William Cox

by Richard Cox

  Meanwhile in July 1813 he had begun to collect subscriptions for a new court house at Windsor. Given that he also supervised the building of local roads, his career as a contractor kept him both busy and remunerated. He never had to face a bankruptcy again. He continued this work throughout his life, despite his growing success as pastoralist. In 1820 he built a new schoolhouse at Castlereagh for the government. One of his most distinguished buildings is the court house, which he completed in 1821. It was designed by Francis Greenway and is the least altered of the architect’s many public buildings. Overall, William was extremely energetic and a good organizer, which was what Macquarie meant when he later called him a man ‘of great arrangement’.

  The court house of 1822 at Windsor, built by William (Author’s photo)

  Macquarie’s references to miserable living conditions on the Hawkesbury were nothing new at the time and were to be repeated by other visitors for many years to come. Grose had written, when he settled 22 convicts whose sentences were expiring there in April 1794, that the fertile alluvial soil was ‘particularly rich’, although he did not visit the area himself.26 By 1804 – when William and James were given their joint grants by King – it was becoming the prime agricultural area of the Cumberland Plain, even though in 1800 Governor Hunter had reported that the settlers were ‘more in debt than in any other district’ (a direct result of the officers’ trade monopoly and payment in spirits) and the houses were of a very poor standard, usually only of two rooms with earthen floors. Half the colony’s smallholdings were there.27 Worse, as William would tell Commissioner Bigge in 1820, when these ex-convict settlers were allotted a convict labourer, the pair would often cooperate in petty crime, the unexpressed fear in William’s letter to Campbell of 1811.

  A more recent historian of the Hawkesbury, Jan Barkley-Jack, disputes the poverty, arguing that many of the smallholders were successful (William subsequently admitted to Bigge that some were).28 However, John Blaxland told Sir Joseph Banks in October 1807 that ‘a large portion of the farms [were] deserted, the buildings down or tumbling down, the poor creatures almost naked and many of them [with] nothing but maize to eat’.29 Even in 1820 Bigge found the occupiers in a state of abject poverty.30 The disparity between these accounts and Barkley-Jack’s is easily explained. Her account relates basically to the period before 1802, whereas Blaxland and Bigge both visited in the aftermath of disastrous floods which were the cause of Macquarie urging settlers to move to higher ground when he laid out his five towns.

  Over the years the Hawkesbury’s fertility gradually became exhausted. When the Coxes moved there in 1804 this was not yet so. True, the soil was relatively fragile and was being overcropped by settlers who had no money for any kind of fertilizer, if they did not own cattle. Nor was it only on the Hawkesbury that this happened. Much of the entire Cumberland Plain was affected, while plagues of caterpillars (army worm) sometimes devastated crops. This was why Gregory Blaxland, William Lawson and the young W. C. Wentworth made their iconic expedition across the Blue Mountains to find new land in May 1813, for which they were rewarded, although they did not cross the Dividing Range. A decade before Governor King had sent his Lieutenant, Francis Barrallier, to try to cross but he failed, as did Bass. George Caley, the botanist, penetrated 100 miles from Nattai with a party of four soldiers and five convicts in November 1804, but failed to cross the Great Dividing Range, being stopped by a huge waterfall. This was the most significant of the attempts. There is a cairn of stones supposedly marking ‘Caley’s Repulse’, and so-called by Macquarie, but not erected by Caley.

  The first European to find the entire way across the mountains to the plains beyond was the assistant land surveyor, G. W. Evans, who did so in seven weeks from November 1813. Macquarie heaped praise on him in an order of 14 February 1814, reporting that the land he had passed through was ‘beautiful and fertile with a rapid stream running through it [Coxs River]’ at the point where he reached ‘the termination of the tour made by Messrs G. Blaxland, W. C. Wentworth and Lieutenant Lawson.’ The three had, of course, not crossed the top of the mountains, but gone around the side of them towards what is now Hartley. Evans progressed as far as the Macquarie River, 42 miles (68 km) beyond the future site of Bathurst.

  Macquarie rewarded Evans with £100 and 1000 acres on the Coal River in Van Diemens’s Land, where he was to be deputy surveyor of lands. He reported the achievement to Earl Bathurst in a letter of 28 April and proposed calling the new country, punningly, West-more-land. He told Bathurst that ‘For the purpose of rendering this new tract beneficial to the Settlers’ he intended to have a cart road constructed across the mountains.31 This would be a very different matter to crossing on foot, as Evans had with his small party. A road would have to tackle precipitous ridges, rising to 3483 feet (1061 metres) at Mount York and higher elsewhere.

  Bearing in mind the distances and communications involved, events moved quite fast and it was only a matter of a few months before William met Macquarie in Sydney to discuss the road project. On 14 July 1814 Macquarie sent a letter detailing his requirements. They were exacting ones. The road had to be 12 feet wide to permit two carts to pass each other ‘with ease’, although he preferred it to be 16 feet wide ‘where it can with ease and convenience be done’. In forest and brush ground the timber had to be cleared away to 20 feet. It was to run from the Emu Plains, on the Nepean River, to a ‘centrical part’ of the Bathurst plains, following a track laid down on Evans’ map. Depots were to be established en route.

  For this task William was to be provided with 30 artificers and labourers and a guard of eight soldiers ‘you have already yourself selected’. They were to be fully provisioned with food and tools. The reward for the convicts was to be emancipation. Evans had reckoned optimistically that the job could be done in three months with 50 men. When William did it in just under six months with far fewer men he was widely praised. As is clear from Macquarie’s letter, all this had been pre-arranged before his letter was sent. He told Bathurst that William had ‘Very Kindly volunteered his services … he is particularly Well adapted for such a business, being Active and very Intelligent in the Conduct of Such Affairs’.32 By the time Bathurst received the despatch the road was complete and William had already accomplished the dangerous and exhausting commission which made his name.

  5 The Challenge of the Blue Mountains

  William Cox kept a journal of almost all the six months spent building the mountain road. It is a small volume, about seven inches by five, bound in brown leather and was given to the Mitchell Library with other family papers in 1965. Recently an apparently earlier, battered version has been located. Either way in terms of personal papers it is all but unique, since every entry is in William’s own handwriting, expressing his own thoughts, as opposed to his more carefully considered official letters. Although it is unlikely that he wrote it for others to read, it has often been published, including in an online version.1 The entries end before the road was finished, possibly because he kept a record of expenses starting at the back and going forwards, so there were only two pages left blank at the time he stopped. Or, more probably, he felt the road had progressed so far that his presence was no longer needed, that his supervisors could complete the job of reaching ‘the centrical part’ of the Bathurst plains, and he wanted to get on with other contracts. Certainly, on 15 January 1815, the day after the road was finished, he was back at Clarendon, busy submitting estimates to the government for road and bridge building at Windsor.

  In fact, had he been less determined and resourceful, William might have failed, since following the ridge along Evans’ route led to Mount York, which the Surveyor and his men only got down with great difficulty and brought the project close to catastrophe at the summit. Not that he could be blamed for that. As the Oxford Companion to Australian History observes, ‘[Gregory] Blaxland was regarded as the originator of the plan of following the ridges as a means of crossing this barrier.’ And as the last chapter notes, Blaxla
nd had not got across the Great Dividing Range beyond.

  When William had succeeded in his task, Macquarie expressed, in a generously worded letter drafted by his secretary, John Campbell, ‘astonishment and regret that amongst so large a population no-one appeared within the first 25 years of the establishment of this settlement possessed of sufficient energy of mind fully to explore a passage over these mountains’.2 But this was after the Governor had traversed the route on a tour of inspection in April and May 1815 and he gave no recognition to the efforts of Barrallier in 1802 or Caley in 1804. Indeed when he wrote that the road promised to be ‘of the greatest public utility, by opening a new source of wealth to the industrious and enterprising’, he was also disregarding the reality of other roads, some of which were little better than tracks.

  In January 1789 Governor Phillip had led a party of woodcutters to mark out a line of road from Sydney to Parramatta. However, the road towards the mountains did not go that way. The road from Parramatta to the Hawkesbury ran west to Richmond and Windsor, whereas William’s new one would start further south, crossing the Nepean River at a ford near present day Penrith. Today the Great Western Highway largely still follows Cox’s line as far as Mount Victoria and in some sections is not a great deal wider than Macquarie’s specification. It was first realigned in 1823, with a major change passing Mount Blaxland, so that today’s route is much further north than William’s. It has been altered at intervals ever since.3

  The Governor had decreed that the expedition would receive ‘provisions, stores, tools, utensils, arms, ammunition, slops [work clothing] and other necessaries’. These would be sent from Sydney to a depot to be established by William on the Emu Plains by ‘two separate conveyances or convoys’ one immediately, the other two weeks later ‘which you will be pleased to receive and take charge of on their arrival there, placing such a guard over them as you may deem expedient, the sergeant commanding the guard of soldiers being instructed to receive all his orders from you for the guidance of himself and party and for their [the stores’] distribution’.

  To meet these ideals, the labour gang William assembled was a much less ill-kempt bunch than was usual. A typical road gang depicted around 1815 in the bush near Sydney (the drawing is in the National Library in Canberra) were clothed in ragged trousers, often patched at the knees, wearing an assortment of rough jackets and smocks, and headgear of all kinds from flat caps to battered high hats for protection against the sun. Their guard of soldiers in high plumed shakos, shouldering muskets with bayonets, was dominating them.

  William’s men were very much better fitted up and motivated. They had volunteered their services, in Macquarie’s words, ‘on the Condition of receiving emancipation for their extra Labor on the conclusion of it. This is the only remuneration they receive, except their rations’.4 He might have added that they would be provided with clothing, which William replaced as necessary. It has been observed that back in Governor Phillip’s time convicts responded much better to the indulgences and incentives which the military offered than to other employers’ inducements.5 William had been an officer and gave continual minor incentives to the men, whilst at the back of their minds must always have been the eventual reward of freedom. His diary states that the 30 men were issued with a ‘suit of slops and a blanket to each man’. We know that slops included shoes and trousers, because a few were found to have been stolen. The blankets were for the cold of the high ridges awaiting them and later more were issued, as well as ‘strong shoes’ for the rugged terrain.

  This was not the only respect in which the gang was different from normal. The word ‘convict’ is nowhere mentioned. William referred to the men by their names and trades as ‘workmen’ or ‘quarrymen’ or ‘carpenters’, while Macquarie had called them ‘artificers and labourers’. Not being labelled convicts must have been mentally invigorating for them. Furthermore, although William had the detachment of eight soldiers with him, the troops were directed towards safeguarding the stores and provisions, not supervising the work.

  There were several supervisors, the chief being Richard Lewis, who had that role at Clarendon, assisted by Hobby and Tye, whilst a fourth named Burne was to prove less satisfactory. The following June Macquarie made Lewis a superintendent ‘in the new discovered country to the westward of the Blue Mountains’, under William’s orders, with a salary of ‘£50 per annum and the usual indulgences’.6 William’s 20-year-old son Henry assisted at the depots. The soldiers – on Macquarie’s orders – also prevented curious sightseers from intruding on the project. ‘I have deemed it advisable,’ Macquarie wrote to William, ‘to issue a Government and general order prohibiting such idlers from visiting you, without a pass signed by me.’ He sent copies of this order to be displayed in conspicuous places and directed William to ‘give the necessary order to your guard and to your constable to see it strictly enforced’. This restriction on access was maintained after the road was completed, presumably to prevent convicts escaping up the road, which Macquarie feared might happen.7

  When the expedition set out on 18 July 1814 the men shared one defining aim: to finish the job and gain their reward, for which they were prepared to work waist deep in rivers and be wet and cold for weeks on end, apart from the sheer physical effort demanded of them. Seven years later Commissioner Bigge, who had a sniffer dog’s nose for wrongdoing and strong views about not freeing convicts early, attacked abuses of the project, of which alleged abuses William seems to have been unaware. These might have included Macquarie’s subsequently giving the supervisor Lewis the official job at Bathurst. In his all-embracing 1822 report into the state of the colony, Bigge specifically referred to the road. He commented that Governor Macquarie’s policy had been to bestow pardons and indulgences as ‘rewards for any particular labour or enterprise’ and ‘The men who were employed in working upon the Bathurst road … and those who contributed to that operation by the loan of their own carts and horses, obtained pardons, emancipations and tickets of leave.’ He named one convict, Tindall, of having only lent a cart, when Tindall had been a labourer throughout, and asserted that ‘the nature of the services, and the manner in which some of them were recommended, excited much surprise in the colony, as well as great suspicion of the channels through which the recommendations passed.’8 There is no evidence of such reactions in the Colonial Secretary’s correspondence relating to the road.

  Happily, the Commissioner did not criticize William personally (though he did on other matters), merely mentioning that those who were employed were selected by Mr Cox and Richard Lewis and that ‘The first principle was capacity for labour and it is stated by some of the free persons, who assisted in it, that the men worked hard and that they were excited to exertion by the hope of receiving emancipations’. This is exactly the impression which William’s journal gives.

  Augustus Earle’s painting of a distant view of the Blue Mountains from Cox’s road in the 1820s (Nan Kivell collection, NLA)

  William was unworried by the possible problems and had arranged everything a week before Macquarie wrote to him on 14 July 1814. The first entry of his journal is dated 7 July and reads: ‘After holding conversation with His Excellency the Governor at Sydney relative to the expedition, I took leave of him this day’. With the help of Lewis he had already assembled the team of 30 trusted convicts. On 11 July he began ‘converting a cart to a caravan to sleep in, as well as to take my own personal luggage.’ This was completed on the 16th. The next day he left Clarendon at 9 am for Captain Woodruff’s farm, carts and provisions arrived from Sydney and he ‘mustered the people’, not calling them convicts. They were issued with slops. The man in charge of the stores was called Gorman and would feature unhappily in William’s later life at Bathurst.

  The next morning they started to make a pass, or ford, across the Nepean. The party found the river banks very steep, as most that they were to encounter were. The Nepean was already notorious for flooding, as William well knew because he had been warmly c
ommended for rescuing a woman caught in the flood of 1806 on the Hawkesbury, previous ones having been recorded in 1795 and 1799. Whatever ‘pass’ he built would need to be flood-resistant. The existing one was merely an improvement on the ford and suffered from flooding. A bridge was only built much later. July 18 and 19 also brought the first of what would become very repetitive observations. The weather was ‘fine, clear and frosty’, some items of slops had been purloined, there were complaints, the first of many, about the food, the pork being deficient. It proved to be underweight. William ‘wrote to His Excellency the Governor for additional bullocks and some small articles of tools’. By the end the Governor’s secretary must have had a small library of such requests, but they were invariably met. In order to speed up re-provisioning, William often obtained supplies from his own estate at Clarendon, while problems with the bullocks used as draught animals to haul supply carts lasted throughout the project.

  The next need was for axes, which the blacksmith fashioned from iron and steel provided by William, but ‘the timber being hard, they all turned. Kept the grindstone constantly going.’ These, with hoes, spades, picks, sledgehammers and a small amount of gunpowder, were all the tools they had. On 23 July a hut was fitted up on the left (the further) bank of the Nepean to store provisions and William wrote to the Governor for pit saws, iron and steel, then went ahead to plot the next stage from the Emu Plains, which would cross a creek and ‘begin ascending the mountain’. On 24 July he noted that ‘The workmen exerted themselves during the week, much to my satisfaction’. By way of reward he gave them ‘a lot of cabbage’, which he had exchanged for a pound of tobacco. By 26 July they had made a ‘complete crossing place’ from the end of the Emu Plains to the foot of the mountain, although the ascent was steep and ‘the soil very rough and stony; the timber chiefly ironbark’. The trees were not so named without reason, but the expedition was now well under way, after little more than a week.