by Richard Cox
There had been various personal disadvantages for William regarding this enterprise. One was being absent from his own farm for a long period. A Cox family memoir suggests that ‘Clarendon still had growing pains’ and asks, in relation to the building of the mountain road, ‘Was the absence from home and family justifiable?’ Macquarie recognized the same point, remarking that ‘Mr Cox voluntarily relinquished the comforts of his own house and the society of his numerous family and exposed himself to much personal fatigue, with only such covering as a bark hut could afford from the inclemency of the weather’.9 As far as organization was concerned, Rebecca had managed Clarendon perfectly well during her husband’s three-year absence from 1806 to 1809, assisted by James King, and William brushed such disincentives aside. He had grown into an extremely determined man and the Governor was correct in admiring his qualities of leadership and personal courage.
Nonetheless, one disincentive was inescapable. Come December, William would reach his fiftieth birthday and would attain that age high up on the mountains in bitter weather. True, he was at the peak of his abilities, but the half century is a moment when any man has to start looking after himself physically. The roughness of the mountains would often mean that the improvised caravan was unable to be manoeuvred up slopes and had to be laboriously taken ahead. Addendums to his diary refer to William sleeping in bark huts, while later diary entries reveal that on several occasions he was ‘completely knocked up’ by his exertions.
The road progressed fast. A resting place subsequently named Springwood was created 12 miles from the ford, beyond the first depot. Secretary Campbell, in his account of the Governor’s tour of inspection in May 1815, described the 12 miles from the Emu ford to the first depot as passing through ‘a very handsome open forest of lofty trees, and much more practicable and easy than was expected’.10 His detailed account of that journey is very helpful in establishing how far exactly William’s party had reached at various times.
Soon the going became tougher and the obstacles more evident. William noted that ‘The ascent is steep; the soil rough and stony; the timber chiefly ironbark’. A superintendent was sent ahead to mark the next five miles through the bush from the depot to the next forest ground. The blacksmith’s forge was brought up and a chimney built for it. The soldiers were moved from the river to the depot.
Confusingly, by comparison with the distances later quoted by Campbell, William recorded, ‘Removed my caravan from the river to the depot on the mountain, a distance of five and three quarter miles and slept there the first night’. The depot was, as William makes clear, not far from the river and was certainly not on the mountain in any real sense. On 28 July he returned home to Clarendon for a brief stay, leaving Richard Lewis in charge, coming back on 1 August when he ‘found the road completed to the said depot, much to my satisfaction’.
In effect they were progressing in a leapfrogging way, as they would throughout the expedition, with William himself at the centre and the advance party ahead, while behind them provisions were moved slowly forward to new locations for the depot. ‘The workmen go with much cheerfulness and do their work well,’ he wrote on 2 August. ‘Gave them a quantity of cabbage as a present.’ Cabbages became a frequent gift to the men and must have been welcome to enliven the carefully counted pieces of pork from the barrels. Green vegetables also ward off scurvy, which did affect one man later.
Despite this good start, 2 August was soured by the fourth supervisor, Burne, refusing to take orders via Richard Lewis, saying he would only obey any from William. The response must have taken Burne aback. ‘I told him I should send any orders I should give to him by whom I pleased,’ William declared roundly. Eventually the supervisor said he would leave. On this William ordered the constable who was accompanying them to receive Burne’s gun and ammunition, he was struck off the stores and the party was informed that ‘he had nothing more to do with me or them’. Permitting such insubordination could have been potentially fatal to driving the project on.
On the following day two working gangs were sent two miles ahead and on 4 August the depot was ‘removed to seven and a half miles forward, as also the corporal and three privates’. The soldiers were there partly for protection against the ‘natives’ some of whom had been heard chattering in the distance after a single gunshot the day before. Nevertheless on 8 August ‘two natives from Richmond joined us; one shot a kangaroo’. It emerged later that William employed them as guides. Later he employed Aborigines, one from Mulgoa and the other from Richmond, at both of which places he owned estates.
The ‘natives’ were very minor nuisances compared to the thick scrub and brush which blocked the road builders’ path for days on end. William complained about it continually: ‘Very thick troublesome brush … Timber both thick and heavy with a very strong brush … brush very thick and heavy from the ninth to the tenth mile’ (8 August). A further hindrance was that good water might be a mile or more from the path of the road. They were briefly visited by G. W. Evans, the deputy surveyor who had established the route but whose track would later prove hazardous to follow. Always ahead of them lay the enticing prospect of ‘good forest ground down in the valley’. The problem was to be getting to it, or rather to a series of forest grounds, from the precipitous slopes of the long ridges which collectively constituted the massif of the mountains.
They ran out of food on 12 August. Gorman reported there were only 14 pieces of meat left and no sugar. At daylight next day William ‘sent Lewis to the depot with a letter to Mrs Cox to send me out immediately 300lb of beef’. Obtaining supplies from Clarendon, rather than from the Commissariat further off in Sydney, would become a relatively frequent occurrence. However, that 13th day of the month, far from being unlucky, although one of the soldiers became ill, saw them out of the brush ground. ‘Gave orders to all hands to remove forward tomorrow morning to the forest ground, about half-a-mile ahead of our work’. On 14 August William: ‘sent Lewis with a letter for the Governor, informing him we were without meat or sugar’. Happily, the next morning ‘at 9.00 a.m. arrived a cart from Clarendon with a side of beef 386lb, 60 cabbages, two bags of corn, etc, for the men’. He does not say what the men felt, but it would have been extraordinary if their loyalty had not been bolstered by these supplies coming from their employer’s own farm. As a young army officer, this author was told, ‘always make sure your men eat before you do’. William knew how important this can be for morale.
They now set off along a 12 mile ridge, as Blaxland had so unfortunately advised. The going through the forest was as bad as through the brush. The trees were gigantic. William noted on 17 August: ‘The timber … very tall and thick. Measured a dead tree which we felled that was 81ft to the first branch and a blood tree 15ft 6in in circumference’. Inevitably there were casualties during the tree felling, typically from long splinters, while both the men’s gear and the tools were wearing out. On 18 August Rebecca Cox came to the rescue again. ‘Got 2lb of shoemakers’ thread from Clarendon and put Headman, one of our men, to repair shoes during the week’’ The blacksmith was employed repairing tools and making nails for the men’s shoes in an improvised forge, for which a primitive chimney had to be built. The evening was stormy, a precursor of bad weather to come, ‘but the wind blew off the rain’. The stonemason went forward to examine a rocky ridge about three miles ahead, the aim being to level it. The roughness of the terrain is unchanged today and adventurous tourists can, and do, become perilously lost in it.
William returned to Clarendon for a week on 19 August, leaving Lewis and Hobby in charge. There must have been a great deal to attend to at home by now, what with up to 100 employees and the lands around Mulgoa as well, where Rebecca had first obtained a grant for Edward in 1804. Around 1811 William had built ‘The Cottage’ there for the boys until such time as they married. When he returned to the road building on 26 August he brought with him his son Henry, who had helped earlier at the depot. He records Henry helping to count what proved to
be a satisfactory 75 pieces of pork in a cask at the first depot, but does not mention him again.
There was a minor drama that day: ‘At 10 a.m. arrived at Martin’s, where I found the sergeant of the party, he having died the day before. Sent to Windsor for the sergeant commanding there for a coffin and party to bury him at Castlereagh (the Reverend Henry Fulton’s parish), but Sergeant Ray sent for the corpse to bring it to Windsor. Wrote to the Governor for another sergeant.’ It is all very laconically told, in the unemotional terms with which William would have been instructed to log events as an officer, a world away from the artificially elegant prose of the Governor’s secretary. He finally reached the working party at 2 pm, finding the road finished thus far, although Lewis had left ‘very ill of a sore throat’. This was a precursor of things to come. Continual rain and cold on the mountain would make many of the workmen ill. Meanwhile William recorded of the men tersely: ‘Done well’.
By 28 August William had ‘removed, with all the people, to a little forward of the 16th mile’. Lewis was back and two more natives, Joe from Mulgoa and Coley from Richmond had joined them – promising to remain. But the mountain was proving a formidable obstacle. In the ensuing days they had to remove ‘an immense quantity of rock, both going up the mountain and to the pass leading to the bluff on the west of it’. William decided to make a road off the bluff, instead of winding round it, and had timber cut to ‘frame the road on to the rock to the ridge below it, about 20ft in depth’: not an easy procedure.
When William eventually reached it on 3 September he recorded unemotionally: ‘The road finished to Caley’s heap of stones, 17¾ miles’. This was near present day Linden. It had taken from 7 August to construct nine miles of road. The next day he clambered up to Evans’ cave and got ‘a view of the country from north west round to south west as far as the eye can carry you’. He could even see Windsor. It must have been truly inspiring, because William was not given to praising the scenery. On the Governor’s tour Campbell recorded the country here as becoming ‘altogether mountainous and extremely rugged’. The pile of stones attracted his attention; ‘it is close to the line of road on top of a rugged and abrupt ascent, and is supposed to have been placed by Mr Caley’. The Governor named it Caley’s Repulse.11 As mentioned earlier, the cairn had not been created by Caley at all. Today this is part of an excitingly ‘wild’ Blue Mountains Drive for tourists, but two centuries ago the landscape was menacingly hard to negotiate. Fortunately the one hazard the forests did not conceal was dangerous predators. Australia has none, except crocodiles.
At the same time construction of a bridge had been started further on, over a river between Linden and what is now Wentworth Falls, employing 10 men. There was no water for stock by the bridge, the nearest being in a ‘tremendous’ gulley nearly a mile away. Nor was there a blade of grass. The bullocks helping with traction were soon to be more of a hindrance than a help. On 8 September the wind was high and cold and ‘blew a perfect hurricane’: again a precursor of future conditions, totally different to those they had left on the Cumberland Plain. They would have liked to shoot kangaroos for meat, but saw none, only bagging three pheasants.
On Sunday 11 September – they could not spare the time to observe the Sabbath – William went three miles forward along the road with Hobby and Lewis over two or three small passes to Caley’s pile again. He wrote: ‘From thence, at least two miles further, the mountain is nearly a solid rock. At places high broken rocks; at others very hanging or shelving, which makes it impossible to make a level good road.’ On 12 September the long bridge, the first of many, was completed, except for the handrails and battening the planks. It had taken the labour of 12 men for three weeks, ‘which time they worked very hard and cheerful’. Its dimensions were impressive. ‘The bridge we have completed is 80ft. long, 15ft. wide at one end and 12ft. at the other’. On the approach to the bridge there was a rough stone wall about 100 feet long, while from the top of the mountain to the lower end was about 400 feet. It was, William considered, with evident pride, ‘a strong, solid bridge, and will, I have no doubt, be reckoned a goodlooking one by travellers that pass through the mountain’. He must have been mortified when Campbell’s account made no mention of it. He issued a pair of strong shoes to each man, an indication of the tough going.
William continued to move forward ahead of the road construction, ‘as far as the firemakers had finished’ (burning away the scrub and brush) and keeping ‘a strong party at the grub hoe’. The stone in the rocky ground was too hard to break with sledgehammers and was having to be levered up. There could hardly have been a more basic way of clearing a road. He also observed various birds, like a ‘quite mottled’ cockatoo. The brightly coloured mature cockatoos remain a feature of the forests around Mount Victoria.
On 25 September, a Sunday, while working out ways to conquer a ‘steep mountain’, William noticed a river below running east, the banks of which ‘are so high and steep it is not possible to get down’. This was the river which Macquarie named after him, which empties into the Wollondilly. He now chose the site for his second depot ‘close to a stream of excellent water’ with ‘the grass tree and other coarse food, which the bullocks eat and fill themselves pretty well’. By 2 October the store building, 17 feet by 12, had been weatherboarded, with gable ends. It was to enter local history when it became the Weatherboard Inn, for many years giving its name to the settlement now called Wentworth Falls. This establishes exactly how far the expedition had reached. William reckoned it to be 28 miles from Emu Ford, but unknown to him it was only a little more than a quarter of the way to the ‘centrical point’ of the Bathurst plains. He now returned to Clarendon, handing over control to his supervisors.
William had observed earlier that the country to the north was ‘extremely hilly, with nothing but timber and rocks’. This was the area through which Bell’s Line of Road would eventually run, and spectacular it certainly is. Range upon range of hills, with steep and often sheer escarpments, are bisected by long valleys. Campbell described:
a succession of steep and rugged hills, some of which are so abrupt as to deny a passage altogether, but at this place a considerable extensive plain is arrived at, which constitutes the summit of the Western mountains and from thence a most extensive and beautiful prospect presents itself on all sides to the eye.
It was easy for the secretary to observe all this when travelling in the comfort, if somewhat bumpy, of a carriage. For William, relying on his compass and the muscular brawn of his team, wielding tools that were often damaged and with men falling ill, it was very different. He was trying to avoid using his limited supply of gunpowder if he could. Meanwhile the wind tore at them savagely. ‘The wind has been very high and cold from the west since Sunday last,’ he had written back on 8 September and it had continued, ‘last night it blew a perfect hurricane … but we got scarcely any rain.’ The next several weeks were tiring and frustrating for everyone.
On 3 October they achieved ‘a very handsome long reach [of road], quite straight’, which he called after Hobby. They were still on the top of the mountain. There were many large anthills around. One he measured was 6 feet high and 20 feet around the bottom. In the evening his servant arrived from Clarendon with horses and William left for home the next morning, writing to the Governor ‘stating to him my arrangements’. He would be away until the 23rd, dealing with the sheep and the harvest at both Clarendon and Mulgoa, as well as attending Macquarie at a muster. On that date, close to three weeks after he had returned home to deal with what must have become pressing affairs – especially the ensuing harvest – William was again confronting ‘the mountain’; or rather the next mountain, since he found he was dealing with a series of ridges. During his absence nine more miles of road had been laboriously constructed. He sent Hobby back in his postchaise to the Nepean for a week and also sent back his own saddle horse, which he could not keep ‘for want of grass’.
Richard Lewis returned on this Sunday evening, 23
October, ‘from the end of the mountain, about ten miles forward, having been with three men to examine the mountain that leads to the forest ground. His report is that the descent is near half a mile down … that it is scarcely possible to make a road down; and that we cannot get off the mountain to the north to make a road … much more difficult than he was before aware of’. William responded to this bad news by setting all hands to road-making the next day, ‘being extremely anxious to get forward and ascertain if we can descend the mountain to the south before we get to the end of the ridge’. He wrote to the Governor for a further supply of gunpowder.
A few days later, on 30 October, he recorded seeing to the east northeast ‘a table rock seen by us from the rocks near Coley’s [sic] pile to our right’. This can only have been the Pulpit Rock, which places their position at the end of October at present day Blackheath. From there it would not have been possible to descend the mountain to the south. The Great Western Highway of today veers west north-west after Mount Victoria and goes steeply down the side of the ridge. William sent three men to search for a way down, unsuccessfully. It rained a lot and the ‘blankets belong to the men were very wet and uncomfortable’. On some days they could not work at all. The changeability of the weather was defined by the Governor, when he made his tour of inspection in May 1815, writing that it did not rain, there was very little water in the Macquarie River at Bathurst and the Nepean at Emu Ford was only six inches deep.