by Richard Cox
Overall, in the management of his estates William appears to have been in pursuit of farming improvements from the start. Even though he had been a clockmaker in Devizes he must have been alert to farming techniques, or was encouraged to be by Holt. He began breeding merino sheep at Brush Farm in the early 1800s. Originally land was cultivated by hoeing around the stumps of trees, in spite of the gain there would have been from grubbing out the stumps. This was because convicts would not perform well enough grubbing stumps to even pay for their rations. Holt recorded that the men were using hoes at Brush Farm in 1800. William is said to have estimated that 15 men with the plough equalled the work of 300 convicts with hoes. The removal of stumps from the ploughlands gradually became more general.90
When Commissioner Bigge commended Cox’s farming it was not without reason. Improvements were his lifelong concern and even if he might have been unaware of the Enlightenment as an intellectual movement in Europe, what he carried through in practice was certainly enlightened in the best sense. His initiatives took two forms; improving the cropping locally on the Hawkesbury and experimenting with ‘artificial grasses’ to provide better fodder for grazing animals.
Bigge asked him in 1819 how some farms retained their fertility. He answered: ‘A farmer can by raising artificial food such as rape, clover, turnips and English grapes, maintain a flock of sheep and the manure from them will enable him to raise his crops of wheat’.91 Clover, lucerne and sainfoin were far more nutritious than the indigenous grass for animal fodder. W. C. Wentworth claimed in his description of the colony that: ‘The natural grasses are sufficiently good and nutritious at all seasons of the year, for the support of every description of stock, where there is an adequate tract of country for them to range over’. But it seems unlikely that he was right, given the efforts that were made to grow better fodder.92
Bigge reported on this subject that: ‘These gentleman [Oxley, Cox, Jamison, Hannibal Macarthur, Redfern, John Macarthur, Throsby and Howe] have turned their attention to the culture of the various qualities of artificial grasses; and from the experiments they have already made, there is every reason to expect that the supply of food for sheep and cattle may be greatly augmented’. The improvements took two forms: introducing better farming techniques and the improved breeding of sheep. This reflected the values of an English landed class, which had become convinced of the possibilities of increasing wealth by the application of improving techniques.93 In line with this belief William became a founder vice chairman of the Agricultural Society in 1822.94
At the same time, managing a large estate involved near-continual interaction with the Aborigines, although not necessarily in conflict with them. William employed Aborigines satisfactorily at Mulgoa in 1826. But Mulgoa was also a potential flashpoint. Settler relationships with the two linguistic tribes whose boundary met there, the Dharug and the Gundungurra, had been extremely volatile. Both to them and the settlers the river was of great importance.95 In 1816 the Sydney Gazette had reported an attack at Mulgoa in which a shepherd and 250 sheep were brutally killed, the sheep having their eyes gouged out.96 This had been during a severe drought, when river water was crucial. By the 1840s the ‘Mulgowie’, as their remnants became known, no longer led a traditional life. The whole issue of relationships with the Aborigines is dealt with in Chapter 11.
Although that issue is now far more important historically than it was seen to be by either government or settlers at the time, it should not detract from coming to conclusions about William’s management of Clarendon in the larger context of the colony and the emergence of its local landed gentry. The early colonial estates, whether pastoral or agricultural, Clarendon being a combination of the two, evolved to suit physical and social circumstances which were barely imaginable in England. This was both in the environment and in the employment of forced convict labour, even though the living conditions and wages of English farm labourers, as William Cobbett pointed out in the 1820s, made them little better off than slaves. The success of those management methods enabled the exclusives to turn themselves into a dominant class.
William’s estates were never the largest in the colony, but they were among the most efficiently and humanely run. Ambition was at the core of the early settlers’ lives and William did indeed create the pattern of an ambitious landholder. At the same time, his understanding of convicts’ thinking and motivations, his basically liberal outlook and his willingness to mix with emancipists added unusual dimensions to the way he worked. This is not to suggest that his attitudes and actions were unique, but they were untypical of his class and not shared by quite a few of the Pure Merinos. It remains greatly regrettable that so little detail is known about Rebecca’s central role in establishing what became more and more of a family enterprise after her death in 1819.
8 The Perquisites of Office
A gentleman much distinguished for experience and sagacity [and having] many of the qualities that are essential in a magistrate, who is to administer the law in New South Wales.1
John Thomas Bigge in his 1822 Report on the Colony
The life of a magistrate in the colony in the early years was more turbulent than might have been imagined, dealing with many more social problems than simply administering justice. As explained in Chapter 4, William was appointed in October 1810 to be ‘Superintendent of the Government labourers and cattle and of the Public Works in the District of the Hawkesbury’. The implications of this were far-reaching, including allocating convicts to masters and dealing with the ensuing problems. He continued in office until his death in 1837, a period little short of 27 of the 37 years he spent in the colony, making his career on the bench a significant part of his life. Additionally, during the period from 1815 to 1819, in spite of his home remaining at Clarendon, he both administered the Bathurst area, where he carried out various exploratory missions for Macquarie, and acted as a magistrate there as well as on the Hawkesbury.
At Bathurst he was responsible for fitting out and supporting the surveyor Oxley’s expeditions, to which Macquarie attached great importance. He also conducted expeditions himself, which ‘added to the knowledge of the country through the exploration of much of the Lachlan River region’.2 All this was a considerable burden for a man now in his fifties who had admitted to being ‘knocked up’ when building the mountain road. Worse, if it brought him credit, it also brought vituperative attacks on his probity. One of his responses has been quoted in the Foreword, when he told Bigge on 4 December 1820, after he had handed over the Bathurst appointment:
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.3
Although criticizing William for giving too many tickets of leave to convicts, Bigge respected him as a magistrate. Accordingly, this chapter looks at the various sides of his public life in the decade ending in 1820, not forgetting that energetic and constructive men invariably attract criticism.
In spite of displaying humanity and good sense, William became the target of complaints from his fellow settlers for favouring himself in the allocation of skilled convicts. He also incurred a considerable number of complaints by convicts themselves, originating from his time at Bathurst. These never resulted in action being taken against him. Nonetheless, Bigge was highly critical of the way he had employed convicts on the other side of the mountains, which the Commissioner claimed, ‘excited much surprise in the colony’. As mentioned earlier, there is little evidence that it did.4 Bigge’s investigation into the state of the colony was the most exhaustive survey of all aspects of life in New South Wales carried out up to that time and he made that survey immediately after William’s term of office at Bathurst ended. He also took an unusually large amount of evidence from William, most of which is examined in Chapter 9.
Administration of the law was a central feature of William’s activity, both at Bathu
rst and on the Hawkesbury. Bigge particularly asked him about punishment.5 His replies, and the details of cases he heard, shed light on much more than William’s own attitudes. They illustrate the daily aspects of life in what was, after all, a penal colony. In England corporal punishment was a harsh fact of daily life for many children, criminals and men in the military forces. Despite the horrors of the lash, Bigge appears not to have thought its use controversial. William’s own earlier reluctance to order flogging had slowly moderated. As a magistrate he was not empowered to deal with the worst crimes, but those he and his fellows on the Windsor bench did deal increasingly strongly with such as fell within their jurisdiction. The later sentencing possibly reflected a more severe regime of punishment in the colony, following Bigge’s visit, which had an impact long before his reports were presented to parliament in 1822 and 1823.
Three sentences given at Windsor between 1811 and 1825 contrast with the six lashes William ordered for the mutineers on the Minerva in 1799, although it is impossible to know how far, as senior magistrate, William prevailed over differing opinions on the bench. At the commonsense end of the scale he twice sent a man to another master, with no punishment, after unreasonable complaints by the original intemperate employer.6 Other of his sentences were proportionate to the offence and vividly illustrative of daily life on the Hawkesbury.
Thus on 10 June 1820 William and John Brabyn heard a case brought by William Bowman (the employer) against James Turner ‘Convict servant’, revealing behaviour by Bowman which was unnecessarily harsh. It is probable that this master employed very few convicts. Turner was accused of ‘neglecting his work and that he does the same in an improper manner and also for being insolent when reprimanded. That Complainant pushed him [i.e., Turner] out of the garden and directed him to Windsor, which he refused and abused Complainant greatly.’ Turner responded by saying that he had lived with his master five years and a half, ‘in the whole of which time his Master has never expressed any dissatisfaction of his conduct’. The circumstances were that he had been told to wheel some dung in a barrow, but the ground being soft he took the dung out with a shovel when the sides (of the barrow) came out. His master kicked him for the delay and ‘brought him to the gaol with his hands bound behind him with a silk handkerchief’. Mr Loder, the gaoler, stated that ‘untieing his arm it was so stagnated he could not use his arm to bring it forward’. William and Brabyn dismissed the complaint and gave the man to another master. A similar case was heard later that month with a similar result.
The bench was a little tougher on 30 October 1822 when Patrick Smith ‘was submitted for amelioration of sentence’, after having been convicted ‘of the most insubordinate conduct’ towards his master (Roger Connor). William asked the Colonial Secretary that ‘the indulgence intended to have been bestowed on him this year now be suspended’.7 To lose a ticket of leave was a penalty, but not a harsh one. On 6 April 1825 William declined to pass a sentence when a Mr Baldwin said that an assigned convict, Fletcher, had robbed him and been convicted ‘four years since’ and ‘he has also neglected his work, although he has not brought these charges before the Bench’. Reporting this, William explained to Goulburn, the Colonial Secretary, that: ‘The Bench have ordered Fletcher to work for another person until your instructions are received on regard to him’.8 He was benign when the employer had been unreasonable.9
William, or the bench he chaired, inevitably did order floggings. On 14 July 1817, sitting with the other magistrates Cartwright and Mileham, they sentenced William Jones to 50 lashes and to be sent to Newcastle for three years to hard labour for stealing a bullock, which always had been a serious offence, both here and in England. Jones also forfeited all his personal property against claims and had the ‘overplus paid into the hands of the Treasurer of the Police Fund at the Hawkesbury’.10 George Lawford, a free man, was tried for ‘a very aggravated felony and … sentenced by a Bench of Magistrates on 18 October 1820 to three years hard labour at Newcastle’.11 Newcastle, north up the coast from Sydney, was a penal colony within the penal colony, where men mined coal. Bigge thought that convicts being sent to the Coal River ‘is felt, and sometimes dreaded by them as a punishment; and that it succeeds in breaking dangerous and bad connections, but that it does not operate in reforming them’.12 Given William’s belief in rehabilitation, the sentences sound uncharacteristic of him, though the crimes had been serious.
In general the administration of the law ranged alongside religion and education as part of the paternalism which characterized New South Wales society.13 As far as religion was concerned William not only helped what was then the established church (of England), he supported the Catholic church as well and indeed the Presbyterians. On 24 May 1822 he wrote to Governor Brisbane to support the Reverend M. Therry who had ‘applied to me as Senior Magistrate’ for a piece of ground belonging to the Crown at Windsor ‘for the purpose of erecting a Chappel for the performance of Roman Catholic worship’ and that ‘the late Governor [Macquarie] had been pleased to express his approbation of the same’. He enclosed a sketch. It was built.
Four years later, in June 1826, he even-handedly supported a memorial to the Governor from 27 free settlers from the Scottish borders at Portland Head, who had mostly come out in 1802. They had established a church in 1809, but been without a minister for 17 years. One had now arrived, for whom they had built a house. They asked for him to be granted a salary, in addition to the small stipend which they could raise themselves. William certified that he had known the original settlers for upwards of 20 years (a mild misstatement given that 20 years before he had been on his way to trial in England) and that their ‘conduct was worthy the consideration of His Excellency the Governor’.14
Paternalism infused most things that the magistrates did. For example, the Cawdor bench, at the Macarthurs’ Camden estates, was more lenient than most. ‘Yet,’ its historian observes, ‘its hand could fall with great brutality.’ People felt ‘the machinery of justice was a lofty elaborate thing. It was a system of paternalism, in which the magistrates tempered their sternness … with just as much personal discretion as each case … seemed to require’.15 That early on William overstepped the mark is shown by his being reproved on 14 February 1811, along with other JPs, in that ‘he conceived that he could … convict and sentence persons for the illegal distillation [of liquor]’ when such prosecutions could only be carried through at Sydney.16
There is every indication that the views and judgments of William, and his colleagues on the Windsor bench, were paternalistic in many contexts. Unfortunately for our knowledge of his personal views, a printed questionnaire sent out by Macquarie to all magistrates and chaplains in February 1820 so infuriated Commissioner Bigge that he demanded the suppression of the answers. This was on the grounds that they were preempting his enquiry. The 13 questions did indeed, in Secretary Campbell’s words, cover ‘the Comparative State of the Colony’. They were very similar to those posed in opinion polls today and included some which were transparently hopeful of vindicating Macquarie’s social policies over the previous ten years, such as whether attendance at church had been more regular or less so and whether the ‘lower Classes’ were ‘more circumspect in their Conduct’. What would have been revealing were the questions on corporal punishment and on the attitudes and behaviour of the free-born offspring of convicts.17
The majority of magistrates are recorded as having replied. William’s answers would by no means necessarily have been the same as those he later gave to Bigge in person. Thus when Bigge interviewed him about punishment for neglect of work, he answered that it would be ‘100 lashes & to the coal mines [Newcastle] for terms not exceeding three years’.18 Asked if he approved of that, he replied: ‘If Newcastle was so situated as that the convict could not escape, I should think it an excellent place of punishment’, adding ‘I think that the Punishment has salutary effects upon those who return’.19 The fear of pain was always a part of the penal system. However, William had long sh
ared Macquarie’s beliefs and may have deliberately been saying what Bigge wanted to hear. In a later memorandum he recorded that ‘Severe punishment only hardens them [i.e., convicts]’.20 This was a view later shared, for example, by the chaplain at Norfolk Island, the Reverend Thomas Atkins, who believed that the lash ‘merely brutalized and hardened the prisoner’.21
William’s punishments for assigned females were lenient. In June 1819 one of his own servants, Ann Keogh, most unusually, came up before him on the bench, accused of being drunk and of stealing articles belonging to Rebecca Cox, immediately after her death. Keogh was sentenced to six months at the Female Factory.22 The Female Factory at Parramatta was not exactly a prison, but more like a workhouse to which women who had offended, were refractory or were pregnant were consigned. It was too crowded for all the women to live in and many were boarded out in the town, sometimes turning to prostitution. William also sent one Anne Walker there, on 29 April 1820, for absconding from her husband after meeting one James Anderson in a public house and going to live with him. The background to this was that the woman was a convict, but allowed to live with her husband. Anderson, being a free man, was only fined.23
The intricate domestic situations with which a magistrate had to deal are further shown by a case heard on 7 September 1824, when the bench listened to a statement from Thomas Wright, relating to his wife Anne Wright, alias Ann Hubbard. Thomas had ‘the honor to inform you that the said women is resident in this district, having a certificate of her freedom, but is now under Bail to appear at the Quarter Sessions to a answer to a charge of Felony’. He added that ‘the child [she] has with her has been adopted by her and does not belong to her husband, but to one Mr Dillon, a man with a large family’.24 Today the story would be sensational tabloid material. Such domestic situations were further complicated if one partner in a marriage was a free person, like Anderson, while the other was a convict. In this situation the convict was permitted to live with the free person, who effectively acted as a guarantor.