William Cox

by Richard Cox

  The evidence does suggest that William had been maligned. The use of the bullocks and carts had been repeatedly authorized by Macquarie. He had not sold a stockyard to government: he had been paid to build it at Crooked Corner, although it is probable that he also used it for himself. 52 But the real crux lay in William’s accusations over the horses. Both Blake and Byrne revealed personal grievances against him. Blake’s included that: ‘Mr Cox promised me an emancipation in the year 1816, if I would go to his stockyard & mind his sheep’. He had received emancipation, but not from William, as had John Emblett. Byrne had been sent to mark out 56 miles of road from the Lachlan River to the Limestone Rock but ‘Mr Cox never paid me for the work’. He told Bigge about a black horse named Scratch that ‘had been employed by Mr Cox in drawing his Caravan was employed in taking down wool from Bathurst. He had a Government mark upon him.’ But Scratch had been acquired legitimately for the Blue Mountains road in 1814. In his 30 January letter William said, ‘The old horse Scratch was the one allowed me for my caravan’.

  Byrne continued about a team of government bullocks bringing up provisions for Oxley’s expedition and taking down a load for Lewis.53 But on 3 February 1816, one of the occasions mentioned by Byrne, the commissary superintendent, Hassall, who seems to have been assisted by his son, had been told that William should receive bullocks in part payment for the conveyance of stores.54 On 5 October 1816 the Deputy Commissary (the son), had written to the storekeeper at Bathurst, Thomas Gorman, instructing him to issue to ‘Wm Cox Esqr’ or his order, ‘fourteen cows and five oxen, being the balance due to him for carriage of provisions and stores from Parramatta to Bathurst’. Furthermore, Gorman had been told: ‘you will be careful to see the above cattle branded with Mr Cox’s brand before they are delivered’.55

  Macquarie, when questioned by Bigge about ‘Mr Cox’s conduct at Bathurst’, defended William. He emphasized over the stockyard question that: ‘he could not credit the Charge as now made. If any Cattle were drawn improperly by Mr Cox, it must be attributed to the neglect of the then Superintendent of the Government stock.’ Protecting himself, he added, ‘The Governor does not however feel himself called upon to explain imputations against Mr Cox or any other person’.56 However, it had been at Macquarie’s direction that William had been paid in cattle and oxen.57

  William spiritedly denied any wrongdoing on his part, whilst claiming that the storekeeper Gorman had been a rogue. Bigge picked up on this, criticizing him for recommending Gorman, when ‘Thomas Gorman, who acted as storekeeper to the Bathurst road party, and afterwards at Bathurst appears in the language of Mr Cox … to have been “a consummate villain”’. William had earlier described Gorman as ‘not equal to the task’ and had asked Macquarie for a replacement, unsuccessfully. He now protested that he did not appreciate what Gorman had been doing: ‘I perfectly understand the mode of common accounts, but am unacquainted with Commissariat Terms or Accounts’.58 Bigge then devoted a whole page of his parliamentary report to criticism of the temptations created by ‘the system upon which Mr Cox had been suffered to conduct the government works, and the issues of provisions at Bathurst’: in other words, which Macquarie had forced on him.59 Part of the Commissioner’s private instructions from Lord Bathurst had been to investigate the alleged extravagance of Macquarie’s public works. This fitted the hidden agenda.60

  Referring to Byrne and Blake, the only convict complainants he appears to have taken seriously, Bigge wrote: ‘It must be observed, that Mr Cox had sent these men to be tried before a criminal court on a charge of poisoning the horses … a charge of which they were acquitted, but of which Mr Cox still thinks they were guilty’. Both were acting as superintendents of farms and ‘were much trusted and commended by their employers’. But Bigge did refer to the ‘difficulty of obtaining concurrent testimony respecting the character of convicts’.61 A logical conclusion is that William had lost his temper with Byrne and Blake over the horses dying. Bigge failed to understand that they were not for Oxley’s expedition, but there was a shortage due to Oxley’s needs. The other accusations were not pursued. It is likely that, over the matter of the stockyards, William had been mixing private and government business, as he often did. No official action was ever taken against him as a result of the complaints.

  Overall, when surveying William’s contribution to the governance of the colony in those years 1816 to 1819, when he was the administrator at Bathurst – the only period in his life in which he served as a representative of the Governor – he unquestionably gave a very great deal more to the colony than he took. But, as elsewhere throughout his life, he did have what can most politely be called an eighteenth-century attitude to the perquisites of office. Nor did he cease acquiring land.

  The 1819 list of grants from 1812 to 1821 shows that William obtained two grants of 820 and 200 acres at Bringelly (Mulgoa) on 8 October 1816 and a further 760 acres there on 18 January 1817. His sons George got 600 acres there on 8 October 1816 and Henry 400 on 18 January 1818, while William Jnr was allotted 800 acres at Melville and Henry 200 at Minto.62 These were all in the County of Cumberland, south of the road from Parramatta to Emu Plains. Whether the Bringelly plots were adjacent is not clear, but it must be highly likely that they were and they underline the ‘family business’ concept which William pursued. Macquarie was generous to the Cox family, and to others, no doubt partly because it furthered his idea of allocating all the land on the Cumberland Plain before making grants beyond the mountains. He also granted land to James Cox at Fort Dalrymple in Van Diemen’s Land, to which James had been permitted to move with one convict servant in 1819, where he eventually formed his own Clarendon estate. Whatever disadvantages representing the Governor at Bathurst had involved, they did not halt the Cox family enterprise.

  9 Toughly Interviewed by Commissioner Bigge

  If the acquisition of land was the essential building block in the establishment of pastoral estates in New South Wales, and of family enterprises such as William Cox and his sons created, the assignment of convict workers to their owners came a close second. When John Thomas Bigge was sent out in 1819 to investigate the state of the colony he had been instructed by Lord Bathurst that transportation to the colony was:

  intended as a severe Punishment … and as such must be rendered an Object of real Terror to all classes of the community … If … by illconsidered Compassion for Convicts … their situation in New South Wales be divested of all Salutary Terror, Transportation cannot operate … as a proper punishment.1

  This applied as much to convicts assigned to private masters as to those employed on government work.

  William Cox, though a disciplinarian, was far from lacking in human compassion towards convicts. His replies to Bigge’s questions were therefore both illuminating and potentially fraught with difficulty for him. They also reveal a good deal about William’s own character and attitudes, as well as providing an unusually clear exposition of what he thought about convicts and their management, with Clarendon as the backdrop. He appreciated that Bigge’s report might be crucial to the future of the colony, as had made been clear to the public by Macquarie’s announcements when the Commissioner arrived.

  It has been remarked that Bigge and his assistants were ‘as assiduous as ants in gathering and storing a vast quantity of detail for carriage back to Whitehall’.2 There has also been much academic dispute over how far Bigge’s conclusions – which were to have a decisive effect on the colony as a whole and which greatly enhanced the fortunes of the pastoralists – were in fact based on the evidence he had taken and how far they derived from the private instructions he was given before he left England. The allegations made against William, which are in the collected evidence but were not published in the main reports, as well as comments in the main report itself, were discussed in the previous chapter.

  From the start in 1788 the colony had been almost entirely dependent on convict labour, as the pastoralists themselves came to be. Without labour an estate
could not be run or developed. An understanding of convict assignment and its role in both the landed gentry’s growing dominance overall, and in the running of William’s estates in particular, is therefore essential in forming an impression of the colony at that time. For the convicts, life on a farm estate, such as Clarendon, was far preferable to working on a purely pastoral one, where the shepherd’s life was lonely and miserable, although at the time of Bigge’s visit estates beyond the mountains were few.

  It will be worth taking a look at the character of the Commissioner himself. John Thomas Bigge was a former Chief Justice of Trinidad, who socially had more in common with the Macarthurs than with Macquarie, whose regime he was investigating as a result of discontent with the Governor’s actions, voiced both in the colony and in London. Bigge had been commissioned to conduct a comprehensive enquiry into the state of the colony and to report back to the Secretary of State, Lord Bathurst.3 He delivered his conclusions in three reports, the first in June 1822, the second later that year, and the third in 1823. The first was on The State of the Colony of New South Wales.4 This dealt almost entirely with the transportation and servitude of convicts. The second was on The Judicial Establishments of New South Wales and of Van Diemen’s Land, for which William was not specifically interviewed, in spite of his being a magistrate. The third report was on the State of Agriculture and Trade in the Colony of New South Wales.5 This criticized William for giving indulgences to convicts, whilst being highly complimentary about his and other farmers’ agricultural methods.

  Bigge’s directive from the Prince Regent had been ‘to enquire into the Laws, Regulations and Usages of the Settlement … and into every other Thing in any way connected with the Administration of the Civil Government’.6 However, Bathurst had given his own private instructions to the Commissioner three weeks earlier. The Secretary of State first asked for alterations that would render the colony ‘available to the purpose of its original Institution’ (as a penal colony) and then wanted Bigge to investigate the alleged extravagance of Governor Macquarie’s public works.7 This heavily loaded subtext also referred to:

  the difference of opinion which has prevailed in the Colony. I allude to the Propriety of admitting into Society Persons, who came to the Settlement as Convicts. The opinion entertained by the Governor, and sanctioned by the Prince Regent, has certainly been, with some exceptions, in favour of their reception … upon terms of Perfect Equality with the Free Settlers.

  No matter what the Prince had approved, Bathurst was aware of the hostility which Macquarie’s ideas had aroused, both in the colony and in parliament.8 Many of Bigge’s questions derived from this instruction.

  Bigge travelled widely and took evidence from a considerable variety of people, supplemented by numerous letters. His main report concluded that ‘the expediency of promoting … the growth of fine wool and creating a valuable export … appears to be the principal if not the only source of productive industry within the colony’.9 The Commissioner, therefore, recommended employing convicts in a pastoral economy as the solution to future development. This was to be the key to the pastoralists achieving pre-eminence in the colony.

  Assignment had originated under Governor Phillip as a means of improving agricultural productivity. It soon became essential for reducing the costs of the penal colony by taking prisoners ‘off the store’, that is to say fed and housed by employers, not the government. As the historian George Rudé has commented, ‘once the convicts arrived in the colony they were cast for an economic role and if they became reformed in the process, so much the better’.10 The obvious role was in food production. Officers of the New South Wales Corps were assigned up to 10 convicts per 100 acres to work their land in the 1790s. Initially the assigned convicts were fed, clothed and, if necessary, housed by the government. But in 1797 Governor Hunter was instructed by the Duke of Portland that this was to be done by the employer.11 In 1805 the Secretary of State began specifying that new free settlers, such as the Blaxland brothers, should be assigned 10 convicts for each 1000 acres of their land grants.12 After 1815 assignment became even more fixedly the cornerstone of the colonial system, where private masters ‘should carry the cost and supervise the labour of convicts at every moment possible’.13

  The convict population increased rapidly during Macquarie’s tenure as governor. In 1814 the total number of convicts to arrive was 819, of whom 72 mechanics (skilled men) out of 194 were assigned to private employers. In 1819, 2376 arrived, but only 92 out of 477 mechanics were able to be assigned.14 These figures are significant in terms of Macquarie’s problems in dealing with the vastly increased number of arrivals after 1815. However, assignment was not the slavery condemned by Sir William Molesworth in his highly partisan parliamentary report of 1838, which reflected how the system had become politically controversial at home.15 It was abandoned in 1840.

  For those convicts who went along with the system and did not cause trouble (or managed not to be provoked into it by intemperate masters, as some of William’s court judgments showed they could), the system provided a way of learning practical skills and securing a far better future than a convicted felon in Britain could hope for. But convicts could be recalcitrant and an employer who did not allow extra rewards and indulgences to a skilled man would have been unlikely to have got much work out of him. As was seen during the building of the Blue Mountains road, William Cox did have a keen understanding of the convict mentality and an appreciation of the value of giving convicts incentives to work well, which was one of Macquarie’s reasons for giving him the job.

  The way in which Governor Macquarie, and likewise William, viewed criminals had progressed beyond the classicist crime-is-in-the-blood school of the late eighteenth century and towards the idea of rehabilitation, anticipating aspects of the positivist approach of the 1820s. One commentator considers that ‘In Macquarie’s personality … were mixed a broad sense of justice and a humanity far ahead of Georgian concepts’.16 This attitude was very different to the terms of Bigge’s agenda. After Macquarie’s departure the belief in rehabilitation faltered and the aims of punishment reverted to the classical view of the eighteenth century. This had been expressed by Lord Portland when he told Governor Hunter back in 1798 that ‘crimes of a more heinous nature … can only be repressed by a sense of the certainty of the punishment that awaits them’.17 There was less concern with understanding the nature of the ‘criminal’ and more with developing rational and systematic means of delivering justice, which Bigge had been told to consider.18

  So the Commissioner’s enquiries into how the assignment system operated under Macquarie, and how it could lead to tickets of leave, or even pardons, was highly charged politically. The ticket of leave was explained to the Molesworth Committee by a later Chief Justice, Sir Francis Forbes, as giving the holder ‘the right … to work for his own benefit’, thus freeing him from assignment, but he could not leave the colony. Tickets were ‘as a reward for good conduct and also formerly as a remuneration for extra work, skill or ingenuity’. That was before Governor Brisbane established a scale under which a ticket was allowed after four years of a seven-year sentence, after six on a 14-year one and after eight on a life sentence.19 The tickets were close to essential for providing a pool of free labour. A convict had also been allowed a ticket if living with a free spouse. By 1837, when Forbes gave his evidence, that privilege had been abolished.

  William had been a major contractor on public works in the ‘Macquarie towns’ on the Hawkesbury. Immediately after constructing the Castlereagh Glebe House, he had built the Blue Mountains road and had been highly praised by the Governor, who had written, inter alia, ‘I cannot therefore too highly Appreciate the Merits and Services of Mr Cox on this occasion’.20 Bigge must have read this correspondence between Bathurst and Macquarie before he came out and such praise was unlikely to have impressed him. In the end he devoted more than a whole page of his main report to sniping criticism of the way the road building was conducted and its r
ewards for the convicts employed.21 Perhaps sensing that Bigge might be hostile to the rewards he gave convicts, William’s answers to the Commissioner’s questions were often guarded and on occasion he plainly said what he guessed Bigge wanted to hear. Having made a statement, he frequently modified it when checking the transcripts and was not always consistent.

  The first interview was on the subject of agriculture on 25 November 1819, the transcript of which William signed on 14 February 1820, but he was not interviewed on convicts until 14 December 1820, shortly before Bigge’s departure.22 The records of his evidence were corrected by him personally, in his own hand. The interview on agriculture, which covers 49 pages, largely about assignment, suggests that Bigge expected to attach importance to what William had to say. He sought the views of only 25 individuals on agriculture and his talks with other landowners were much shorter.23 John Ritchie, in a biography of Macquarie, suggests that Bigge ‘took precautions to ensure that their replies favoured his vision of a pastoral economy which would remove prisoners from government work in the towns’.24

  In his agricultural interview William told Bigge, in a way that underlined the primitive nature of farming of the early days, that when he first came to the colony in 1800, ‘Tillage was conducted entirely by hand hoes’, as was explained in Chapter 8. Nor were harrows used, ‘the seeds being covered in by the hoe’.25 George Caley, the botanist, wrote in 1803: ‘Nothing further is done than break up the ground with a hoe and throw in the wheat which is again chopped over with a hoe or harrowed … the stumps that yet remain in the ground are against it’.26 However, it has been considered that the labour intensive method of hand hoeing and hand-setting or sowing seed ‘was intrinsic to improved husbandry on the light soils of the Port Jackson hinterland’.27