Torrens, Sir Robert Richard Chute (1812–84), politician and land reformer, was born in Cork on 31 May 1812, son of Robert Torrens (qv) and his first wife, Charity Herbert Chute. After graduating BA from TCD (1835) he became a customs officer in the port of London.
In 1840 Torrens emigrated to South Australia as collector of customs, probably through the influence of his father, who was chairman of the South Australian Colonization Commission. His official conduct (and expensive land speculations) aroused much controversy; some of his decisions on the detention of suspect ships provoked lawsuits, and he was frequently at odds with the governor and members of his own staff (Torrens was only answerable to London and could not be removed by the colonial authorities, though he was frequently censured by them). After a board of inquiry returned an ambiguous verdict about his behaviour, an Adelaide journalist published an article ridiculing this result; Torrens physically assaulted the journalist in the street and was subsequently obliged to pay him £250 damages and resign as a JP.
In 1851–7 Torrens was a nominated member of the legislative council of South Australia; he was appointed colonial treasurer and registrar general in 1852 and joined the executive council in 1855. In this capacity he strongly opposed the introduction of manhood suffrage, the secret ballot, and an elected upper house in a new South Australian constitution (1855–6). Nonetheless, under the new constitution Torrens briefly emerged as a popular politician by taking up the issue of land title reform.
Although South Australian land grants only dated back to an act of 1834, the system of land ownership (based on the common-law principle of the possession of title deeds) rapidly became hopelessly confused. Surveying had been carried out hurriedly if at all; many poorer colonists avoided lawyers because of their expensive fees, with the result that documentation of land transfers was often legally and physically defective and prone to accidental destruction. Torrens was aware of these shortcomings through his work as registrar general; he later claimed that he had taken an interest in it as early as 1837 because of the misfortunes of a relative. Opponents claimed that his adoption of the issue was motivated by the realisation that he would need secure titles for his own land holdings before he could sell up and leave the colony.
In 1857 Torrens was elected to the South Australian legislative council for Adelaide (topping the poll) as advocate of a draft bill which laid down that indefeasible title should be provided by entries in a state-maintained registry of land-holdings. (He was acting prime minister of South Australia 1–30 September 1857.) His system of land registry was based on the shipping register, while the system of deed registration, adopted in Britain from 1862, was modelled on that used for the ownership of stocks and shares. Torrens was not the first person in South Australia to advocate such an approach; his proposals were heavily influenced by the German lawyer Ulrich Hubbe (who drew on a similar system operating in the Hanseatic cities of the Baltic) and other members of an informal committee of helpers. The South Australian real property act, eventually passed in December 1857, also drew on the May 1857 report of a British royal commission advocating the implementation of a similar scheme. Although Torrens's later claims to be the sole author of what was known in South Australia as ‘the real property act title’ system (which came to be known elsewhere as ‘Torrens title’) were exaggerated, it is clear that his skill in harnessing public opinion and determination in debate were crucial in overcoming considerable opposition within the legislature – principally from lawyers afraid of losing business, whom Torrens compared to pigs trying to swim against a current and cutting their own throats thereby.
After the enactment of the act in January 1858 Torrens resigned from the legislative council to become the first registrar general. In this capacity he oversaw the creation of the central register, and orchestrated resistance to the continued attempts of the legal profession to frustrate the act. The refusal of most lawyers to handle transactions under the legislation led to a new law authorising ‘land brokers’ to undertake such transactions; the disallowance by the South Australian courts of several features of the act led to further legislation (including an 1861 act implementing the recommendations of a real property commission on which Torrens served), the removal of the chief justice from office, and a dispute between court and colonial legislature which was only resolved when Westminster passed the 1865 colonial laws validity act.
At the same time, Torrens promoted the adoption of the system by other Australian colonies; at the invitation of the Tasmanian government he drafted what became the Tasmania real property act (1862), and he advised the drafters of the 1862 Victoria act. New South Wales adopted the South Australian act in 1862, as Queensland had done in 1861. Western Australia followed in 1875. In later decades the system (in varying forms) was widely adopted across the British commonwealth; most Canadian provinces adopted the Torrens system, as did several US states. Torrens's activities at this time aroused a certain amount of criticism: it was alleged that his anxiety to spread the system across Australasia reflected a desire to legitimise his own dubious titles, and his continued dealings in South Australian land created obvious scope for conflict of interest involving his position as ultimate arbiter of the colony's land titles.
In 1862 Torrens returned to England on unpaid health leave (he resigned as registrar general in 1865, when he became a candidate for the Westminster parliament) and undertook lecture tours advocating the replacement of the British system of conveyancing by compulsory land-title registry; he published a series of pamphlets explaining the South Australian approach, in which he claimed to be its sole originator, leading to the adoption of the terms ‘Torrens act’ and ‘Torrens titles’ to describe it. After two unsuccessful candidacies Torrens became Liberal MP for the borough of Cambridge (1868–74) but made little impact, though some interest was expressed in his proposals in Ireland. In Australia most landowners were commercially oriented speculators who saw land primarily as a commodity, and the title reforms advocated by Torrens could be plausibly presented as ‘the people's cause’; in Britain landowning was dominated by an aristocratic elite who wished to maintain their control of the land. Torrens, for example, was hostile to trusts, widely used under the British system to limit the right of immediate heirs to dispose of their estates, because he saw them as interfering with the transparency of title.
After losing his parliamentary seat, Torrens (who had now acquired a country residence near Ashburton, Devonshire) became a director of several companies and lobbied for official recognition. He became KCMG (1872) and GCMG (1884) despite opposition from Governor Dominick Daly of South Australia, who described him as a self-promoting charlatan. In 1880 a proposal that the South Australian legislature should vote Torrens a pension of £500 a year was withdrawn after arousing fierce opposition. He died at Falmouth, Cornwall, of pneumonia on 31 August 1884 and is buried in Leusdon churchyard on the edge of Dartmoor with his wife, Barbara Ainslie Anson (née Park, d. 1899), niece of the explorer Mungo Park. He had become her second husband on 19 February 1839; their marriage was childless.