William Cox
Page 21
Giving evidence on agriculture in 1819, William had said that ‘an emancipated convict had much better remain as a labourer’. A ‘great majority have sold their lands and are reduced to poverty’.71 Possibly he was recalling the numerous failures after the March 1819 floods (or those of 1817). But Bigge had reminded him that some emancipated convicts were thriving and successful people. ‘Certainly,’ he later contradicted himself by admitting during the interview on convicts, ‘& I would point out many who now have large families and considerable stock, who began with nothing more than the land they got.’72 In the end Bigge concluded that: ‘an emancipated convict, without capital or means of cultivation’ could not so manage 30 acres ‘as to derive subsistence or profit from it’.73
The convicts’ true character, on which the future of the colony would depend, was ever controversial. ‘Let a foreigner, a stranger,’ William later wrote to Bigge, ‘be told that it is the convict, the refuse of our country, that have performed nearly all the labour that has been done here in the short space of thirty years and I think he would be astonished.’74 That they were indeed not the refuse of Britain is shown by Stephen Nicholas and Peter R. Shergold’s researches. They write: ‘All three of our separate measures of the convict workers’ human capital – their occupations, literacy and height – point to the same conclusion: the convict settlers sent to New South Wales were ordinary members of the British and Irish working classes’.75 In the early decades of the colony the inherent wickedness of criminals had been a commonly held belief. But it has been calculated that in the period 1810– 19 those transported were overwhelmingly aged between 15 and 29, which meant they had the youth and energy, once free, to develop the colony. 76 Would they, and their children, enjoy the rights of British citizens?
Transported felons had common law rights in the penal colony which they would not have enjoyed as prisoners in England, such as the right to petition, bear witness, own property and marry. Trial by jury could have been considered implicit in this. But at the time of Bigge’s visit all trials were conducted initially by magistrates, then if necessary by the Supreme Court in Sydney. Both trial by jury, and more particularly having ex-convicts serving as jurors, would have been steps too far for both the authorities and many settlers, even though several ex-convicts were magistrates. Bigge asked William if the idea of ex-convicts acting as jurors had been discussed. As he probably knew, William had been at a meeting on 12 February 1819, resulting in a petition to the home government asking for ‘that great and valued inheritance of our ancestors, trial by jury’, with 1260 signatories. This was refused by Bathurst the following year.77 The petition had been ‘a fresh and historic conjunction of nearly all exclusive and emancipist interests’.78 It was of keen concern to Bigge.
William told him: ‘It was considered at the meeting that persons whose sentences were expired would be legally capable of acting as jurors and that no further objections could or ought to exist to their so acting’. But there had been disagreement over whether those privileges ought to be allowed to convicts pardoned by the governor or only those given freedom by the higher authority of the King. ‘Are such persons morally competent to Discharge the office of Jurors?’ Bigge asked. William retreated, suggesting that some ex-convicts would be unfit ‘as they are too much tainted with effects of crime’. He then prevaricated, saying ‘but I do not think the time has arrived yet for introducing the Trial by Jury upon any Plan’.79
Here William was reflecting a serious division in the colony between those who saw the convicts as future citizens, and those like Archibald Bell and Marsden who could not countenance their being given public responsibilities. In any case, there might by then have been enough free citizens to sidestep that possibility. Gregory Blaxland, when interviewed, thought there were enough ‘persons who had not been transported’ to form a jury.80 William’s own response was half-hearted. Bigge eventually found ‘among all ranks’ a desire to see jury trial introduced ‘[but] the time was not ripe for its introduction in the penal colonies’.81 When trial by jury was introduced, many years later, no emancipists were selected.
A second ‘right’ which William told Bigge about was imaginary. It was the convicts’ ‘right’ to own the land of the colony they had laboured to create. William explained: ‘They give a Decided Preference to those who have been convicts … they think that the Free People have no right to the possession of lands in this colony’. Did ‘convicts look on a grant of lands as their right?’ Bigge asked. William replied cautiously: ‘latterly they have been inclined to hold that opinion’.82 He was evasive, even though others had made similar observations (which he was unlikely to have known). This careful conversation presaged a crucial later change in the colony, when the offspring of the emancipists asserted their rights as native-born citizens in the 1840s. The naval surgeon Peter Cunningham noticed, on a visit in 1826, that ‘currency lads’, children of convicts, did not like working for settlers as ‘they naturally look upon that vocation as degrading’.83
Thanks to a shortage of skilled men among the predominantly young convicts arriving, there was resentment against William for favouring himself, as a magistrate, in the allocation of ‘mechanics’. Chapter 7 includes discussion of Commissioner Bigge’s investigation of such allegations. Surprisingly, however, Bigge’s interviews with William Cox, Archibald Bell and the Blaxland brothers did not touch on how the assignment system helped the government or the welfare of the colony. Atkinson is critical of the landowners’ behaviour at that time when he writes: ‘Until the mid-1820s employers in both New South Wales and Van Diemen’s Land thought of the assignment system as an employment exchange … To a progressive mind many employers seemed to do too little for the improvement of the country. They also failed to understand that they were agents of the state in the management of their men and women.’84 Bigge did not appear interested in how the private interests of landowners could be reconciled with and support the needs of government. Yet from its inception the assignment system had been intended to do exactly that, both to boost food production and save government expense by taking prisoners ‘off the store’. However, Bigge had his agenda, and ‘once he developed an approach, his investigation was directed to reinforcing his opinion’.85 However he did end up shedding an unprecedented light on how the colony was run.
Two pictures emerge from the evidence just reviewed; one general to the colony, the other individual to William Cox. The effect of the report in terms of the economy was an encouragement of pastoral enterprise, which attracted new free settlers. But Macquarie had believed in development ‘by means of small land settlement … linked with the redemption of the wicked.’86 That ideal of rehabilitation was abandoned. Recognition of the part emancipists could play in developing the colony was set back a generation. The rights which convicts should have had, as British citizens, were not recognized. Bigge’s brief had been to reduce public expenditure. As the jurist J. J. Spigelman points out: ‘He focussed on the idea by which increased severity of the convict experience could … also reduce public expenditure in the colony. This could be achieved by ensuring that a greater proportion of convicts were assigned to private employers, especially pastoralists.’ Bigge was a bureaucrat and, even though he identified sheep farming as the future of the colony’s economy, a wider vision for the future was not on his agenda.87
William himself emerges as liberal and humane, understanding convicts’ feelings about the country their labour was creating. If he was evasive in giving evidence to Bigge, it was not without reason. In public life he is revealed as continuing the eighteenth century’s blurred distinctions between public and private property. That he exploited his official position, as did others, cannot be in doubt. But the complaints levelled against him were, if seen in proportion, minor compared to his achievements. His assigned servants were well treated, clothed and housed. He gave them incentives and assisted them towards tickets of leave and emancipation. Such liberal instincts would lead, in the 1820s, to his
assuming a benevolent public role in the colony.
10 A Wife Lost and a New Marriage
Rebecca Cox died during a flood on the Hawkesbury River on 19 March 1819, the rising waters being so dangerous that her body was only able to be recovered by boat. Although this sad event ought to have burnt itself into the ancestral memory of her descendants, the Memoirs merely say: ‘In 1819 Mrs William Cox died, leaving five sons. In 1821 William Cox married again.’1 This follows a relatively lengthy discourse headed ‘Over the Ranges’ about the family’s pastoral expansion beyond the mountains, which does, however, put his activities into perspective. It explains how he and William Lawson found the grazing land around Mudgee, being guided towards it by a ‘blackfellow named Aaron’, who had been terrified of the natives there. Lawson was appointed to succeed William as ‘magistrate and commandant of the County of Westmoreland’ on 23 August 1819, as recounted already.2
The two ex-officers, and their sons, both collaborated and competed in opening up that country over the ensuing decades. The historical arguments as to why development was slow beyond the mountains have centred on Macquarie’s desire to see the land on the Cumberland Plain fully allocated first and his fear of convicts escaping. When the Governor made his semiceremonial journey along the Blue Mountains road in May 1815, he wrote in his journal about William’s ‘incredible labour and perseverance’ in constructing it and referred to ‘the New Discovered Country’ beyond.3 However, he proved restrained in allowing settlement there. His reluctance to allow expansion is shown by William’s 2000 acre reward for building the road having still not been officially laid out when Bigge visited Bathurst in 1819.
The significant expansion westwards only took place between 1825 and 1830. As noted in Chapter 7, Chris Cunningham suggests that this was really due to lack of interest.4 On the other hand, few men were needed to shepherd large flocks and stock had been allowed to be pastured temporarily beyond the mountains in 1816, after a drought.
Contrary to Cunningham’s theory, when William Lawson acquired 30,000 acres near Bathurst in March 1819, he did so before taking over his duties. In terms of the pastoralists’ territorial ambitions his letters are revealing. On 29 March 1819, he wrote to his agent in England, saying he had accepted the Bathurst appointment because: ‘my sheep and stock are more of them over the mountains … I have increased my Estates and property to three thousand acres’. He had already been rewarded for the 1813 expedition with a land grant. Now he told his agent that he also had land well outside the official limits.5
Nor was Cox far behind in this expansion. Bigge noted that ‘The more opulent settlers have begun to fence their estates with strong railings’ and that
This gentleman [Cox at Bathurst] has erected farm buildings, and made inclosures [sic], in which he is making experiments with the artificial grasses [clover, lucerne, sainfoin]. It is here that he has considerable flocks of sheep, amounting to 5,000, and herds of cattle, which from the late accessions of other occupants, have been obliged to resort to new and more distant tracts. Twenty four flocks, of which ten belonged to Mr Cox, were distributed over the Bathurst Plains and adjoining valleys in the month of November 1819, and the whole number of sheep then amounted to 11,000.6
This was in spite of the land still not having been made over to William officially. The Memoirs name other families in that area that time. Hassall was on the O’Connell plains, Lawson himself on the Macquarie Plains, while ‘On the right bank of the river were the brothers West, Mackenzie, Cox [the Hereford Estate], Hawkins, Piper and the Rankin brothers, Kite, Lee and Smith. Some of them had small farms.’7 In fact several, like John Piper, had a fair amount of land. What they were not were pioneers like Cox and Lawson. They simply aspired to be country gentlemen. This undermines the historians’ claims that few people were interested in the land beyond the mountains, although they were relatively few.
Commissioner Bigge’s account makes it transparently clear that it was the settlers who were pioneering development beyond the mountains, not the government. As the historian Geoffrey Blainey remarks: ‘Successive governors faced the dilemma: should they foster the wool industry or should they prevent the sheep and their shepherds [from] … endangering the prison? In the end the sheep were victorious.’8 Thus to a substantial extent it was the settlers, like William and his sons, who drove settlement policy in the colony.
In practice, the pastoralists were pursuing the only realistic economic development possible at that time, as was soon to be encouraged by Bigge’s report on agriculture.9 Pastoralism, it must be explained, was quite separate from the continuing allocation of smallholdings to ex-convicts, which had been official policy since the arrival of the First Fleet. It was also distinct from Governor Darling’s small grants in the late 1820s to the native-born and to the ex-officer migrants who arrived after 1815 and were often regarded as squatters. If William came relatively late to the ranks of the pastoralists – and it could be argued that, due to his liberal actions, he never was a true Pure Merino – he had first to rehabilitate himself and secure an alternative income. The New Discovered Country was to be where he achieved his family’s most lasting farming success.
Up to 1810 and the arrival of Governor Macquarie, land policy had been largely driven by acquisitive officers and officials. Six of the future landed gentry pastoralists had started off as New South Wales Corps officers: John Brabyn, Anthony Fenn Kemp, William Lawson, John Macarthur, John Piper and William Cox himself. Others included D’Arcy Wentworth, the medical officer, and Samuel Marsden, the chaplain. In the mid-1800s a new driver of land allocation had emerged: the patronage of the Secretaries of State for individuals. This continued for more than a decade, with grants proportional to the settler’s ‘means of cultivation’. In 1818 it was decided that prospective migrants, if they possessed £500 capital, could apply. John Ritchie records that 56 men did so in 1818, in 1819 applicants numbered 133, and in 1820 the number was 237, most saying that they ‘wished to farm sheep’. As explained earlier, Lord Liverpool restrained the move. But it had helped to increase ‘demands that New South Wales should be treated less as a gaol and more as a colony’.10
For most of his time Macquarie’s energies had been concentrated on putting Sydney in order and laying out the five towns of Castlereagh, Pitt Town, Richmond, Wilberforce and Windsor. In doing the latter he was invariably accompanied by William, who became a leading contractor, building the Glebe House at Castlereagh and repairing the court house at Windsor (which he later completely rebuilt, also constructing the rectory there for Marsden). During this decade William’s own holdings on the plain were supplemented in a chequerboard of ad hoc acquisitions. Several appear not to have been too scrupulous, as was noted in the case of James Watson.11 It is clear that William put pressure on him, as he did on a constable, to sell him a town plot.
The momentum of pastoralist expansion was only temporarily checked by Viscount Goderich, the Secretary of State, in 1831. Appreciating that the government had effectively lost control, he ordained that land should only be sold, not granted or leased. Until then, as John Darwin observes, ‘local free settlers … forced the abandonment of London’s attempts to restrain inland expansion’.12
From 1812 until 1827 the Secretary of State was that thoughtful politician, Earl Bathurst. He was dedicated to the goal of improvement and interested in the contribution the colonies could make to the mother country. This gave a measure of direction to the patronage, despite Bathurst combining his colonial responsibilities with being Minister at War, which kept him busy. New South Wales was far from being the most significant among many colonial possessions. The wars with France preoccupied the government from the mid-1790s until the defeat of Napoleon in 1815. Thereafter a severe depression, and unemployment, brought a rise in crime, during ‘a period of dramatic economic and social change’.13 The government was more interested in the colony as a repository for criminals than in its development, so Bathurst may have been something of a lone voice in th
e government on that score, even though it was he who commissioned Bigge’s report to ascertain what was actually going on and wished the sanction of transportation for crime to be more effective.
In terms of the expansion of settlement, the most important event of the second decade of the new century had been the 1813 expedition across the Blue Mountains, although Blaxland, Lawson and Wentworth were motivated not so much by ambition for land as by problems on the Cumberland Plain. These included drought and caterpillars (army worm) eating the grass.14 The three men were warmly praised by Macquarie for their ‘enterprising exertions’. He granted them 1000 acres each on the other side in February 1814.15 This was followed by the completion of the Blue Mountains road in January 1815, which was William Cox’s great achievement and for which he had been rewarded.
A further factor hindering western settlement, quoted by W. C. Wentworth in 1819, was said to be the cost to users of the road, in terms of labour and time. It took ten days to bring carts or livestock from Bathurst to Sydney. Wentworth called the road ‘excessively steep and dangerous’, whilst admitting ‘yet carts and waggons go up and down it continually’.16 In 1831 Bathurst settlers were still complaining about the cost of bringing their produce and stock to market and asking for a rent reduction in consequence.17 The crossing of the mountains and the building of the road did help to drive policy, but not fully until after Macquarie’s departure, as statistics show. There were only around 120,000 sheep in the entire colony in 1820.18 By 1830 there would be 504,775, mostly west of the mountains, and in the next five years wool exports would more than quadruple.19 Bigge had recommended ‘The growth of fine wool … [as] the principal, if not the only, source of productive industry’.20 Sheep needed pasture and the graziers eventually obtained it.