Primitive accumulation was a brutal process often performed by gentlemen. Not all pastoralists were brutes – unless they had to be. Not all Aboriginals were murdered – unless they had to be. Facades of normality were hurriedly erected to confound Karl Marx. For a moment the Australian pastoralists could build oases of sophistication on the Australian landscape. For a generation or so they managed to impose a uniquely Australian gentility around the waterholes and rivers. That the phenomenon was a passing one is symbolised by the life and death of James Bourke in the Riverina. A secondary pioneer, he died at the age of twenty-four. His brother Thomas, ‘a fine athletic man’ died of the booze aged twenty-six. The body of his step-uncle, James Peter, was found in the river a few days later: he had been in ‘a severe fit of the horrors’. All sorts of disasters of a man-made kind – from fatal flaws to death duties – combined with the elements to wash away the billabong dynasties.

James Bourke’s stepfather, John Peter, was something of an exception. A portion of his vast estate on the Murrimbidgee is still in the hands of his descendants. Paul de Serville has traced this history with a lot of elegance and wit and a minimum of tedium and dross in Tubbo ‘The Great Peter’s Run’.

It is extraordinary how many settlers came to Australia with the sum of fifty pounds. John Peter was one of them. His father gave him the money when John refused a generous portion of the family’s considerable holdings near Glasgow. John apparently wanted his independence more. In Australia the money counted for less than the Scottishness: to be Scottish was ‘in itself a passport to fortune’, an Englishman remarked. The Scots knew about primitive accumulation better than most. They had seen it happen in their own land and lifetime. Peter took a job as manager of one of Alexander MacLeay’s stations. MacLeay was the Colonial Secretary and a man of great influence.

Peter prospered, and, amongst Aboriginals who appear to have offered relatively little resistance, he seems not to have resorted to violence. He found them invaluable labourers. That was an experience more common than usually publicly recorded. By a combination of good management and good luck John Peter built a great domain. Tubbo was 339,700 acres. He had more than that in the Lachlan district, and later leased another 324,000 in Queensland. For Tubbo he paid just £189 per annum. John Peter had another prime estate called Gumly Gumly which he got from a widow, Mrs Bourke, in what de Serville calls a ‘shrewd’ marriage. It might also have been called bastardry. Mrs Bourke had been an able station owner. She broke in her own bullocks. She spent little time with her new husband on the same continent, let along on the same bed.

Some Scots, like Peter’s nephew, William Peter MacGregor, built a caricature of Scotland in their own backyards. MacGregor installed a loch on which he could be rowed about while his piper played laments. But John Peter went home and stayed there, immensely rich. He preferred deer to kangaroos.

His successors protected Tubbo against drought and flood, rabbits, diseases of sheep, and all forms of creeping socialism. De Serville runs short of the rich eccentric human material he relishes, but he finishes the story. If his text cannot maintain the pace through the advancing stages of pastoral capitalism, nor, one suspects, could the latter day managers. It is not just the changing fashion in hats: rural conservatism no longer has the flair which, if it does not redeem their venality, at least made the original dynasts more interesting.

Peter Freeman’s The Homestead: A Riverina anthology is a near perfect companion volume. People of normal physical span will require a desk to read it. Or a coffee table; but the contents surpass that genre. It is a human geography of the Riverina the pastoral age. All types of buildings appear in pristine and decaying states. There is something on their interiors but perhaps not enough: the interior of a pastoralist’s head might be, more intriguing than his façade. Freeman describes building techniques and materials, and plots the functional as well as the ornamental side of station architecture.

Maurice Cantlon’s Homesteads of Southern New South Wales 1830–1900 is a less ambitious and less imaginative version of Freeman’s. There are some fine photographs, but it is, as one would expect, mainly for people who like homesteads.

The next task for the National Trust and publishers of like mind must be an illustrated history of station front gates: to test Paul de Serville’s novel contention that they follow the same principle as pastoralists’ hats – ‘the simpler the entrance the larger the property’.