William Cox Read online

  WILLIAM COX

  Blue Mountains Road Builder and Pastoralist

  WILLIAM COX

  Richard Cox

  Rosenberg Publishing, $29.95 (pbk), $14.99 (Ebook)

  Bruce Elder, Sydney Morning Herald – Spectrum, Saturday 4th August 2012

  Given that in 1814, with a work team of only 30 convicts, he built a 163-kilometre road across the Blue Mountains in about six months, William Cox deserves a place in the pantheon of Australia's greatest early settlers. Yet, like many engineers, his contribution has been largely overlooked.

  It is a comment on the nation's indifference to its history that this book, written by Cox's English great-great-grandson, is the first full biography of a complex man who was dismissed from the NSW Corps, fathered 10 children, was the co-founder of Australia's first agricultural society, became a prosperous landowner and pastoralist, and, according to some sources, was antagonistic to Aborigines while being a champion of citizen's rights for emancipists.

  Richard is an Oxford University graduate who has published 12 novels and several nonfiction titles. This is a well-researched and well-written account.

  William Cox, JP, in mid-life as a senior magistrate

  WILLIAM COX

  Blue Mountains Road Builder and Pastoralist

  Richard Cox

  ROSENBERG

  First published in Australia in 2012

  by Rosenberg Publishing Pty Ltd

  PO Box 6125, Dural Delivery Centre NSW 2158

  Phone: 61 2 9654 1502 Fax: 61 2 9654 1338

  Email: [email protected]

  Web: www.rosenbergpub.com.au

  FB: www.facebook.com/RosenbergPublishing

  Copyright © Richard Cox 2012

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher in writing

  National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry

  Author: Cox, Richard Hubert, 1931-

  Title: William Cox : Blue Mountains road builder and pastoralist / Richard Cox.

  ISBN: 9781921719530 (pbk.)

  ISBN: 9781922013620 (Ebook)

  ISBN: 9781922013637 (Epub)

  ISBN: 9781922013644 (mobi/Kindle)

  Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.

  Subjects: Cox, William, 1764-1837.

  Mountain roads–New South Wales–Blue Mountains.

  Livestock workers–New South Wales–Biography.

  Soldiers–New South Wales–Biography.

  Dewey Number: 625.7092

  Front cover illustration: Convicts repairing the Blue Mountains road, circa 1826, by Augustus Earle (Nan Kivell Collection, National Library of Australia) with a small portrait of William Cox as a young officer (Courtesy of Christopher Cox)

  Printed in China by Everbest Printing Co Limited

  Contents

  Acknowledgments

  Metric Conversions

  Foreword: A Contradictory Character

  1 An English Gentleman With no Money

  2 Emigration – Hostile Ships, Storms and Mutinies

  3 The Second Largest Landowner in Two Years, Bankrupt in Three

  4 Rehabilitated as Macquarie’s Protégé

  5 The Challenge of the Blue Mountains

  6 Mount York Defeated

  7 A Family Enterprise

  8 The Perquisites of Office

  9 Toughly Interviewed by Commissioner Bigge

  10 A Wife Lost and a New Marriage

  11 Dispossessing the Aborigines

  12 The Exclusives Lose Their Dominance

  13 The Cox Dynasty Established

  Bibliography

  Notes

  Index

  Acknowledgments

  This book derives largely from an MPhil thesis submitted at the Menzies Centre for Australian Studies, King’s College London. I owe profuse thanks to Professor Carl Bridge and Dr Frank Bongiorno at the Centre.

  I have also received valuable contributions from various members of the Cox family, notably Christopher Cox at Burrundulla; James Cox of Anglesea, Victoria; Barrie Cox; Thelma Birrell; Jamie Cox of Longford, Tasmania; and Yvonne and Bryan Cox in New Zealand.

  Others to whom I owe a real debt for help and encouragement include Professor Alan Atkinson, Professor John Gascoigne, Dr Grace Karskens and most particularly Babette Smith. Nor should I fail to thank the everhelpful staff at the Mitchell Library, where the Cox family papers were deposited in 1965.

  Richard Cox

  Coombe Bissett

  England

  Metric Conversions

  Many measurements, and all historical ones, are given in Imperial form. The equivalents are set out below:

  1 mile = 1.60 kilometres

  1 acre = 0.40 hectares

  1 foot = 30 centimetres

  1 pound (lb) = 450 grams

  1 yard (3 feet) = 90 centimetres

  1 pound (£) = $2

  12 pence (d) = 1 shilling

  20 shillings (s) = £1

  1 guinea (£1 1s) = $2.10

  1 gill = 140 millilitres

  Foreword:

  A Contradictory Character

  The stock, when valued, was considered worth twenty five percent more than the purchase money, consequently the farm did not stand Mr Cox in sixpence. What made things even better was that Mr Cox paid him with bills on the regimental agents.

  Joseph Holt, Irish rebel and farm manager for William Cox, paymaster of the New South Wales Corps, October 18001

  MEMORANDUM

  Paymaster William Cox, of the New South Wales Corps, is dismissed the Service.

  London Gazette, 16 April 18082

  Mr Cox is a Sensible, intelligent Man, of great arrangement, and the best agriculturalist in the colony.

  Governor Macquarie, recommending William Cox to be the commandant at Bathurst, 24 June 18153

  Let a foreigner, a stranger, be told that it is the Convict, the refuse of our Country, that [sic] 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.

  William Cox to Commissioner Bigge, 7 May 18204

  I have received also a grant of land of 100 acres for my Services on the Western road. I have sold it to Mr Cox. He gave me £25 for it, he paid me in money and a cow, and several orders, that I have paid.

  James Watson, emancipated for working on the Bathurst road, in complaint to Bigge, 29 November 18205

  There is not a magistrate in the Colony who has given as much of his time to the business of the Crown & the public these ten years past as myself … If any man ever laboured amidst a den of thieves and a nest of hornets it is myself.

  William Cox to Commissioner Bigge, 4 December 18206

  What is to be made of these contradictory statements by and about the man who made his name building the first road across the Blue Mountains for Governor Macquarie? William Cox had been dismissed from the army in 1808 for the ‘malversation’ of the New South Wales Corps’ funds, in order to buy himself land. Yet he managed to recover from bankruptcy and become a leading pastoralist in the colony in the 1820s, helping to carry through the pastoralist development which gave Australia its first significant exports, as well as championing the rights of ex-convicts. By the time of his death in 1837 he had become a ‘national’ figure. The contemporary quotations heading this foreword show that, as well as being a pioneer he was a man whose contradictory character, but constructive actions, not to mention his temperament, make him what one historian calls ‘a fascinating if roguish character in early Australian history’ and, when building the Blue Mountains road, ‘a hu
mane yet seemingly inspiring taskmaster’.7 Having arrived in the colony in January 1800, in charge of a shipload of convicts on the Minerva, when he became noted for his humanity, he went on, after recovering from bankruptcy, to die one of the wealthiest men in the colony. He has many memorials. New South Wales is littered with Cox roads, while a Coxs River runs out of the mountains west of Lithgow. An obelisk stands on Mount York, commemorating his road building achievement, and he has a memorial window in Sydney’s St Andrew’s Cathedral. Although a Federal Department of Transport building in Canberra was named after him as recently as 1986, few people today know who he was.

  The Blue Mountains road was an outstanding achievement by any standard. With a gang of 30 convicts Cox constructed more than 100 miles of roads across appalling terrain, rising to over 4000 feet, in a few days over six months. The road gave access to the extensive grazing around Bathurst, at the time when the colony was expanding and was soon to need more land. At the age of 50 he shared his convict labourers’ privations, often sleeping in a bark hut in bitter weather. In this respect he was a forerunner of the distinctively Australian ethos that a leader must prove himself to his men to be accepted by them.

  If you were to lay the literary pages devoted to convicts end to end they might almost make a pathway from Sydney to the mountains. Those devoted to the early colonial gentry would barely carpet the drawing room at Government House. Because some made their fortunes – and the colony’s – from merino sheep they became known as Pure Merinos. Very little of substance has been written about them since Samuel Bennett’s often acerbic History of Australian Discovery and Colonisation, published in Sydney in 1865. Many Pure Merino families were bankrupted by the Bank of Australia’s crash in 1843 and a catastrophic fall in the value of sheep and cattle. In Bennett’s words, ‘Castles in the air faded’. William had died in 1837, so never saw this. But the family survived. He had realized early on that the English landed gentry’s system of primogeniture and entail was irrelevant in Australia, due to the abundance of land, and he ran his estates as a family enterprise, which was how they survived.

  In many ways William’s career reflects both the ambitions and the flaws of early Australian development, in what it must be remembered was a harsh and unfamiliar environment. He was a man of determination, an outstanding manager, often more fair minded than his contemporary landowners. He was considerate of the ex-convicts who he recognized had created the colony by their labour. He appreciated that when the British government had sent out female convicts as well as men at the very beginning it was inevitably creating a future generation of free-born British citizens, with citizens’ rights. He supported the campaigns for trial by jury and an elected assembly. He had a lifelong concern with improvement, being a founder vice president of the Agricultural Society (still flourishing today) in 1822. Yet he maintained an eighteenth-century view of entitlement to the spoils of office, both as a magistrate and an administrator.

  Commissioner Bigge described William in 1822 as one of the six best farmers in the colony.8 At his home estate of Clarendon on the Hawkesbury he set the pattern of an ambitious landholder, employing large numbers of convicts and also helping deserving men towards emancipation, for which he was heavily criticized by Bigge. He and his contemporary free settlers were driven by the lesson of eighteenth-century England that the ownership of land spelt wealth, power and social position (which was still entirely true when Jane Austen was writing in the early nineteenth century). The pastoralist gentry’s eventual failure to retain pre-eminence in the colony has been described by one historian as being ‘nearly as significant and as interesting as any success in Australian history’.9

  All land ownership in the colony depended ultimately not upon the Crown, as the government liked to think, but on the dispossession of the Aborigines. William was aware of their plight, but he did little about it. As a magistrate on the Hawkesbury he proposed tough measures against Aborigines after the murder of settlers in 1816. However, he employed them (as guides) both on making the road in 1814 and as farm workers at Mulgoa later, finding they worked just as well as whites if properly fed and paid. He was also accused of advocating the massacre of Aborigines at Bathurst during the ‘Black War’ of 1824, although this is far from proven.

  As a person William was outwardly strong-minded and straightforward, although described by a daughter-in-law in later life as irascible and not liking to be contradicted, but by then he was 68. He was actually a man of contradictions. His innocent expression in a portrait of him as a young officer hardly prepares one for the stern face of the magistrate. One reason for his not being as well known as his contemporaries, the outstanding example being John Macarthur, is that William seldom courted publicity. He probably never got over the disgrace of his bankruptcy and therefore avoided controversy. Governor Brisbane put him forward for the first Legislative Council in 1824, although only officials were chosen.

  A century and three quarters after William’s death, Clarendon on the Hawkesbury is long gone, the farm now an RAAF airfield, the name preserved only on a railway station. But his descendants still run the family estate at Mudgee, where land was first acquired in 1821. It continues as an operational family estate. The Coxes still breed racehorses and support the Jockey Club, which they helped to found in 1825. By contrast the Macarthurs’ Camden, which encom-passed 60,000 acres in the 1820s, is now almost swallowed up by Sydney and is effectively an entertainment complex and theme park, with paint ball games and one historic colonial house.

  William’s highly eulogistic Memoirs were ghosted and published 64 years after his death.

  1 An English Gentleman With no Money

  The bulk of William Cox’s career, with the spectacular ups and downs of a man who was capable of being idiosyncratic, to say the least, was spent in New South Wales. His reason for going there lay in the deprivation and lack of opportunity in rural Dorset, where he grew up, and in Wiltshire, where he lived when first married. His problem was that he was from the minor gentry, entitled to a coat of arms, but could not afford to be of it. His solution was emigration, although there is an inbuilt mystery about this, since he had a fairly high class clockmaking business in Wiltshire before he joined the regular army in 1795, later transferring to the New South Wales Corps. It must be assumed that the clockmaking was not doing well enough in a time of economic depression, while his father–in–law, who probably supported his business from London, died that year. Even so, it was a curious change of career, most likely prompted by lack of income. As Edna Hickson, a descendant of William’s and the editor of a reprint of his Memoirs, puts it: ‘At the end of the eighteenth century Englishmen with ambition and limited means could look to the Colonies for opportunities to enhance their chances of success in life’.1

  The War of Independence had closed off North America as a destination for emigrants, except for the wastes of Upper Canada, frozen in winter and plagued by flies and mosquitoes in summer. William might have tried for the East India Company, hoping to make his pile and retire to England a rich man, although cadet entry to the Company was oversubscribed. That he opted instead for a completely new life in a recently established penal colony tells one a good deal not merely about William himself, but also about those other free-settler compatriots who came to form the pastoralist colonial gentry of the colony and who had such a great influence on Australia’s early development. Most of them, like John Macarthur, D’Arcy Wentworth, John Piper, William Lawson and in a different way, the colony’s chaplain Samuel Marsden, had the same motivation. All escaped unsatisfactory opportunities at home, exploiting military or official appointments to start a new life. They had learnt from the late eighteenth-century society they lived in that the ownership of land spelt wealth and power, even if the possibility of becoming members of a local landed gentry in Australia only became apparent after they arrived.2

  The timbered frontage of William’s birthplace at Wimborne. Inside it is decidedly cramped (Author’s photo)


  William was born on 19 December 1764 in the ancient, but isolated, town of Wimborne Minster in Dorset, which lies some six miles from the port of Poole. He had an elder brother, Robert, born in 1754, and two elder sisters, Jane born in 1758 and Anne born in 1762, neither of whom married. His father, Robert, was a ship owner and master mariner at the vast natural harbour of Poole. Shipping was the family business. His grandfather, also William, had traded with Newfoundland. The trade was extremely profitable, Newfoundland having the most prolific fishing grounds in the world. Ships from Poole took salt and general supplies to Newfoundland, shipped salted cod, furs and seal skins from there to the Mediterranean, and returned to Dorset with wine, raisins and olive oil.

  In the 1770s some 70 sailing ships made the transatlantic passage every year. From 1600 to 1815 Poole had ‘enjoyed an era of great prosperity’, which would only end after the Napoleonic Wars.3 The wealth of the Poole merchants ‘equalled, and often exceeded, that of most of the landed gentry of Dorset’.4 Robert Cox, however, was not a prominent ship owner. In fact the records do not mention him at all. Nor was this was the kind of enterprise a true Dorset gentleman of the period would have run himself, though he might have bought shares in it.

  Crossing the Atlantic in small ships was much more dangerous than coastal trading, as one chronicler of Dorset life, Jo Draper, points out.5 Robert Cox was lost at sea before William was born, leaving his mother not only bereaved, but largely bereft. Robert is known to have made a will – no longer extant – before a previous voyage, which would have provided for his wife. But when he was gone she does not seem to have been left at all well-off financially, despite having help from her father.

  On 8 March 1765 Jane Cox had to present herself, supported by her father, Robert Harvey, to provide a bond for £1400 – a considerable sum – to the Official of the Peculiar and Exempt Jurisdiction of Wimborne, and arrange the administration of her affairs. The Jurisdiction had authority over a great deal more than just church matters.6 Evidently, agreement was achieved. The family remained in their house in King Street, facing the Minster and, in due course, she sent William to the Queen Elizabeth I Grammar School, little more than one hundred yards away round the corner. The Cox home was known then as the Poet’s House, because the poet Matthew