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Well before Western Australia’s Covid border closures there was actually a Western Australian who enforced his own border… with Western Australia. This is a ridiculously brief account of Prince Leonard Casley and the micronation known as the Principality of Hutt River.
Some joke that Australia is “micronation central”, and that may be true. The notion of a micronation tends to promote a fair bit of scepticism and, at the least, raises eyebrows. However it is important to recognise that in the case of the Principality of Hutt River, Casley’s unrelenting keenness of mind in the midst of an unjust situation enabled him to set the precedent in the first place.
It was the late 1960s and Casley was originally farming in WA’s wheatbelt when a variety of factors, not least the drought in the wheatbelt and the attractive land prices further north, led he and wife Shirley to sell up and move their young family to a midwest property within the Northampton Shire.
Already an experienced farmer, Casley was going about his business tidying up the new property and putting in his crops. With 18,500 acres (almost 7,500 hectares), the Casleys were preparing to harvest around 40,000 bushels of wheat that summer.
For historical context, to keep the wheat price elevated, the Western Australian Government issued wheat quotas for farms (Heaton, 2013; Ryan et al., 2006). Farmers were notified of the maximum amount of wheat they could sell from their harvest and in November 1969 Casley was notified that the total amount of wheat he could sell from his harvest was 1,647 bushels (PHR Historic Archives).
“Under this new quota, it would have taken five hundred years to crop the same average amount of wheat that had been harvested in the previous twenty years. The gross proceeds would not have even paid the interest on the hire purchase on two four-wheel drive tractors that were in use. This did not allow any return for maintenance of their homes and families, and no income on which to survive let alone profit,” Prince Leonard wrote.
In a very basic nutshell, the issue at the time was that Australia was operating under a single-desk wheat marketing regime, which essentially meant that everyone put their wheat into an Australian pool and that pool of the national tonnage was marketed and sold around the world. Wheat farmers were paid according to whatever their individual quota in the pool permitted. The quota rules happened to change in 1969 due to an influx of more farmers in WA, meaning more grain and, since Casley’s new property didn’t have a history selling wheat, there was no expectation to account for such a large input into that year’s pool. Furthermore, no compensation would be given to farmers for any losses suffered as a result of the new quota.
It is this vital part of the history that is often lost in recounts of Casley’s story. It was in reality much more than Casley just “attempting to avoid the ordinary laws of the land.” The family had sold a property and bought another on one set of regulations; then the regulations changed, and now they were desperate.
Casley tried to reason with every level of bureaucracy he could and, in the face of stone walls, tried something else. Very broadly speaking, Casley knew enough about the federation and where Australia stood in a legal sense at the time to declare his property an independent nation, thereby not obliged to be subject to, among other things, the Australian wheat marketing system, and able to sell his wheat how he wished.
Certainly, there was ultimately a degree of just-let-him-go by the authorities after a time, but that attitude arguably remained based on the knowledge that Casley had already won the argument with them and ultimately knew what he was about.
On entering the Principality of Hutt River (PHR; also commonly known by its former name of Hutt River Province), visitors could view a framed letter from the Australian Tax Office declaring Casley a ‘non-resident of Australia for income tax purposes.’
Handing the baton to his son Graeme in 2017, Casley passed away in 2019. On 21 April 2020, the PHR celebrated its 50th anniversary. By August 2020, it was listed with Elders for sale as 2704 Ogilvie West Road. According to an ABC article, Graeme had announced that the PHR “would be dissolved and the property sold as farmland in order to pay off a growing debt to the Australian Taxation Office. He said the falling income from tourism due to COVID-19, along with the debt, were the main reasons for the dissolution.”
These days, the closest one can really get to PHR history is by visiting the Chiverton House Museum in Northampton and talking to one of the local volunteers there. While they may not necessarily agree with his position, there’s no doubt that Leonard Casley’s fight for his ability to farm formed a pivotal part of not just the local history, but ultimately our Australian national story.
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* A New York Times article from 2011 describes a visit to the PHR and interviews with both Leonard and wife Shirley.
* A Sydney Morning Herald ‘From the Archives' article describes a dispute Casley had with the Northampton Shire three years after succession for not abiding with Shire bylaws.
