William Cox

by Richard Cox

  Bigge recorded that in 1821 William held 4000 acres beyond the mountains, with 5200 sheep, while William Jnr had 1270 acres, George and Henry between them 4500 and young Edward 300.21 Given Macquarie’s restraints, they were doing pretty well. Nothing that William told Bigge about agriculture mentioned the plight of the Aborigines.

  By 1821 some half a million acres in the colony were owned by free settlers. True, most of the arable land was farmed by some 2000 ex-convicts. But of those half million acres, only 32,273 were under arable cultivation. The hugely greater part was ‘used for running sheep, cattle, horses, goats and swine’.22 This matched Bigge’s concept. He named William as one of ‘the principal proprietors of sheep and cattle’, along with Palmer Jnr, Throsby, Macarthur, Wentworth, Jamison and Marsden.23 Placing convicts with such farmers, who resided on their own estates (which not all owners did), was the model for the colonial landed gentry, whose westward impetus greatly increased under Governor Brisbane, utilizing the mountain road.

  After William was succeeded at Bathurst by William Lawson the two agreed upon a joint venture in an area known to the Aborigines as ‘Munna’ along the Cudgegong River, which they called Mudgee. Lawson also took up 6000 acres on the Cudgegong. George Cox kept a journal of his energetic first inspection of the country around Munna. He rode out on 30 November 1821, accompanied by Richard Lewis, his father’s long-term supervisor, a settler named William Lee and four others ‘including one Native man and five horses’. They left Hereford at 6.30 am, with George noting the character and potential of the country and drawing maps. They covered between 22 and 27 miles a day, reaching a place named Mudgee at 2 pm on Sunday 2 December. In that time they had covered 137 miles (220 km) and established two cattle runs.24 Rolls comments: ‘These men were instinctive bushmen. The maps they made might be wild, but they never lost themselves.’25

  In January 1822, George and Henry Cox mustered 500 head of cattle, some belonging to William Lawson and some to their own father, and set out for the nearer part of Munna. Here they built huts and stockyards and the same again 20 miles further on at Guntawang, leaving in charge the convict stock overseer, Theophilus Chamberlain. Over time Lawson’s sons, Nelson and William, and George and Henry Cox, acquired adjoining runs, over which they occasionally quarrelled and where they were attacked by Aborigines.26 Mudgee soon attracted more settlers. Rowland Hassall, Richard Fitzgerald and James Badgery were among the first.27 In 1820 Bigge had noticed that William had ‘from the late accessions of other occupants, been obliged to resort to new and more distant tracts’.28 Indeed William attempted to became a squatter far beyond Mudgee. This implies mounting settler pressures on land and the succeeding phases in the westward expansion, under Governors Brisbane and Darling, support this reading.

  The first phase, under Brisbane, was of very short-term leases. There was much correspondence, for example on ‘the circumstance of considerable Tracts of land coming into the possession of persons, who do not possess capital sufficient to cultivate and improve them’. Others held on to uncleared land in the hope of selling later at a profit.29 The price to be charged was constantly debated. The leases produced a quick response from both Cox and Lawson. On 5 January 1822, Frederick Goulburn, the Colonial Secretary, who had taken over from Campbell,30 wrote to William conveying Sir Thomas Brisbane’s ‘sanction for your occupation of all the land extending two geographical miles in every direction from the spot where the 32-30 parallel of South latitude cuts the Cudgegong River for the use of your flocks and herds as a grazing run’. The lease could be revoked with six months notice.31 There was no mention of rent. A radius of two miles comprises a considerable extent of land, but this was now normal in the area. William Lawson was allotted a similar six monthly lease, adjacent to that given ‘on the 5th January last to William Cox’.32 When the six month leases were asserted to give inadequate tenure, Brisbane issued annual tickets permitting longer occupation.

  By Brisbane’s time, expansion west of the mountains was becoming something of a Cox family business, as it was for the Lawsons and a few others. Lawson, originally a New South Wales Corps officer, had been the surveyor on the 1813 crossing of the Blue Mountains, as a reward for which he was given his first 1000 acres west of the mountains. After retiring from being superintendent at Bathurst, he settled at his mansion on the western slopes of Prospect Hill on the Cumberland Plain side of the mountains, and called it Veterans Hall. Eventually, his estates totalled at least 195,500 acres.33 The Lawson sons managed their father’s interests beyond the mountains, as did William Cox’s. It had been on Lawson pére’s advice that George Cox took up land around Mudgee. The 1822 Muster shows that William Cox’s holding had risen to 6955 acres, of which 3500 were cleared, with 5525 sheep. His sons’ holdings had not greatly increased. 34 But the family enterprise was central to William’s thinking. Although he had a hierarchical view of society, his actions as related throughout this biography demonstrate that he had quickly appreciated that, in practical terms, the confining English tradition of entail, which placed an estate in the hands of trustees, and primogeniture, which passed it to the eldest son, had no reality in the colony. In New South Wales it appeared that land was unlimited and pastoralists were creating dynasties within a generation, which was impossible in England.

  Brisbane’s tickets were superseded by Bathurst’s concept that purchases and leases should be allowed in equal measure, while he also wanted the allocation of Crown lands to contribute more financially through sales. He was now, in 1824, following up his emissary, Bigge’s, proposals regarding the alienation of land and a pastoral economy, whilst under considerable domestic financial pressure. At home, in England, between 1820 and 1822, the collapse in the price of wheat and inflation had forced tax reductions and ‘exacerbated the ongoing fiscal crisis’.35 But although Bathurst wanted to help the colony pay its way, his orders became a confusing factor. They were passed on in a long letter from John Oxley, the surveyor general, to Major Ovens, the Colonial Secretary, in May 1825.

  There were to be two ‘Distinct Classes’ of settlers, ‘the first class obtaining their Lands by purchase, the second by Grant … under certain limitations’.36 One historian comments: ‘In giving priority to sales [as opposed to grants] Earl Bathurst sought to increase the prospect of land being employed productively’.37 Among the limitations were that no land could be alienated as a grant until it had been on the market for six months and not purchased. The second class of settler was to be apportioned land in proportion to the ‘Extent of Capital’ intended to be spent on bringing the land into cultivation. But Oxley himself commented that there were no ‘important or essential’ differences between the new provisions and the previous rules.38 Matters were further complicated through an earlier provision regarding convicts. Brisbane had adopted a suggestion made by Oxley that emigrants should take one convict off the store for every 100 acres granted them. But from 1827 to 1833 the demand for assignees exceeded supply by about 200 percent.39 Brisbane may have created this situation deliberately by reducing the number available for assignment.40

  The way in which Bathurst’s ideas complicated matters is also shown by the lengthy correspondence with Darling, Brisbane’s successor, over several years. Thus on 22 July 1826 the Governor reported the Executive Council’s fear that land having to be on the market for six months would cause ‘the total ruin of Persons who Came to the Colony as Settlers in the full and well grounded expectation of obtaining Grants of Land immediately after their arrival’.41 In September 1826 he was expressing the ‘expediency of deviating from the Instructions … in the case of Settlers … wishing to purchase’.42 Darling also raised the question of whether land should be allocated in ‘the immediate neighbourhood of the established Counties’ or only anywhere ‘within the range of the Settled Districts’.43 William Cox tried to exploit the former idea, as will be seen.

  Further expansion followed when the Nineteen Counties were defined within the ‘prescribed area’.44 Holdings were to be
in blocks of 1920 acres. But there was a lack of surveyors and the Secretary of State sent instructions allowing land to be allocated before it had been surveyed and valued. On 16 October 1828 Darling allowed unoccupied land adjacent to leases to be taken over, although half the applications were rejected, because the lands were not adjacent. The underlying story of the official letters is one of continual settler pressure on the boundaries of permitted settlement shown on the map on page 136.

  William Cox asked, on 5 June 1825 if, as an official surveyor was at the Cudgegong River, he could purchase for his son Edward ‘two thousand acres at Dabee on this river and higher up than the stations furnished out by his brothers George and Henry’.45 Dabee was near Rylstone. This relied on the requirement for settlers to prove that they possessed at least £500 of capital as well as paying their own passages. William wrote to His Excellency Sir Thomas Brisbane:

  I have the honour to state to Your Excellency that my son Edward Cox, who is arrived from England as a Free Settler, has applied to me as a reference as to his means of bringing a farm into a proper state of cultivation. In answer to which I beg to inform Your Excellency that independent of his own income [? may have meant capital], which is worth upwards of a thousand pounds sterling that I intend adding the same sum in stock to that amount, making in the whole upwards of two thousand pounds sterling.46

  Edward was still only 20 years old and had been sent to Rawdon in Yorkshire at 16 for five years to learn sheep farming. In calling him a free settler William was realigning the truth, as he had when William and James had arrived as boys. Edward had been born in the colony at Windsor in May 1805 and was not a ‘free settler’. Although he did acquire the estate, which he named Rawdon, his true home was at Mulgoa, where at that time he was living in the unostentatious Cottage which William had constructed in 1811 for his sons. He later built the elegant mansion called Fernhill.

  The next year an attempt by William to stretch the limits of occupation for his family failed, revealing a gap between the old tickets of occupation and the new leases and sales. On 9 December 1826 he wrote to Alexander McLeay, the new Colonial Secretary saying that:

  the whole of the Tickets of Occupation, occupied by Myself and sons, in the Districts of Mudgee and [illegible] & to the N. East of Bathurst, having been taken up [with] Grants or Purchases by different individuals, I find it necessary to send my young cattle to a place called by the Natives ‘Binnea’, it lay about N. N. East from Mudgee & is supposed to be distant from thence about 50 to 60 miles.47

  The surveyor, Oxley, quickly pointed out that Binnea was ‘considerably to the northward of the limits within which settlers are permitted to settle’ and ‘if the distance from Mudgee be accurately stated the situation requested by Mr Cox is on the SW side of Liverpool Plains’.48 It is worth commenting that although William had laboured hard and long in 1817 and 1818 to equip Oxley’s expeditions, there is no hint that he attempted to call in favours in return.

  Oxley was writing only a few weeks after the problem of unauthorized occupation of Crown lands had caused Darling to create the new ‘limits of location’ on 5 September. Settlers were only allowed ‘depasturing licences’ within these limits. But the pressures from them when they saw sparsely wooded open grazing land ahead of them forced a policy change only three years later, although no settler was permitted to receive more than 2560 acres. William Cox, William Jnr and William Lawson were among those who applied for 2560 acre grants. The end result was that eventually Earl Bathurst ceased to insist that purchasers should have priority.49 The 1826 regulations had been promulgated ‘until His Majesty’s pleasure shall be known’; those of 1829 were issued ‘for the present’. This had the stamp of yielding to pressure, not of permanence. Despite Bathurst’s intentions, by 1831 Darling had only allotted 496,270 acres out of 1,700,000 acres of officially alienated land.50 The good intentions had been almost completely subverted by their own complexities, from which the Coxes benefited.

  The grants brought conflict between neighbouring settlers as the result of land having been inadequately surveyed, if surveyed at all. Lawson had leased land adjoining Cox’s on the Talbragar, 35 kilometres west of Mudgee. In March 1830 William’s overseer, Michael Lahy, found a notice signed by Nelson Lawson. It read: ‘Within one month of the date of this you are to remove the heifer herd of Mr Cox in your charge now despasturing at Cox’s Point as the land is rented to me’. The herd was eight miles from Nelson Lawson’s stockyards and William promptly asked the Colonial Secretary if he was allowed to come near another person’s grant ‘when there were large quantities of land in various directions adjoining Lawson’s land’.51 The dispute then seems to have died.

  In 1831 the new Secretary of State, Viscount Goderich, concluded that the way in which land was legally transferred (in distinction to the squatter occupations) was unsatisfactory. ‘The scheme of deriving a Revenue from quit rents,’ he wrote to the Governor, ‘seems to me also to be condemned both by reason and experience … the great bulk of the land, on which they are due, continues unimproved’ and ‘large tracts of land’ were ‘being appropriated by persons unable to improve and cultivate them.’ Accordingly he ordered that: ‘in future, no land shall be disposed of otherwise than by sale’. There would be a minimum price, but the highest bidder would ‘in all cases be entitled to the preference’. The revenue would help finance ‘the emigration [to the colony] of the unemployed British labourers, which would be of real and essential service’.52

  This followed the ideas of a most unusual man, a former junior consular officer called Gibbon Wakefield. During three years of imprisonment for abducting a 15-year-old heiress, Wakefield had begun asking his fellow prisoners about their offences and devised a system for colonization. In his Letter from Sydney of 1829 he had argued that there was a chaotic granting of free land and that: ‘if settlement were concentrated, waste lands of the Crown could be readily sold and the proceeds applied to the emigration of labourers … ensuring a balanced, fruitful clinical society’.53

  This sponsored emigration for unemployed English farm labourers was begun in the early 1830s. At the time of Goderich’s order Governor Bourke had not been persuaded. His biographer, Hazel King, writes: ‘The great territorial expansion of settlement in New South Wales during Bourke’s governorship had been carried out on the initiative of the colonists themselves … The Governor was able to convince the home government … that it was wiser to make a virtue of necessity and try to guide and control a movement which it could not prevent.’54 William Cox, with his sons, was one of those displaying that initiative, despite his advancing years and the serious illness he had been stricken by in 1828.

  As might have been expected, Goderich’s orders were not received well by the Pure Merinos, who would now only be able to expand by buying and were going to be expected to pay the immigrant labourers, instead of enjoying cheap convict labour. In response to Goderich, a committee, uniting the exclusives, the emancipists and the relatively recent colonial bourgeoisie, petitioned the Governor about the level of quit rents. Its 52 signatories of both generations included William Cox, his sons William and James, the Macarthurs, John Blaxland and the Lawsons. ‘The value of land,’ the petitioners claimed, ‘must depend upon the demand, and the quantity to be disposed of … The Interior … discovers exhaustless tracts of land … suitable only for grazing.’ The more territory there was the less its value would be. That, and the reduced price of stock, would ruin farmers if the quit rents were not reduced.55 Darling received the petition in April 1831, but did not forward it to Goderich until September.56 By then ‘the grumbles, groans and apprehensions of the landowners had swollen into a roar of anxiety’.57 If the reforms put a brake on expansion, they certainly did not halt it. William Cox continued buying land until his death in 1837. In the longer term the land sales did provide revenue for assisting immigrants.

  Although Francis Forbes, the Chief Justice, had supported the protest it was to no avail.58 A government notice of 1
6 September 1831 decreed that ‘persons desirous of completing the purchase at five shillings per acre, of the whole, or any portion … not less than one square mile [640 acres], shall pay in portions’. Characteristically, William lost little time in applying. He asked, under an old warrant from Governor Brisbane of 3 May 1825, to purchase 4000 acres, of which he intended to retain 2560, or four square miles.59 Land was being assessed in square miles, or the equivalent acreage. Next, on 16 April 1833, William was granted 640 acres (one square mile) of the government reserve at Mudgee ‘bounded south by the Cudgegong river, east by Mr George Cox’s 4,000 acres’.60 William Jnr made similar approaches. Notwithstanding Goderich, the late 1830s were, in Atkinson’s words, ‘a time of great economic expansion … the Macarthurs themselves had never been richer; they were leaders among the landed gentlemen’. The Coxes also prospered, unaware of the disasters to follow in the 1840s.61

  Nor did the Goderich reforms stop the parallel pressures from the much loathed (by the exclusives) squatters. The exclusives had their capital tied up in their land, whereas the squatters had theirs in cattle and sheep, having taken the land for nothing. The initial squatter image was first applied to poorer farmers who made use of vacant land, both within and beyond the limits of location. But the use of the term broadened from its original pejorative sense. By the time when the great age of pastoral occupation began, around 1835, the term ‘squatter’ covered a wide range of people, from predatory ex-convicts robbing their neighbours to such respectable immigrants as the younger sons of the gentry, officers of the army and navy, clergymen, lawyers and doctors, even a few women, who all considered themselves to be, or aspired to be, gentry.

  The situation was complicated by many exclusives having themselves been partial squatters. In 1834 Chief Justice Forbes himself, who had stock depastured on the Liverpool Plains, beyond the limits of location, told Bourke plainly: ‘I am a squatter in the District’. Not many exclusives would have been so honest.62 In 1836 Bourke sought to legalize squatting beyond the limits of location.63 Competing territorially with squatters for land, and for political ascendancy with emancipists, the Pure Merinos were slowly eclipsed, although not until after Bourke’s day. ‘It was the next Governor, Sir George Gipps, who was to see the immigrants and the native-born absolutely in the ascendant, although the transition was becoming evident even in 1835.’64