William Cox

by Richard Cox

  John Macarthur, the previous paymaster from whom William bought Brush Farm in 1800 (Dixson Galleries, State Library of NSW [DG 242])

  Port Jackson as seen by the surgeon of the Minerva in January 1800 (British Library Mss 13880)

  By November 1791 Phillip had abandoned agricultural efforts at Sydney in favour of the fertile land round Parramatta and established a farm at what he named Rose Hill. He then decided to lay down a township west of the redoubt, between it and Government House, first constructed by him in 1793 as a very simple building. Only later did it become the elegant building which still overlooks the centre of the conurbation. Parramatta being situated 24 kilometres from Sydney by land, further by river, it was never the seat of the Governor’s main residence, nor of the New South Wales Corps’ principal barracks. Those were in Sydney, between what Macquarie named George Street and York Street, bounded at one end of King Street. Today’s Wynyard Square occupies part of the substantial site and the short Barrack Street led to it. It was from there that Major Johnston marched his men overnight to deal with the Castle Hill (or Vinegar Hill) convict uprising in 1804.

  In terms of the acquisition of land by officers, Parramatta was far more important than anywhere else in the early days. On 25 February 1793 acting Governor Grose gave John Macarthur, who was administering the settlement there, a grant of 100 acres and a further 100 a year later. This became Elizabeth Farm, named after John’s wife. The house is still there today, on land running down to the river. Gradually officers obtained plots of land in the developing town, or near it. William’s purchase of Brush Farm fitted into a regimental pattern at the settlement, although it was further out in what is now Ryde. The name Brush Farm derived from the patches of local rainforest, or ‘brush’, surrounding the upper areas of The Ponds. The present day Brush Farm house was not where William and Rebecca lived. It was originally Joseph Holt’s house, greatly extended and glorified by Gregory Blaxland, who owned it from 1807.2 If the surgeon Price’s watercolour of Mr Cox’s ‘box’ is correct, William’s own house was much closer to the water. From here he would have ridden on horseback to the paymaster’s office in the barracks. The family evidently rode, since Holt described how in 1803 he found Rebecca had no horse at her disposal after the bankruptcy, when they were still living at Brush Farm.

  A woman of New South Wales and an officer of the NSW Corps at Parramatta when William was there (Juan Ravenet, published Paris 1824)

  A map drawn in 1804 by the colonial surveyor, George Evans, shows how Parramatta was laid out. The eastern end of the High Street, now George Street, was the barracks, originally called the Redoubt. Facing it at the western end was Government House in its domain on a low hill. The gaol stood a way to the north and the hospital a little closer in, by the oxbow lake known as the Crescent. Directly between Government House and the barracks, lining the 205 foot wide High Street, were the thatched homes of the officers and officials mentioned earlier, on small rectangular plots of land. Some of their owners were to feature largely in William’s future life, notably Captain John Piper, John Brabyn, Edward Abbott and D’Arcy Wentworth. The contrast between how some lived then and how they lived later is seen at an extreme in the case of John Piper, William’s particular friend. Piper later made a great deal of money as the Naval Officer at Sydney, collecting customs duties, and in 1822 completed the magnificent mansion Henrietta Villa at Point Piper on the Sydney foreshore, only to be bankrupted in 1827.

  The historian Michael Roe comments that ‘The oldest established [gentry] could trace their colonial roots to the first twenty years of Australian history – to the officers of the military establishment … or the civil establishment’.3 Among the civilians was that unusual character, the chaplain Samuel Marsden, the sturdy son of a Yorkshire blacksmith who became notorious for devoting as much time to his four-legged flock as to his parochial one. The pumpkin-faced Marsden resided close to the simple church at Parramatta which is today St John’s Cathedral, where William’s second marriage took place in 1821. He later had a grandiose Georgian rectory built for himself.

  Samuel Marsden, chaplain, pastoralist and magistrate, conducted William’s second marriage (Alexander Turnbull Library, New Zealand)

  Parramatta was thus the focal point of William Cox’s first years in the colony. Early sketches show the convicts’ huts, cultivated fields, farm carts, Aborigines and women walking down the High Street. It was a small community where everyone – excluding the convicts – knew everyone else and where William rapidly became prominent. His experiences illustrate the strong position the New South Wales Corps’ officers held in acquiring estates in the 1790s and 1800s (a strength totally demolished when Governor Macquarie was ordered to send the regiment home in 1810). As John Macarthur’s wife, Elizabeth, had told a friend back in 1790 – only two years after the landing of the First Fleet – ‘This country offers numerous advantages to persons holding appointments under government’.4 That also presaged the ways by which William, and such of his contemporaries as John Macarthur, acquired grazing land on a large scale and created great estates. It can bear repeating that they had brought with them the overriding lesson from late eighteenth-century England that the ownership of land spelt wealth and power. They relatively quickly turned themselves into a dominant class of landed gentry in the colony, roughly between the governorates of King and Bourke.

  Since Elizabeth Macarthur was telling friends about the opportunities in the colony eight years before William transferred into the Corps it is reasonable to assume that he knew all about them in advance, even if he may not have made the 1797 visit. As it was, the early years were for him a sorry saga of the eighteenth-century style chicanery thought acceptable at the time – ambition, opportunism and a quite extraordinary degree of naiveté. The opportunism is illustrated by William unhesitatingly using regimental funds to buy land, as recorded by Joseph Holt and eventually realized by the army authorities at home.

  Although the Colonial Secretary’s correspondence and the Historical Records of Australia yield bare facts about William’s acquisitions, while the Sydney Gazette published sale notices, most of the knowledge of the early days at Brush Farm derives from Holt’s Memoirs. At the outset, on 22 January 1800, William had told him: ‘I have money, and you are possessed of considerable knowledge in agricultural pursuits; suppose we join them together, I think we should easily make a fortune’.5 Given that William’s main civilian experience was of clockmaking, and Holt had been a successful farmer in Ireland, this was a prudent move.6 The terms of the deal were not instantly agreed. Holt refused a salary on the grounds that he had been a master all his life and had ‘great reluctance to become a servant’. In the end they had no written arrangement, Holt being satisfied that he would receive a fair remuneration, which William called ‘a hard bargain’.7

  Holt continued to work as William’s farm manager through to April 1804, long after the bankruptcy, and continued to keep in touch with William, as a letter from William to Governor King of 24 December 1804 shows. In this letter William recounted how Holt had warned him of a planned uprising by English convicts, including some of his own workers.8 Holt and William also had their quarrels. One such occasion was in October 1800 when Holt, who as a former Irish rebel was held under constant suspicion by officials, was not – in his view – adequately defended by Cox against accusations. After they had made things up, Holt and his wife went home and ‘had scarcely got into our house before the servant arrived with a basket, and a note from Mrs Cox; in the basket were two gallons of wine and two of rum, which the good lady begged us to accept’. This is one of the few recorded examples of Rebecca’s actions in running the Cox household and illustrates her practicality in immediately making amends for her husband’s mistakes plus an instinctive generosity.9

  Macarthur sold Brush Farm at Dundas because he was thinking of returning to England. William is highly likely to have known this, not least because he was taking over the job which Macarthur previously held. Holt des
cribed it vividly: ‘I had never seen such mould as it was, for it resembled an old churchyard; loose black rank looking earth’. However, the ground was ‘very well situated and I gave my opinion very much in favour of the purchase’. Holt moved his family there on 1 February 1800 and immediately ‘prepared sixty acres to be sown in with wheat’. He relates how Macarthur cheated William by selling him ‘a large flock of sheep … They were old rotten ewes of the Bengal breed; he paid three pounds each for them and one hundred and fifty pounds for a brood mare.’ Given that William had been a clockmaker, it is hardly surprising that he was fooled. Holt later described Macarthur as a ‘very overbearing and tyrannical man’.10

  By contrast to Macarthur, who he condemned, Holt considered ‘Captain Cox was a man of strict integrity … But whatever Mr McArthur thought, he [i.e., Macarthur] did not act in this affair in a gentleman like manner’.11 This is an interesting reflection, given the nature of Cox’s land dealings and of Macarthur becoming pre-eminent among the colonial landed gentry. It incidentally shows that William must have had considerable sums of cash with him when he arrived, at least partly from his dealings in Rio, and probably also from having sold the Devizes house.

  Whether his first flock was rotten or not, by November 1802 the Agricultural Returns for the colony show Cox as owning 1440 acres and 1100 sheep – as many as Macarthur, who had now left the army. The officers often took over small acreages from ex-soldiers, persuading them to exchange their land for goods or for spirits. The practice was bemoaned by Governor King, who castigated the ‘few monopolizing traders … not failing to ruin those they marked for their prey by the baneful lure of spirits’.12 King regarded the practice as morally dubious, despite the lax standards of such actions of his own as later exchanging grants of land with his successor, Bligh.

  Although William Cox was not guilty of such trading, his attempts to build an agricultural empire in a hurry seem to have been rooted in an eighteenth-century view of the perquisites of office. There was a huge advantage in being able to offer bills drawn on the regimental agents, as they were payable in sterling, which did not circulate in the colony and was much sought after. Most payments were made with promissory notes. Looked at from almost any perspective, two aspects of the colony’s initial planning were extraordinary. One was that the authorities did not envisage the need for a form of legal currency. The other was that they do not seem to have appreciated how by bringing out female convicts along with men, they were guaranteeing a next generation of free-born British citizens. The effect of this will be seen in later chapters.

  Once he had bought Brush Farm, William quickly went on to acquire a highly productive fruit farm adjoining it. This was the 600 acre Canterbury Farm, belonging to the Reverend Richard Johnson, a Church of England clergyman who had brought orange seeds from Rio de Janeiro and also grew nectarines, peaches and apricots, as well as having planted two acres of vines. Having made his fortune he was leaving the colony. William promptly built a road connecting the two farms, along the line of the Kissing Point road, started to build a ‘large dwelling house’ and continued to expand his holdings.13 Holt lists a considerable number of other small land purchases from individuals, a selection of which illustrate how the 1440 acres were accumulated in an almost ravenous way.

  Holt comments on his own astuteness when he ‘made a good bargain for Mr Cox, clearing for him above £1,000 in one year by these purchases’.14 Two such were of 30 acres from Thomas Higgins for £35 and of 50 acres from Mr Hume for £45. They bought John Ramsey’s farm of 75 acres for £60, Berrington’s 25 acres for £100, and 100 acres from Captain McKellar ‘for £50 and ten gallons of rum’, as well as smaller properties which may have belonged to ex-soldiers. Holt again records, with a note of triumph, how they acquired a 100 acre farm from a Dr Thompson, with 124 sheep and paid £500 for it, as usual with bills drawn on the regimental agents. The accompanying stock was, in the words quoted at the head of the Foreword, ‘worth twenty five percent more than the purchase money … Mr Cox paid him with bills on the regimental agents.’

  This particular deal had a less than happy ending for the seller, but provides a description of Cox’s farms. Dr Thompson’s wife deserted him for an officer on the French ship on which they left, taking the bills of exchange with her. The ship was one of two corvettes (Le Geographe and Le Naturaliste) sent out by Napoleon Buonaparte to survey the coast of Australia. The French naturalist, Peron, who travelled with them, visited Brush Farm in 1802 and was highly complimentary about it. His subsequent book described the farm in a way no one else did:

  Often on the summit of a picturesque hillock may be a discerned a large and elegant mansion, surrounded by more considerable cultivated lands and covered by greater numbers of flocks and labourers … The one in question belonged to Mr Cox … As soon as he perceived M. Bellefin and me, he got into a boat belonging to his farm and, coming to our vessel invited us in so pressing a manner to pass the night at his house that we could not resist his friendly solicitations … On a second voyage which I made to his estate [with Colonel Paterson and Mr Laycock] Mr Cox took us all to dinner to another farm, still more rich and elegant … more inland on the side of Castle Hill … The road which leads from one to the other of these farms is so wide and convenient that we went over it in a carriage. It is between six and seven miles in length and to make it immense loads of rubbish were necessary. The whole of Mr Cox’s land amounts to 860 acres … [with] 800 sheep of the finest breeds.15

  The second farm was clearly Canterbury, the inclusion of which in the estate increased Holt’s daily ride of inspection to about 12 miles along the line of the Kissing Point road. The house, which so impressed Peron, must have been ‘the handsome place’ which Holt describes William as having wished to build. Perhaps the most telling point in Peron’s narrative is that he was taken to see Cox’s properties by Colonel Paterson (the commanding officer of the New South Wales Corps) and his lady. Paterson was evidently showing off how advanced the colony had become to this French naturalist. He would later be criticized for condoning Cox’s venality.

  Holt and Cox bought stock again from Macarthur despite the rotten ewes, including ‘one hundred head of cattle, bulls and cows’ and 69 pigs. Holt cannily ‘advised Mr Cox to take a bottle or two of wine with him, and then to make the bargain after dinner’. The Irishman had a great belief in using liquor to facilitate dealings, as he later showed when the bankruptcy sales took place. Whether because of the alcoholic influence or not, William only had to pay £500 down for the cattle, on the basis that the stock would later be divided. When that happened they had so multiplied that Holt cleared a £1200 profit for William on the deal. ‘So,’ Holt recorded with satisfaction, ‘we made up the loss he had sustained by the manoeuvres of the first bargain.’ There was an attractive deviousness about Holt. Not all their offers were successful, however. On 14 May 1802 William made a credit offer for Major Foveaux’s farm and stock, but was outbid by a Lieutenant Rowley’s cash offer of £700. In 1800 Foveaux had been the largest landowner in the colony, was an important officer in the Corps and may have been wary of William’s land deals, yet not willing – like Paterson – to denounce the use of bills drawn on the regimental agents. The officers were almost endemically corrupt.16

  Holt also describes how he set about planting William’s land. At the outset, in February 1800, he had prepared 60 acres to be planted with wheat and began sowing the seed on 24 March, finishing on 3 June. In October he planted Indian corn.17 This was all done by hoeing between the tree stumps, which in the early days were not dug up when the ground was cleared, making it impractical to use ploughs (although Macarthur had imported the first iron plough in 1794). All farming involved the employment of assigned convicts. In the same year of 1800 Holt was appalled when forced to witness the flogging of an Irish convict named Fitzgerald at Toongabbie, who had been sentenced to 300 lashes. During this often quoted incident, Holt wrote that the ‘flesh and skin blew off my face as they shook off the cats
[cat o’ nine tails]’. He commented that this flogging took place although ‘it was against the law to flog a man past fifty lashes without a doctor’.18 Holt then had a seven pound hoe made, which he required labourers working for him to use, instead of being flogged, and called it his personal flogger, also a much quoted remark. On William seeing it ‘Mr Cox said “this is a terrible tool”’.19

  The background to any agricultural enterprise was always that settlers had to learn how to farm in completely unfamiliar territory with strange vegetation, where land could, in Holt’s words ‘require labour and manure as much as the mountains of Wicklow; but [with the benefit that] every district yields two crops a year’.20 Even so, the climate was often hostile. Drought could alternate with flood, and army worm could devastate crops almost overnight. Thus on 14 October of William’s first year a hailstorm destroyed every acre of the wheat Holt had so laboriously planted. A worse disaster struck on 21 October 1803, when their harvest was attacked by the blight known as rust. The Memoirs say that 266 acres of his wheat were completely lost in three days and the produce of those acres was not worth £20.21 Farming would also involve a problem that Holt did not have to encounter, but which William later did on the Hawkesbury in 1816 and at Bathurst in 1824, namely the increasing displacement of Aboriginal people, with resultant violent conflict.