William Cox

by Richard Cox

  Obviously either obtaining land from government, or squatting on it, was not the only way of expanding an estate. Making direct purchases from individuals was less problematic. As always, William Cox seized opportunities. In the 1820s his old friend John Piper had been earning more as the Naval Officer at Sydney than the Governor did and had accumulated extensive properties, including 2000 acres ‘at Bathurst’.65 He got into financial trouble in 1827, through deficiencies in his collection of customs duties and his chairmanship of the Bank of New South Wales. On 29 June 1827, having become one of Piper’s trustees, William wrote suggesting paying off £500 of his debts in exchange for land, saying he was glad ‘the lands were all sold … Vaucluse not selling would have thrown us out.’ This meant Piper was spared having to sell his elegant Henrietta Villa at Point Piper.66

  On 11 October 1832 William wrote from his Hereford farm at Bathurst about an exchange of land ‘from the other side of the water’, presumably to acquire it. He was in touch again on 24 March 1835. These friendly letters always began ‘My dear Piper’ and concluded with family news.67 As well as helping to save Piper, the purchases resulted in an enlargement of the Cox estates west of the mountains. As mentioned earlier, by no means all the settlers around Bathurst were pioneers. Piper, like Mackenzie of Dockairne and others, had simply aspired to be country gentlemen.68 There was even a Bathurst Hunt, whose riders wore green coats and chased dingoes.

  The frequent changes in the way land was allocated in the first three decades of the nineteenth century meant that there was no standard pattern by which estates were accumulated. There was no inherited land, apart from Jamison’s original 500 acres. John Macarthur’s vision had been of ‘an extensive wool exporting country controlled by men of real capital, with “estates of at least 10,000 acres each”’.69 But few early settlers possessed substantial capital, in the way the Blaxlands had done. Most collected land piece by piece, like William Cox, who was more typical of his generation, with his 29 different plots as well as various houses and urban plots.70 But this was misleading. He had worked collectively with his sons in a family enterprise from as early as 1804. The family’s Mudgee holdings alone eventually came to 100,000 acres. Quite a number of pastoralists were bankrupted by the 1840s depression, including John Blaxland’s estate (he had died by then). Yet the landed gentry did not collapse. The Coxes themselves suffered, but survived, having a great measure of determination in their genes.

  Early on during this turbulent time, just as Bigge was leaving the colony, William, bereft of his first wife for two years, remarried. His new bride was Anna Blachford. She was 32 years younger than him and they were married by Samuel Marsden a mere month after she arrived in Sydney. A copy of the marriage certificate provided by the (now) Cathedral Church of St John Parramatta shows that the wedding on 23 January 1821 was by special licence.71 Given that William was a contemporary with whom he had both collaborated and quarrelled for many years, Marsden might have mentioned the occasion in his correspondence (now in the Mitchell Library), but he was evidently too preoccupied with missionary work in New Zealand. The witnesses are given as George Cox and Mary Ellen Lenouf, the latter an incorrect transcribing of Leroux, the family with whom Anna had arrived from Hobart aboard the Queen Charlotte on 18 December 1820. On the way out there from Sydney the brig had set a record run of 48 hours. Returning, she sailed from Port Dalrymple with a cargo of 20 tons of salted meat, 60 bushels of wheat and four passengers. They were Captain Watkins of the 48th Regiment, Lieutenant Leroux of the same, Mrs Leroux and ‘Miss Blackford’ (a frequent misspelling of her surname).72

  St John’s Cathedral, Parramatta, location of William’s second marriage. Mrs Macquarie designed the towers, copying Reculver church in Kent (Author’s photo)

  Anna was the daughter of Joseph Blachford, a London merchant, and Susan Pike, and was born at Brading in the Isle of Wight in 1796. Her gravestone in New Zealand has inexplicably been altered to suggest that she died at the age of 80 and so would have been born in 1789. Although Mowle’s Genealogical History of the Pioneering Families of Australia gives this date, the Isle of Wight records show that her parents were only married at Newport on 22 April 1793 and contemporaries commented on how young she was. She died on 26 August 1869. It is said in the same Cox family document that she was both the niece of George Wilson Leroux, and that she was Mrs Leroux’s sister, but Mowle has her being the niece. It is more likely that she was the sister. She had travelled out with them three years earlier, when he was posted to Hobart as part of the 48th Regiment, taking over duties in the colony. Van Diemen’s Land was then administered as an integral part of New South Wales. They had reached Port Jackson on 30 August 1817 and the Hobart Gazette reported their arrival at Hobart on 27 September.

  Leroux himself became District Coroner at Launceston. In 1820 he was also the Naval Officer (in charge of customs duties) for which he received a barrack allowance.73 He was bound to have been in contact with James Cox for two reasons. James was a magistrate at Port Dalyrymple in 1820 and was also a merchant supplying meat to the army garrison. It is a reasonable presumption that James provided an introduction to his father when Leroux was posted to the mainland.

  The 48th Regiment continued to form the colonial garrison until 1824. Leroux must have been provided with accommodation, where Anna would have stayed. The family memoir quotes a letter from Robert Murray to D’Arcy Wentworth, saying:

  Old Mr Cox has got a licence to be married to Lt Leroux’s wife’s sister of the 48th Regiment. They landed from the Derwent a fortnight ago. He saw her three times, approved and they consented She is not yet twenty.74

  Anna was a lot older than that, but the rapidity of the engagement is unquestionable. There is an often quoted account of her elaborate sarsanet wedding dress, with a lace pelerine, in a letter to Elizabeth Piper dated 21 December 1829, but it unquestionably refers to the 1828 wedding of her sister, who had followed her out and married Francis Beddek, the Windsor solicitor.75 Governor Darling’s despatch of 22 December 1828 shows that he had granted Anna’s sister and another lady, a Miss Wylde, ‘a Reserve of two Square Miles of Land each on their Marriage, subject to His Majesty’s confirmation … Miss Blachford is sister to Mrs Cox, the wife of the second Magistrate in point of seniority in the Territory, and is married to a very respectable professional Gentleman of the name of Beddek, who arrived here last year … the measure will, in this Community, be attended with many beneficial consequences.’76 Beddek was Windsor’s first solicitor. It was commented wryly that the area needed one, the locals being so disputatious. He became entwined with the Cox family, living for a time in Claremont Cottage at Windsor and eventually drafting William’s will. It seems from the ‘Reminiscences’ of Edward’s wife, Jane Maria, that their mother also came to join the Coxes. If Leroux’s wife was indeed another sister, she must have written very encouraging letters home about colonial life. Anna herself, because of her youth, quickly made an impression on the way of life at Clarendon. The number of servants was increased, William built a new and elegant dining room as an addition to the house, and – as the Sydney Gazette recorded – they began to give parties and dances in a way that William never had before.

  11 Dispossessing the Aborigines

  Inescapably, William Cox and other landowners became involved in conflicts with the Aborigines, when as settlers they moved into territory which was traditionally occupied by the ‘natives’ and on the natural fruits of which they depended for their living. This had a second dimension for settlers who, like Cox, were magistrates responsible for the security of their districts and had to deal with attacks by Aborigines – and who often could have done more to prevent settler outrages against them. The fighting was brutal, and reprisals by Aborigines were savage and indiscriminate.

  The potential for conflict had been recognized at the start by Governor Phillip, who strove to understand the Aborigines. He had been ordered to establish contact with them and, in the words of the Australian Dictionary of
Biography, ‘proposed to treat the Aboriginals kindly and to establish harmonious relations with them’ in accordance with his orders and, undoubtedly, with his nature.1 He placed two native men, Colebe and Bennelong – the latter to feature prominently in early accounts of the colony – in his personal care. Any among the very few settlers who interfered with the Aborigines’ traditional pursuits were liable to heavy punishment.

  However, the Governor was eventually forced to take punitive action against the natives after he was himself speared in the arm at a meeting with some at Manly Cove. It is unclear whether he realized that the spear used against him was not a fearsome killing spear, studded with sharp stones, which could not be withdrawn without inflicting great and fatal damage, but was of a lighter kind that gave a warning wound. It says much for his character that the attack did not cause him to abandon his policy. But even the small area of 3400 acres (1392 ha) which Phillip alienated for white settlement was sufficient to cause conflict. In consequence he ordered plots to be set out side by side, rather than with ten acre spaces between them as planned, since the Aborigines could hide therein. This illustrates that, even with the best of white intentions, conflict became inevitable as settlement expanded. Archibald Bell much later told Commissioner Bigge that the natives ‘are naturally mild, inoffensive and indolent, but pertubaceous in seeking revenge which is indiscriminately visited upon the first white man they meet with’.2 William was to experience the results of this at first hand in 1816.

  Thus from the beginning a central question regarding the acquisition of land in the colony was how the government and the settlers saw semi-nomadically occupied territory. The legal concept of terra nullius – land belonging to no one – had not yet been formulated. The historical commentator Inga Clendinnen points out that: ‘During those first years … only a handful of First Fleet observers began to grasp the great fact of the Australians’ [Aborigines’] intimate dependence on what the British continued to think of as a “wild”, indeed empty, land’.3 It has been argued that ‘there was no legal doctrine maintaining that uninhabited land could be regarded as ownerless’ and that ‘early legal interpretation was supported by government policy which recognized indigenous title to the land’.4

  There is little in the recorded attitudes of a succession of governors to support that claim. Their aim was to see the colony’s lands developed. King did tell Bligh that he considered the Aborigines to be ‘the real Proprietors of the Soil’ and tried to protect their ‘persons and property’.5 Macquarie wrote to Bathurst in October 1814: ‘Those Natives who dwell Near Sydney or other principal Settlements, live in a State of perfect Peace, Friendliness and Sociality with the Settlers … it seems only to require the fostering Hand of Time … to bring these poor Un-enlightened people into an important Degree of Civilisation.’6 Before he left he told the Secretary of State that New South Wales had ‘been converted from a barren Wilderness of Woods into a thriving British colony’. Lord Bathurst’s land regulations of 1825 contained ‘no mention of the Aboriginal people … it continued to be assumed that they had no prior claim on the land’.7

  This was William Cox’s basic attitude. Although he did express sympathy on occasion for the Aborigines’ predicament in becoming dependent on settlers for food, as the result of having been dispossessed, none of his recorded remarks support the idea that they had any right to the land. Nor was it understood then, which is fully recognized today, that in Richard Broome’s words: ‘Aboriginals viewed land symbolically as the land created by great ancestors … labour [thus] reflected the deepest meanings of life and one’s place in it’.8 Their labour, as William saw it when employing them at Mulgoa, did however deserve fair pay and treatment, not the exploitation to which they were often subject when given work.

  There had been incidents on the Hawkesbury long before William’s time, including settlers gratuitously killing Aborigines. The new farms at what was than known as Mulgrave Place in the 1790s had increasingly restricted the access of the indigenous Darug people to waterways and traditional sources of food. These included wild yams, honey, tree grubs, fish, eels, birds such as quail, and of course kangaroos. Governor Hunter had refused to punish the few taken captive, recognizing them as victims, and King was the first governor to meet Darug elders to discuss grievances caused by settlement. Although they asked King to be able to use the ungranted areas around the rivers, this proved impossible in practice due to settlement pressures and the Aborigines responded by seizing settlers’ corn and provisions and killing the settlers themselves in most brutal ways. It was left to the farmer to decide when he could reasonably shoot at Aboriginal raiding parties to protect his own and his family’s lives.9 Grace Karskens comments that ‘the Hawkesbury was in a state of war for years, from 1799 to 1805, while violence broke out again on the Nepean to the south in 1814–16’.10

  On the Hawkesbury there was a particularly savage outbreak in late May 1816. The bodies of three white men were discovered, ‘badly disfigured’, and probably killed by Aborigines.11 William received instructions from the Governor dated 1 July and 6 July and as a result made military dispositions to deal with the problem. He informed Macquarie on 11 July of his preliminary dispositions:

  went to Capt Forrests’s farm to get a place for Sgt Broadfoot’s party to sleep in case they came that evening … Finding no shelter they went to the left bank of the Grose and have now a position a little below Mr Bell’s in an empty house that commands the ridge leading to the roads north and west, as well as the Grose.

  William’s writing was as neat and controlled as ever. He folded his letter three times so as to fit into an ‘envelope’ made of one piece of paper about six inches wide and four inches deep, marked ‘H M Service’. Macquarie recorded down the side ‘’Recd 12 July 16. Answered 13 ditto.’ The original is in the Mitchell Library. The text continues explaining an incident that was typical:

  I have now the honour of reporting to Your Excellency that I formed a party on Saturday last to go in quest of the Hoschen [sic] Natives and sent two Constables and two friendly natives as guides [names given] and on Monday morning they were joined by Mr Luttrell and seven other men making 12 … On Tuesday they proceeded towards Singleton’s mile and in the evening information was brought to Mr Bell’s that the Natives had been to Joseph Hobson’s farm and murdered him. I received this information at one o’clock on Tuesday morning and after directing [the] Sgt and his men to get the track of the Natives, I went the same route with the Sergeant, but they lost track of them and I deemed it prudent to drop the pursuit.

  On the Wednesday morning the coroner’s inquest on the body was held. William attended and ‘explained Your Excellency’s determination as to the four Natives … and gave directions who to give the alarm to in case they saw or heard of any Natives. I also settled my plan with the Sergeant.’ Macquarie replied on Friday 19 July, in haste judging from the handwriting, accepting William’s advice.12 It appears that the natives were not caught.

  William explained after the inquest that ‘Hobson was a very hard working, quiet man and always on the best of terms with the Natives. His death wound was on the head and he was also stripped quite naked. He had removed his family after the murder of the 2 stockmen.’ He further told Macquarie that ‘The Natives here appear so determined on mischief that very prompt measures are necessary or the Settlers and Stockmen will be murdered in future’. The stockmen are likely to have been convicts. The Bell mentioned was presumably Archibald Bell, who from 1812 to 1818 commanded a detachment of the 73rd Regiment at Windsor and had a property named Belmont at Richmond. It seems odd that he was not involved directly in the operation, although this was evidently a job for the magistrate (Bell was appointed as one in 1820, with a salary and a house). Very probably he had the murder of Hobson in mind when he told Bigge that the natives took revenge on the first white man they encountered.

  During 1816 a number of orders were sent out by the Colonial Secretary regarding ‘Aboriginal activities’, not
ably on 9 May when a proclamation was circulated to all JPs about ‘Aboriginal hostility’ and on 26 July ‘respecting the sanguinary Disposition and Outrages still manifested by the black Natives of the Colony’. On 19 October the need for protection against the natives was certified and on 2 November a circular was sent concerning the cessation of hostilities and the treatment of natives, which was also sent to the Aborigines themselves.13 This marked the end of that series of conflicts. The precise cause of the 1816 conflict was not identified, although there had been a brutal and unnecessary attack on an Aboriginal boy by settlers. But provocation was seen completely differently by settlers and Aborigines, as Bell explained.

  These events may well have conditioned William’s attitudes at Bathurst in 1824, detailed below. This author’s reading of events, taken amongst other sources from records of meetings, is that when conflict became inevitable on a larger scale around Bathurst in the next decade, William’s view was again pragmatic: effectively a version of stick and carrot, of attack followed by negotiation. Indeed the 1816 incidents took place when he was already dividing his time between the Hawkesbury and Bathurst, where he was the commandant. What took place at Bathurst has become extremely controversial to historians, even if it was not at the time.