Squatter notions regarding use of the plains for extensive winter pastoral runs did not accord with official visions of a more closely settled country. The Land Acts of 1860, 1862 and 1865 aimed instead to settle farmers on the plains, however squatters continued to consolidate and expand their holdings. In preparation for selection under the Land Act 1865 for instance, the Restdown Plains West run was surveyed into allotments of between 80 and 400 acres. The then owners of the run, Alexander Boyd and Francis Bell, took up the majority of the selections themselves through the illegal means of dummying.¹⁹ With the introduction of the strict residency and cultivation conditions of the Land Act 1869, however, a determined push was made by the colonial government to transform places like the northern plains, which by then were controlled largely by only twenty-nine men, into a patchwork of rural holdings.²⁰

PROV, VPRS 625/P0, Unit 162, Item 9470/19.20, part parish plan of Ballendella showing allotment 66 shaded pink

Heavy rains brought selectors to the plains from the early 1870s under the Land Act 1869, which opened up all unalienated land in the colony to selectors with runs of up to 320 acres.²¹ Licences (Section 19s) were taken up for three years at an annual rental of 2 shillings per acre. These licences required the selector to develop the land by living on-site for at least two and a half years, and within three years building a house to fulfil residency conditions, fencing the selection, cultivating at least ten per cent of the land, and affecting other advances such as the clearing of vegetation, the construction of water storages, and the erection of outbuildings. If improvements at a rate of £1 per acre were made within this time, the selector could either purchase the land freehold by paying the balance of 14s. per acre, or obtain a seven-year lease (Section 20) paid at an annual rent of 2s. per acre and credited as part payment of the fee simple.

Under this Act, unmarried Rochester farmer George Paynter took up land on the former Restdown Plains West run in the newly surveyed parish of Ballendella. Paynter selected two allotments: 230 acres in July 1871 and 89 acres in December 1873. On the first block, after a weatherboard cottage with shingle roof and a slab hut had been built, fences erected, dam and well dug, and 70 acres cultivated to wheat, he applied for a lease in February 1876. On his second allotment, after enclosing the land with post-and-rail sapling and chock-and-log fences, and grubbing and clearing 18 acres, he applied for a lease in April 1877. At the same time, the erratic nature of the country was brought into sharp relief by a series of dry years over the period 1876-81.²² Paynter, in order to pay debts perhaps incurred because of the continuing drought, mortgaged the lease on his first allotment in July 1878 for £200, and the lease on his second selection in May 1879 for £100. He was able to pay back these debts and make the required rental payments under the terms of the lease, coming to own his farms freehold in March 1882 and February 1884.²³ Many other selectors however were less fortunate and had to sell their farms or transfer their leases. On the northern plains, the population of the East Loddon Shire fell from 3400 in 1877 to 2000 in 1882, and in the Echuca Shire from 12 000 in 1877 to 8200 in 1882.²⁴

PROV, VPRS 625/P0, Unit 577, Item 46016/19.20, survey for allotment 67 Parish of Ballendella

Settlers on the semi-arid plains such as Paynter increased their vulnerability to the disaster potential of meteorological drought through the removal of vegetation, as required under the cultivation and improvement conditions of the Land Act 1869. As a result of these practices, soil from the northern plains was carried great distances by the wind. Widespread 'red' rain coloured by dust from wind erosion of the soils of inland Victoria was recorded across the colony in April 1884.²⁵ Moreover, the continuous cropping of the soils of the plains, initially fertile because of centuries of accumulation of silt deposited by rivers, resulted in 'grain sick' land and decreasing yields, especially over the drought years of this period. In the counties of Bendigo, Gladstone, Gunbower and Tatchera, average annual wheat yields fell from 9.2 bushels per acre in 1877-78 to 5.6 bushels per acre in 1882-83.²⁶ The ideal of settling a yeomanry on small farms was increasingly challenged as the land could not provide the returns that were required to meet the debts of the selectors. Consequently, cultural constructions began to emphasise the inability of the plains country to support more intensive farming systems. When the northern plains failed to make their expected contribution to the economy in the 1880s, instrumental expectations were disappointed. Likewise, when Land Acts failed to settle people as envisaged, territorial approaches reformulated the plains as the 'empty north'.²⁷ From the 1880s, a concerted effort was then made to reverse the decline by controlling environmental fluctuations through human intervention.