William Cox

by Richard Cox

  Bathurst and Bigge had between them outlined a future for the colony in which the pastoralists would be dominant, employing convict labour, even if nothing that the civil servant Bigge proposed could be described as visionary. But, in the historian Michael Roe’s words: ‘Time and space and growth all undercut the Bathurst–Bigge design, yet its upholders fought back, demanding attention. Their failure was nearly as significant and as interesting as any success in Australian history.’1

  William’s role during these years was not entirely typical of the gentry, because he was liberal minded and often – but not always – supported the emancipists’ aspirations. His liberalities had their limitations, for example the possibility of having ex-convicts potentially sitting on criminal juries, which he could not accept. Yet his experiences, together with those of Jamison and a few others, do cast a useful light both on his own character and on that curious period of history, with its internecine political infighting, before the gold rush of the 1850s changed everything again. Nor did anything stop William continuing to expand his estates and build his family dynasty, right up until his death. This was as well as executing government construction contracts and sitting as a senior magistrate, not to mention raising a second family with his new wife, Anna Blachford.

  Up to the 1820s, the public role of the landed gentry had been held back by Governor Macquarie. If William’s great patron was ‘the father of Australia’, he was also capable of being an unyielding parent, especially where matters of the larger public interest were concerned. Local benevolent initiatives he fostered, colony-wide ones – except those promoted by the Church – he often prohibited. This was unrealistic, since long before he departed the leading landed settlers had become established as citizens of substance. As such they were natural leaders of the community. They had come to believe in their authority and rights, which Macquarie ought to have recognized. At the same time, so far as the overwhelming majority of them were concerned, the ownership of land was at the heart of everything. It certainly was for William and, to a slightly lesser extent, his sons.

  The possession of land was not only associated, in the English gentry’s mind, with birth, political power and stability, it was the reason why so many of the exclusives had come out to the wide spaces of the colony in the first place.2 Land remained inextricably linked to progress and to the quarrel between the ‘ancient nobility’ and the new squatters, even though most gentry had engaged in squatting at some time or other themselves.3 The established gentry’s status was compromised by the squatter arrivals in two ways. The Pure Merinos had invested their money in acquiring land. The squatters simply took territory for nothing and invested only in stock, including some very small-scale farmers, often ex-convicts. Secondly, many among the larger scale squatters aspired to the same social standing as the gentry, which by origins and social standing they enjoyed at home, such as ex-officers. This complicated situation has already been explained.

  The landed gentry’s wealth and status had indeed been greatly bolstered by the Bathurst/Bigge pastoral concept. From a sociological point of view it had adverse effects, at least from William’s liberal standpoint; the Bigge Report led immediately to the abandonment of Macquarie’s constructive views on the rehabilitation of ex-convicts, to which he subscribed. It was true also, although apparently not appreciated by many settlers, that the ex-convict emancipist population was certain to assume a much wider significance, fuelled by the ex-convicts’ belief that they had the right to the colony’s land, as William and others had observed to Bigge in 1819. Two decades later, in 1837, James Macarthur published his classic book New South Wales, its Present State and Future Prospects in London. In this he deplored that ex-convicts thought ‘the colony theirs by right, and that the emigrant settlers were interlopers upon the soil’.

  Adding to this pressure, the emancipists’ free-born children were becoming a growing influence and one which, if the authorities had thought about it at all, had been inevitable once women convicts were sent out with the First Fleet in 1788. In all, some 12,500 female convicts were transported. In the 1820s those born before 1810 were coming of age. By 1828 one quarter of the population of New South Wales had been born in the colony.4 These young people were entitled to the rights of British subjects and they began to be joined in the 1830s by an ever increasing number of young free immigrant workers, encouraged to come out with assistance from the home government as part of Goderich’s plans of 1831. In the whole of the 1820s such free immigrants had totalled 6500, but between 1831 and 1840 over 40,000 arrived.5

  To further this inflow Governor Bourke gave a bounty to settlers who employed their own agents to bring in mechanics or agricultural labourers; single men from 18 to 25 years old, unmarried females between 15 and 30, and couples under 30. This was on top of government-assisted schemes. Both offered real attractions for the immigrants, but little for the great landowners. Although, in practice, the wages paid were not as high as those proposed in 1831, workers’ pay was still high compared to the cost of employing assigned convicts. In 1833 immigrant female domestic servants received £8 to £16 a year, men more, and they also had to be housed and fed. 6 Thirteen years later, in 1846, convicts whose sentences had expired were being sent as labourers to Port Phillip and paid £20 a year, hardly a crippling increase.7

  Although there was heated dispute locally about the character of the female immigrants, for both sexes the colony was a welcome change from the deeply impoverished state of rural southern England. Far from improving, this had became more intense since the 1790s. In November 1825 William Cobbett recorded that ‘the honest labourer’ is fed worse than a prisoner and existed ‘on 7d a day for six days of the week and nothing on Sunday’.8 In Hampshire, Wiltshire and Dorset there were rural riots in 1830, while the first would-be trade unionists, the Tolpuddle Martyrs, were transported from Dorset to the colony in 1834. Thus immigration brought an influx of men and women who were already politicized from their bitter experiences in the home country. ‘Pastoralism encouraged militancy among the working class … many urban workers yearned to become yeomen and most free workers hated the thought of employment on outback sheep stations.’9 However, they usually seem to have put that old resentment aside when given new opportunities.

  Under Bourke’s scheme the Macarthurs successfully ‘brought out forty one families between April 1837 and March 1839, together with a small number of single men … This was only possible because the late 1830s were a time of great economic expansion [in the colony]’.10 The Coxes do not appear to have done anything similar with whole families, although William’s sons imported craftsmen to build their elegant mansions at Mulgoa, where building progress was only checked by adverse economic circumstances in the 1840s.

  In the 1820s and in the 1830s, more and more ‘gentlemen’ squatters arrived, also encouraged by the home government. Bourke’s Crown Lands Occupation Bill of 1836 systemized and extended the granting of temporary licences to be issued to persons of good repute on ‘runs’ beyond the official limits of occupation, effectively legalizing the squatting.11 A decade later, in 1845, Gideon Scott Lang defined squatting: ‘The first principle of squatting is that the squatter shall have full power to settle without restriction wherever he can find unoccupied pasture, and to take possession of as much land as his stock can occupy’.12 Donald Carisbrooke writes: ‘Many of the immigrants with capital who came to Australia in 1838 did not intend to make it their permanent home, but to return to Britain with their fortunes made’.13

  Some doctors and lawyers might have planned to return. But the exarmy and navy officers put out to grass by the recession which followed the Napoleonic War, and their half-pay brethren, were different. They had been allowed to commute their half pay into land purchases in the colony, especially in the Hunter River valley, and came to have considerable influence. Most considered themselves to be gentry, although Jane Austen, in her novels of that period, considered naval officers (who were unquestionably socially superior
to those from the army) to be on the borderline. To read Austen’s Persuasion, for example, is to understand how intensely small distinctions were felt. A knight was considerably inferior to a baronet and an admiral was barely on calling terms with either. Her characters include naval captains of 30 who had been promoted due to others being killed in action, who were no longer employed. Men like these became squatters in New South Wales, where the English social distinctions were copied.

  Some newcomers really were of the English gentry, or better. The Wyndhams, cousins of the Earl of Egremont, England’s largest landowner, and of a Secretary of State, were genuine aristocrats who built Dalwood in the Hunter.14 George Wyndham became a custodian of British ways in the Hunter. Governor Gipps called him a ‘gentleman greatly respected and of high repute for talents and education in the Colony’ when asking him to stand for the Legislative Council in March 1839 (which he declined on the ground of his private affairs requiring his undivided attention).15 Nonetheless, or perhaps because of it, Wyndham was seen by emancipists as a symbol of squatter arrogance. On that same occasion William Cox Jnr was approached by Gipps and also declined for similar reasons. This demonstrates one way in which the ‘the ancient nobility’, in Mudie’s pejorative phrase, were being asked to share their pre-eminence with relative newcomers.

  An important point about these arriving families was that they were almost a generation younger than the original exclusives, whose natural political enemies they became, whilst – as happens with immigrants almost anywhere – they in turn became resentful of those who followed, because the more numerous the squatters the more competition there was for land and labour. In so far as the original landed gentry were concerned, squatting was only acceptable if it was brought within the framework of ownership and attachment to the soil. They were particularly hostile to the small squatters, who ran a few sheep or cattle and were accused of stealing sheep and sheltering bushrangers. These men were usually on unclaimed land within the county boundaries. The main squatter territory, the area around the Hunter River, was quite different to either the Cumberland Plain or the land west of the mountains, having terrain suitable for both grazing and agriculture.16 It spawned a different society, obviously different to the small opportunist squatters and also to the genuine gentry. They included the viciously reactionary ‘Major’ James Mudie (a former officer of the Marines who had been a lieutenant, never a major).

  William Cox did eventually extend his interests to the Hunter too, although conflict between the old colonists and the new immigrants reached its worst proportions there, in an extreme reflection of the colony overall, where the free immigrants were generally disliked by both the native-born and their fathers, the emancipists.17 In the 1830s Chief Justice Forbes told Governor Bourke that ‘as he saw it there were two political groups in the colony – the immigrants and emancipists’.18 This was a simplification. Within the political stewpot there were also the increasing subsidiary groupings already mentioned; the emancipists’ native-born offspring; the squatters, the would-be gentleman immigrants and the increasing number of immigrant workers. They all contributed to the pressures on the exclusives.

  Looking at it from their angle, the historian John Ward asks, referring to the Macarthurs, how the squatters could have a credible commitment to the colony, as against the ‘ancient nobility’ who ‘had been granted land or bought it, who by skilful breeding had improved the quality of the fleeces and who by immense expenditures had built up permanent homesteads and establishments’. Freehold ownership of land, according to the Macarthurs, gave independent gentlemen their title to political and social authority.19 By the end of the 1820s, before the squatters began to arrive in any number, the Macarthurs’ Camden Park incorporated over 60,000 acres. By then John had died and the family’s authority was being exercised by his thoughtful son, James, and his nephew, Hannibal, while William Cox’s authority was increasingly being wielded in conjunction with his sons in a family enterprise which would be of much greater eventual extent than the Macarthurs’.

  It was against this increasingly agitated background that the landed gentry attempted to exercise ‘political and social authority’ from the 1820s onwards, once Macquarie had left. They were largely held together by the concept of respectability underpinning their position and they tried to shape society not only by participating in politics, but also through their role as economic men.20 As has been observed, Macquarie had kept a close eye on any activities rivalling his own and limited what the established landed gentry could do. He had increased the muscle of the Sydney Benevolent Society and given his approbation ‘in the most flattering terms’ to a petition for trial by jury, the ‘valued inheritance of our ancestors’, as well as supporting the lifting of restrictions on the burthen of trading ships, explained below. But he stopped the formation of an agricultural society, which could have helped the farming community as a whole. Archibald Bell’s replies to Bigge’s questioning on 27 November 1819 show that it had been a genuinely disinterested idea, although with one qualification:

  [Bigge] ‘Was any attempt made to form an agricultural society?’

  [Bell] ‘Several attempts have been made & proposals offered … by the Gentlemen of the Colony, but the application was negatived’.

  ‘Can you recollect the names of the persons who joined in the application?’

  ‘Mr Cox, Mr Marsden, the two Messrs Blaxland, Sir John Jamison and I think the Judge Advocate, there were others who names I forget & I think it took place about two years ago … this was submitted to the consideration of the Governor with a request that he would become the Patron.’21

  Bell also explained that there had been objections to the possibility of emancipists being allowed to join the society, which qualification the Governor disliked:

  I heard that he [Macquarie] objected to it as persons who had been convicts were not likely to be admitted … the mode of admission was to have been by ballot & although no specific article was framed to exclude this description of persons, we [supported] the principle of their exclusion.22

  Nor until after Macquarie had left were the more intellectual Philosophical Society of Australia and the Sydney Institution able to come to life, and leaders like Sir John Jamison become free to launch new initiatives. Jamison himself, for many years an associate of William’s, was to prove an energetic liberal and supporter of the emancipists, becoming a contentious figure as a result.23 Liberals like Jamison and Governor Bourke supported ex-convicts’ aspirations out of intellectual conviction, while William appears to have done so out of sympathy and understanding for their situation. It was also no coincidence that this energetic discussion of possible improvements came about after Bigge’s long visit in 1819–21. The Commissioner had been very concerned with improvements, which his report reflected.

  The landed gentry’s inclination towards disinterested benevolent work had been evident long before Macquarie left and Bigge took his report to parliament. As might be expected, the magistrates appealed for help for the Hawkesbury community after floods, as they had done under Bligh. Thus in June 1817 William headed an appeal to the Governor about the ‘great distress occasioned by the recent inundations’, to which Macquarie responded on 17 June, giving relief.24 William also led the Hawkesbury Benevolent Society, jointly with magistrates Brabyn, Cartwright and Mileham. On 20 May 1819 Macquarie acknowledged a letter from them about a general meeting and replied:

  For the interests of the Poor of the Districts of the Hawkesbury … I shall be happy to give the said Committee in trust for the support of the Benevolent Institution, one thousand acres of land in any part of the Colony where Crown lands remain still unappropriated.

  The gift evidently paid results over the years. It was noted at Windsor on 3 December 1827 that:

  Members of the Select Committee [of the Society] having perused and made ourselves fully acquainted with the Method adopted by William Cox, Brabyn and Bell Esqrs … the measures resolved upon are most conducive to the in
terests of the Society.25

  Income came from the sales of cattle bred from a donated herd. Since the stockholders were careful to cull their own herds of the worst animals when making donations, the society was reckoned to have ‘owned the roughest mob of Colonial cattle’.26

  Similarly, on 3 May 1823 several JPs, including William, wrote to Governor Brisbane about relief for aged persons ‘who have been discharged from the benefit of His Majesty’s stores [and] … are in the utmost distress, nearly the whole of them being incapable of labor and subsisting on the precarious bounty of their neighbours’. The oldest was 90 and the 20 included two soldiers’ widows of 60. Brisbane’s secretary, Goulburn, agreed to put them ‘on the stores’.27 William also made more directly personal efforts to help those in distress. On 2 February 1823 he asked Brisbane to be ‘graciously pleased to grant [a 78-year-old] a ration from His Majesty’s stores’. This was an ex-convict ‘oppressed with infirmities and [who] can no longer labour to procure a subsistence’, having been employed ‘as a labourer on my farm for the last fifteen years and conducted himself with the strictest honesty’. Brisbane replied: ‘Most strongly recommended to be admitted to the Benevolent Fund’, although William might have been expected to help a long-serving employee himself.28

  Overall, with government assistance, he and the other magistrates were often successful in combating the great poverty there had long been among smallholders on the Hawkesbury and, unlike Jamison, he was not in conflict with Brisbane. He resigned from the presidency of the Benevolent Society in January 1824. William Jnr, who lived at Richmond after he left the army, was elected treasurer in 1827. This was a small sign of the next generation of Coxes giving some thought to the society they lived in. As will be seen in the next chapter, they were more inclined towards simply living like gentlemen, whilst accepting the kind of local obligations that their parallel squires in England performed.