Whether as administrators fulfilling their public duties in New South Wales or
free settlers taking up land, they drew on the models and practices they had learnt on the Iberian Peninsula.
The arrival of
free settlers from the early 1790s seems to have led to some level of self prescription and experimentation with local plants as individuals and families established themselves in increasingly remote locations (Cribb 1983, Maiden 1889/1975, Webb 1948).
But he argues that the convict settlers and the Aborigines enjoyed 'two decades of comparatively peaceful shared land use' before the
free settlers made their 'land-grab' and, using the considerable skills of the convict bushmen, killed many Aborigines.
As the decades passed, conditions for convicts improved--and many
free settlers arrived.
Merle outlines a micro-society rigidly divided into discrete sectors the Kanaks, defeated in the rebellion of 1878 and increasingly confined to Melanesian reserves; the
free settlers, sustained by a pioneer myth and their French provincial associations; the emancipists wandering the island in search of work; the descendants of the penitentiary, forever stigmatised by their criminal origins, for whom legitimising pioneer myths were unavailable; and contract labourers from Vietnam or Java, who were at the mercy of brutal colon employers.
What's more, it looked as though the
free settlers in Kansas were winning over the slave settlers.
Free settlers who had come to the colony of their own accord - known as "exclusives" - complained about his attitude towards the emancipists.
