants were set up in the United States in the 18th century, it was also a British colony. So this is an import from Britain to the North American colonies. It’s in place in Canada by the end of the 18th century. And then South Australia in particular, but the British colonies in New Zealand and Australia are also very interested in land endowments as a way of funding their public school system.

And if I can be permitted to do a little bit of a deep dive into the history of New South Wales in the early 19th century, there is a concern about the morality of the colony and this convict society in the 1820s. And the answer that the colonial secretary in London comes up with is an endowment of land to fund the Church of England to set up schools across New South Wales. And for this purpose, they’re granted one seventh of the colony — one seventh of the lands of the colony — which at that point goes all the way from the top of Queensland down to Tasmania, which is huge, a landmass the size of England.

Now, the problem was, though, that land was entirely unsurveyed, was occupied by many First Nations peoples, and was unable to generate income because it was bushland being occupied by First Nations people. And so the Church and Schools Corporation failed. However, about 450,000 acres had already been granted to the corporation in the first decade before it failed. And so those lands sat on the books, funding religious education in New South Wales all the way up until the 1880s. And at various points, the colony tried to get control of that land in order to direct it to fund state controlled education.
But in all of these colonies at the time, the big fight is between religious education, run by the churches, and an attempt to establish what’s called a national system or a system that is non-sectarian and is run by the state, modelled on the Irish system. This might be arcane history to your listeners. But the point is, there is an attempt to secularise land. Land has been given to the church and colonial parliaments are attempting to take back that land and direct it to public education.
But they run up against a problem, which is that until the granting of responsible government in these colonies, the colonial legislatures don’t have control of land. They can’t pass regulations to do with land. So the minute they get responsible government, which is in the 1850s and 60s — it’s earlier in Canada — the first pieces of legislation that these new colonial legislatures pass are one, land legislation, and two, education legislation. These are the top priorities of the colonies.
And of course, land is income generating. These colonies don’t have taxation and their major sources of income are from land sales and from customs duties. So the big task is to secularise land held by the churches and also break up the big pastoral estates, which have been leased out to squatters who are running cattle and sheep over huge tracts of land, often undertaking a lot of the violence of the frontier. And this is where the massacres of Indigenous people come from, the conflict between these squatters and Indigenous people.

So this is the impulse of these colonial parliaments to take back these lands from these two sources and to create education acts. And perhaps unsurprisingly, these two things go together because land is, well, it’s free. It’s there and it requires development. These colonial settlers are trying to settle this land with more white family settlers to undertake a new intensive form of agriculture that is either growing wheat or growing dairy rather than running sheep and cattle. And so settling this land is a real imperative of colonial parliaments. And they need to fund education and they need to set up schools in order to lure people to these new regions.

Will Brehm 7:52
It’s so fascinating to think about the relationship between, let’s say, schools and land and the politics behind it. Because the history you just shared, this long historical survey, in a sense, has the beginning of schools and its relationship to land about creating a religious school system to bring morality to a place that is seen as being immoral in the eyes of the British colonists. But then that shifts and the politics begin to shift, as you said, when responsible government comes in in the mid-1800s. And it’s about secularizing the land and using education to lure settlers into these places that have not yet been settled permanently. And so you can see this shifting politics around how land and education are operating just in that colonial empire — the same colonial empire — but a hundred years apart, things have changed.

Tamson Pietsch 8:46
Yeah, and I would like to emphasize, though, that the moral imperative doesn’t disappear. It’s just that now these societies no longer think that the church can undertake it. So it’s the case that in the early 18th century, the Church of England is understood to be able to undertake a public function. But 50 years later, the colonists no longer believe the church can be a public entity. They see it as a private and sectarian one. And it’s the state that can undertake the public task of morality.
And public morality is absolutely central because in all of the Australian colonies that get responsible government, all men have the vote. So it’s absolutely crucial that the youths which are roaming the streets in these gold rush era towns and creating havoc are seen by the state to be educated into responsible citizens who can be controlled as well as be self-controlling.

Will Brehm 9:46
And even to this day, there is still a large sector of religious schools in Australia. So these schools have not disappeared in some senses either.

Tamson Pietsch 9:55
No, and that long history is really fascinating because land endowments were absolutely central to taking state money out of education. So the 1880 Act in New South Wales — there’s an act passed immediately before that secularizes the church and schools lands and directs all the funding from those 450,000 acres to public instruction. But that 1880 Education Act abolishes all state funding to denominational national schools. It’s quite mind-blowing to think about it at the moment. Like, imagine the state government passing a law that withdraws all funding from private schools. That’s the magnitude of this 1880 Act.

And it was only really possible because it came with this massive expansion of the state system. And that was only thought to be financially viable by the parliament because this land endowment came to inject capital. And the same story is at play in South Australia as well, where although they had long before withdrawn state funding from schooling, there was no state system to run alongside it. And so it’s only land endowments that let the state system grow. And then the religious schools sort of withered to a small rump.

And then the bookend of that story is the second part of the 20th century, where the state begins to fund religious education once again, not through the state governments, but through the federal government. And we know that story a lot better.

Will Brehm 11:21
That’s right, that’s still written about in the newspapers today. So that movement to secularize land and use land endowments to start funding or creating a public education system, settlers start settling in different parts of Australia based on where the agriculture is happening. Did it work? Like, from the government’s eyes, was it successful?

Tamson Pietsch 11:44
Well, it depends what you are asking is the objective. It was absolutely successful in luring farmers to these regions. So when these regions are released for purchase or sale, you could see, if you are a prospective settler with your family — and the whole point was to encourage families to settle these communities because it took a family to maintain an acreage of that size — you could see that your kids could walk to school because there would be a school there. And it was that land endowment funding that was also in your neighborhood that would fund that school. So that was incredibly successful. In South Australia, settlers rushed to these newly released northern regions.

But if we’re going to ask the other kind of question, which people that run education systems are always interested in — did it generate enough income? The whole point of this, legislatures were happy to pass these acts because they thought that income from these lands would fund public education in perpetuity, and it would never be a drain upon the public revenue. These were liberals, and liberals in the 19th century did not believe in state intervention. So if you could generate a source of independent income for public education from this dispossessed land, let’s take that. However, the lands never seriously generated enough income to completely fund the public education system.

And that was for a couple of reasons. First, the South Australian government — and I’ll speak about South Australia, but the other states have got similar but slightly different conditions that pertain — the South Australian government had released land north of what’s called Goyder’s Line, which was a line that the surveyor general drew, still there on the map today. You can drive the region and see where Goyder’s Line begins, because it’s where saltbush starts to grow. It’s the line beyond which rainfall is not regular enough to support broadacre farming or wheat. And the surveyor general said, do not release land north of this area for broadacre cropping, it will be a disaster. There’d been a few good years of rain, so the government wanted to make money, they released all this land, settlers flocked there, a lot of the land endowments for schools are in those regions, and it’s great for the first five years. And then the rain stopped, the soils had been deeply eroded, and people had to leave the region. So the land is in these marginal areas which are not productive.

And the consequence of this is that these soils have been really devastated even to today. And I think it’s worth thinking about why the wheat yields in those regions were so high. South Australia was the largest exporter of wheat in this decade. And I think in part it’s got to do with indigenous cultivation of that land and of the grasslands for hundreds of thousands of years. And although cattle had been grazing on that land, it had not completely destroyed the soil structure. And so the soil still contained a lot of that legacy. And so wheat yields were incredibly high for five or so years until the rain stopped and the soils had been destroyed.

And so that really affected the amount of income that the government school system could extract from the land. There are big droughts in the 1880s and 90s, there’s another drought called the Federation drought in the early 20th century, and then again in the late 1920s and early 1930s. And we see that these lands get sold off during those periods because they’re no longer generating sufficient income.

But I do want to say that Western Australia didn’t reserve agricultural lands in the same way. It reserved lands in the region around Perth. And that meant that they got built on and they became income generating because they were real estate. And the Land Endowment Trust in Western Australia still exists. And it is actually before the Western Australian Parliament at the moment; they’re attempting to abolish it. And I think it’s really useful for us to remember that throughout the 20th century, this mechanism has been generating income — never sufficient income to fund the school system, but it has been generating income in the ways that the founders anticipated. And Western Australia has lasted the longest in part because of the nature of the property in the portfolio.

Will Brehm 16:03
And so in Western Australia, some of that money still goes to the education system, the schools?

Tamson Pietsch 16:07
Correct, yeah.

Will Brehm 16:09
And in South Australia, with all the droughts, did schools close? Did settlers go elsewhere?

Tamson Pietsch 16:14
Yes. So I actually dragged my family on a tour of these regions last year. The region is marked by stone cottages with no roofs. And I took them to all the land endowment sites, because you can tell where they were from the marks on the maps. And there’s no school there anymore. The actual acreage has been sold. Sometimes there’s a memorial plot. They’re still unbelievably trying to grow wheat in these regions, only sustained by superphosphate and these sorts of chemicals. It’s a really interesting region to travel around because it’s all written on the landscape. You can see the history of this spread out before you.

Will Brehm 16:54
One of the assumptions that we make for this sort of talk so far is that these lands were eligible to be taken and endowed. Now, obviously, these were lands of, as you said earlier, the various First Nations groups across Australia. Do we know anything about the impact that these land endowments for schools in particular have had on Indigenous communities?

Tamson Pietsch 17:12
This is a major area for study, and it’s only by noticing that these land endowments exist that we can then do the next step, which is find out where they were. There were two and a half million acres across Western Australia, South Australia, New South Wales, and Victoria that were granted or reserved as land endowments, covering many, many First Nations territories.

I’ve tried to do a deep dive into the South Australian educational lands, focusing particularly on that region in the Mid-North that was released in the 1870s and that many endowment lands were on. And it’s particularly the Ngunu and Ngadjuri whose lands were taken.

And the relationship between land endowments for education and dispossession is a really complex and interesting one, I think. And it pushes us to think about dispossession much more carefully than perhaps we do. These lands were leased, as I said, to pastoralists from the 1840s onwards. And it was those pastoralists that undertook much of the violence that led to displacement and the decimation of Indigenous populations, who were pushed to missions that began to be established, some in the region, some on the borders of it.

So pastoralism lets Aboriginal people as stockmen or as women servicing homesteads able to continue a relationship to their country. Although it has these devastating and violent effects, it also has cracks within it that let Aboriginal people exist in the labour economy on their own land. But alienation — which is the selling of this land — so when it’s leased, it’s still government land that’s just been leased to pastoralists. When it’s sold to settlers as part of closer settlement, which is what those maps with the schools on them are about, that’s the government alienating the land and turning it into private property held by small settlers. And those small settlers come and they build a house — they’re obliged to build houses in order to maintain their bank loans — they put fences up, they sow their land with wheat, they live on it in a really intensive way. And there’s very little place for Aboriginal people in that economy. And so they’re pushed further to the edges of their country.

And it’s devastating for Ngunu in particular, who end up on a mission off their land. And so if we’re going to think about dispossession, there’s obviously that first wave of violence and displacement. And then there’s a second wave of land alienation, which also takes these lands out of the reach of future native title claims, once Mabo gets passed. And then there’s also the effects on the land itself — once the land is transformed by European agriculture in such a way that the kinds of ways of caring for country that Indigenous people have long pursued no longer have purchase, there’s another kind of alienation that comes from land transformation.

And so I think the schools rely on those earlier forms of dispossession — it’s very difficult to sell these lands if that earlier violence hadn’t happened — but they also advance it in these ways through much more intensive European settlement.

Will Brehm 20:38
This phenomenon that you’ve been looking at in Australia, you said earlier that it also took place in other British colonies — the US, Canada, New Zealand — but it might have looked slightly different and had different mechanisms. What are some of the big differences that you see in the other British colonies?

Tamson Pietsch 20:51
Sure. New Zealand is really interesting because more than a quarter — more than 25%, it’s 27%, I think — of the entire landmass of New Zealand is set aside as an endowment for education. It’s incredible. And some of that land — and Maori land rights have a very different history than Indigenous land rights in Australia — some of that land is actually sold by Maori or given by Maori to school systems or to universities in return for places for Maori in those school systems. So there’s a certain kind of very unequal bargain that is made, but elsewhere land is just taken and handed over to school systems, irrespective of Maori presence.

In the US, there is a massive — the unequal treaties hand over land. First Nations peoples in the Americas make unequal treaties under pain of removal and death. And it’s the land acquired through those treaties that is then handed over by the federal government to states when they become states. In fact, it’s built into the state constitutions, the establishment of land endowments for common schools or for state schooling in the US. But that mechanism of acquiring that land is slightly different than in Australia, where the whole land was deemed unoccupied — terra nullius, this fiction of terra nullius — unoccupied by Indigenous people. So it was defined as crown land, whether or not anybody was living on it. And so those mechanisms of violence and displacement are all the more important in Australia.

Will Brehm 22:29
I guess by way of conclusion, this sort of — I don’t know what you want to call it — like a policy lever of using land endowments to fund schools as part of settler colonialism. And of course, we’ve been talking a lot about British colonialism. What about other forms of colonialism? I’m thinking of Chinese colonialism in Western China, or colonialism in Palestine, or there’s been other forms of colonialism both presently and historically. Do we see a similar thing? Is this a feature that’s unique, do you think, to British colonialism? Or is it a feature that is unique to settler colonialism writ large?

Tamson Pietsch 23:03
I think the particular form these land endowments for education take is a 19th century form. It relies on that great land speculation, really, that is British expansion into these settler colonial regions in that period. But in other contexts, China — land endowments are actually a thing in China too for education. And Palestine, land is at the heart of wealth.
So if I’m to generalise or to zoom out, I think what the history of education, and actually just educationalists generally, need to pay attention to is the way that land and wealth generated from land is deeply embedded in financing education, but also the way education is a lever to advance land acquisition and land wealth. Those two things are incredibly entangled.
And I would place into that a third factor, which is the growth of liberal democratic institutions, because we like to talk about them at the moment, and that’s true — we should be talking about liberal democratic institutions at the moment as under incredible pressure and strain. And if we are to renew our democracy in ways that are meaningful for the challenges of the 21st century — which includes disinformation, new information orders, the pressures of climate change and the global migration that’s going to attend to that — the democracies we make need to fit those purposes, and the ones that we’ve got need to be examined.

So we need to really examine the foundations of the systems we’ve got. And the system we’ve got is these liberal institutions — which is the parliament, but also questions of the franchise — and education, which was absolutely central to the founders of liberal democracies in the settler colonies, entangled with the dispossession of Aboriginal people.
And that is really something. And the school system — lefties like to talk about the public education system as the great good, and it is, you know. John Dewey argued that it was the public schools that made democratic societies. They brought all kinds of different people together, and it was there that the publics were created. And I believe that to be true. But also, they do that at the exclusion of and at the expense of the First Peoples of this country. And so what does it mean to wrestle with that? And what does it mean to build a system on the other side of that? A system that does include everybody, that does acknowledge the sources of our wealth, and that perhaps seeks to work towards an economy that is less extractive and more attentive to the conditions of continued survival. And I think that is why thinking about schools as a part of this story is so important.

Will Brehm 25:51
Tamson Pietsch, thank you so much for joining FreshEd. Congratulations on your new paper. It’s such a fascinating area to explore, and like you said, so much more work is needed down this road.

Tamson Pietsch 26:03
Thank you so much, Will. It’s been great.

1. Introducing Settler Colonial Studies
2. Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native
3. Entangled Pasts: Land-Grant Colleges and American Indian Dispossession
4. Coloniality: The Darker Side of Modernity
5. The Long Environmental Justice Movement
6. Gateways to the West, Part I: Education in the Shaping of the West
7. Schooling as a White Good
8. University Land Grabs: Indigenous Dispossession and the Universities of Toronto and Manitoba

Have any useful resources related to this show? Please send them to info@freshedpodcast.com