by Richard Cox
When the surveyor general, John Oxley, was interviewed by Bigge in 1819 – he was one of the handful of landowners praised by the Commissioner – he was asked whether he thought the removal of stumps and trees ‘contributes to the augmentation of the produce?’ ‘I certainly do,’ Oxley replied, ‘at least one eighth is gained by grubbing the trees.’ He went on to explain: ‘It is a practice newly introduced and only freemen work at it … the price generally given is about 40s an acre’. Convicts would not perform enough to even pay for their rations, unless ‘they are overpaid as free men’.28 Although John Macarthur had brought out the first iron plough in the 1790s, landowners were too well aware of the labour costs involved.
When the Commissioner asked by what means productivity could be improved, William gave specific examples, in addition to grubbing out the stumps, which had now begun. ‘A farmer can by raising artificial food such as rape, clover, turnips & English grapes, maintain a flock of sheep & the manure from them will enable him to raise his crops of wheat.’ Using sheep manure was exactly what was done in Dorset. William’s enthusiasm was, probably unknowingly, despite his growing agricultural expertise, echoing the agricultural revolution of ‘Turnip Townshend’ 90 years earlier. Viscount Townshend had introduced the cultivation of turnips on a large scale and a four field-field crop rotation system at his estate in Norfolk in the 1730s. William had similar ideas.
Wheat crop yields had declined from 20 to 25 bushels per acre on the Hawkesbury. Asked by Bigge if ‘it will soon be necessary to adopt a better system of husbandry’, William was emphatic that it would. ‘Most certainly,’ he replied, ‘& if they [the fields] were appropriated to the growth of maize according to a new system lately & successfully adopted of ploughing for maize and clearing it likewise with the plough I think the crops of the Hawkesbury district could still be very productive.’29 The fertility of the Hawkesbury soil was becoming exhausted.
The Hawkesbury river in 2010, seen from the road bridge (Author’s photo)
Bigge asked: ‘Were the convicts of that day [William’s first years] better fitted for the purposes of agriculture?’ The development of agriculture had always been part of the intention of the assignment system. At this, the general tenor of William’s evidence became a grievance – one frequently expressed by other settlers – that recent convict arrivals were less useful: ‘The convicts which arrived here in the early part of my time, were generally able bodied men, & who had been accustomed to country labor and capable of performing the duties required of them’. Many of the able-bodied had been Irish. By 1820, William lamented, one fourth of those arriving were aged under 21 and ‘not fit to send into the field for labour, being incapable of performing a day’s work’.30 By then there were indeed very few country labourers being sent out.31 At the same time the constructive potential of the young convicts was being overwhelmed by their numbers.
The termination of the Napoleonic War had made matters radically worse for Macquarie, loading convicts on to him without consultation in numbers for which he could not find employment. The end had brought economic depression to England. Men were no longer being recruited to the armed forces, while some out-of-work ex-servicemen turned to crime. There were unemployed half-pay officers, some of whom later arrived as squatters. Even Jane Austen, in her novel Persuasion, written in 1815 and 1816, introduces naval officers looking for places to live.32 Men and women convicted of ‘serious’ crimes, which could include petty theft, posed an immediate problem and were transported.
In 1817 Bathurst admitted that ‘The Number of Convicts transported has increased beyond all calculation’, but still complained at the cost of lodging them. The situation had soon worsened.33 In 1818 Macquarie drew Bathurst’s attention to five ships having arrived in one month and five days, bringing 1064 more convicts in that ‘Short time’ alone.34 Meanwhile, the disastrous floods of 1817 had not only damaged farmland, they had reduced the demand for farm labour, with convicts who had been assigned being returned to government by employers. The Governor had attempted to tackle the 1818 influx by shipping some 440 of them straight on to Van Diemen’s Land. Bigge simply disregarded the difficulties which would have undermined his case.
Macquarie employed the majority of arriving convicts, and those already in New South Wales, on public works. This classic solution benefited William as a contractor and also meant he had no problem obtaining men for Clarendon. T. G. Parsons argues that Bigge ‘consistently ignored’ evidence that landowners were adequately supplied with agricultural labour, notably Jamison, Bayly and John Macarthur, ‘whose 47 convicts included 45 percent of mechanics and agriculturally skilled men’.35 William told Bigge: ‘Myself and my sons employ about 100 men’ and described the many trades carried out on his own estate.36 By 1823 he was employing 128 himself.37
Bigge might have been concerned with the treatment of assigned convicts by their masters and, by implication, what kind of men those employers were. In fact, he devoted very few questions to the subject. What did emerge was to William’s credit, also illustrating the disparities between different employers’ attitudes. He told Bigge: ‘Our ploughmen and labourers are paid by the year from at not less than £10 and many as high as £15. When we employ them by task & they are good working men they are capable of earning considerably more. Some mechanics are given from £15 to £25.’38 At this time the official wage had recently been raised by Macquarie from £10 to £11 and for women to £7. It was intended to cover necessary domestic expenses (wages were abolished by Brisbane in 1823). Task work was paid for on completion of a specific job, after which the convict was ‘on his own time’ and both could, and often did, get up to no good. Macquarie would have liked to abolish it.39
Overall, William estimated his workers cost him at least £25 12s a year each, some of this in rations. John Blaxland stated that each of his convicts set him back a very similar amount, £24, charging the rations at £14, while free shepherds earned between £15 and £25, with rations added.40 By contrast, Gregory Blaxland, thought: ‘The ration is fair, but the wages are too high. £4 in necessaries would be sufficient’.41 A sterling coinage, as opposed to local notes and coins, known as ‘currency’, was firmly established in 1818, when the Bank of New South Wales was founded. William told Bigge that ‘they now receive their wages in money or in cloathing [sic] and other articles of necessity at a sterling price’.42 This was much better for the convicts. William was also opposed to clothing being given in lieu of wages and in a significant letter to Bigge emphasized the need to give assigned men some extra small comforts. He wrote:
It is laid down in law that ‘the Master shall not give his servants any money or useless thing unless they have a proper stock of clothing’ … what is he to do for Tobacco, Soap, thread to mend his clothing and little comforts that they want when unwell … or now and then getting a day’s recreation? … he would be like a slave without any stimulus for exertion.43
Providing a stimulus to convicts to work well was important, not that Cox was alone in realizing it. With the currency stabilized, labourer convicts in the colony could be better off materially than they would have been as countryside workers in England, except for their lack of freedom and the threat of the lash. By the time of the mid-1820s in England William Cobbett recorded that farm workers would be earning only seven pence a day, six days a week, without board or food.44 Convicts were fed, clothed and provided with some sort of medical care.
This was certainly true of William’s community at Clarendon, where his first manager, the Irish exile Joseph Holt, referring to his early days at Brush Farm, recorded that ‘His good treatment of the convicts in his service had the happiest effect upon many of those who were so lucky as to get into his service’.45 As quoted earlier, William’s idea of a desirable relationship between master and servant was encapsulated when, in the later interview on convicts, he told Bigge that ‘where the man is capable of performing the task with ease to himself, he pleases his Master who makes his life more comfo
rtable’.46 He also made the point that there was more control over convicts if they were with a private employer, although not if they were with an emancipist smallholder, when he considered that master and servant would get up to mischief together.
William saw female convicts as either wives or domestic servants, as most of them were. But not, as so many others did, as inevitably being drawn into prostitution. Macquarie had soon after his arrival unequivocally condemned all cohabitation unsanctified by marriage ties in an official proclamation.47 William, less puritanically, saw women as a stabilizing influence in society, although his frequent references to the desirability of marriage validate the contribution which he felt women made to family life. This reflected what they could become. From the moment of their arrival females were treated differently to men and were sent to employers almost immediately. Numerically they were far fewer. Charles Bateson estimates that from 1810 to 1819 the number of women transported was 1934 as against 11,650 men.48 But they possessed many skills which the colony could increasingly utilize. Deborah Oxley summarizes a wide range of prior occupations, with 40 skills predominating, including nursemaids and laundrywomen, while 22.22 percent were housemaids. There were milliners, bootmakers and even five schoolmistresses.49 Female skills needed no adapting to the environment and convict domestics played a vital role in the households of William and other landowners, although he and they sometimes suffered from their thefts.
Strangely, William thought female servants should not be paid at all, because they were living with the family, as he told Bigge in a letter of May 1820. Generally speaking, domestic servants were ‘provisioned well’, although they slept ‘outside the house in a detached kitchen or outbuilding’ for fear of theft.50 This does not seem to have been the case at Clarendon, although the kitchens were separate, while Elizabeth Farm had ‘A Kitchen with Servants’ Apartments’.51 William’s female servants really did live in, much as they slept in the attics or basements at English country houses, which William Jnr’s did in the basement at Hobartville, but in England they were paid.
The second role of convict females was as women available to men. Nothing that William told Bigge suggests that he thought women were merely providers of sexual services. Joy Damousi suggests that convict women were ‘assigned only one function – they were there primarily as objects of sexual gratification’.52 True, some employers did take convict servants to their beds. D’Arcy Wentworth lived with and finally married a convict woman, which hardly fits Damousi’s description, but it did cast doubt on his being a true gentleman. Between 1826 and 1831 Darling gave inducements to women who found husbands, so that husband and wife could be assigned to the same master. In 1831 William Jnr encouraged two employees, Agnes Wicks and Samuel Leicester, to marry so that the man could get a ticket of leave.53
Bigge devoted more attention to the Female Factory than to any other aspect of the women’s lives, on account of its cost. It was William’s belief that women ought to be in domestic service and that the factory had given them ‘an aversion to service in the respectable families in the country’.54 His main concern was whether the factory produced potential domestics, a narrow-minded approach, which characterized his views on female convicts.
The Commissioner also asked William if ‘the encouragement held out to Prisoners to marry by giving them the privilege of tickets of leave is attended with good effects’. Convicts were allowed a ticket of leave if married to a free person. William expressed doubt about this change to ‘comparative freedom’ through a convict marrying and settling down. In practice, in 1818 he had helped a life prisoner, named William Price, to establish himself at Bathurst and to start a new life when he got married.55 He did not share the strong views of the chaplain at the Hawkesbury, the Reverend Robert Cartwright, who was robust in attacking the exemptions attendant upon marriage, telling Bigge that such indulgences would be ‘making an holy Institution subservient to the vilest purposes, which is frequently done in this colony’.56 Subsequently, marriage was increasingly seen by the authorities as a reward for good behaviour, rather than as a right.
There were various ways in which a convict could attain freedom. Convicts could become free by completing their term of servitude, or relatively free through indulgences, emancipation and, for a few, full pardons. These could be recommended to the governor annually. The men employed on the Blue Mountains road had been rewarded with pardons for their work, Macquarie telling Lord Bathurst, ‘They being a considerable time in this Country and of Decent Conduct’.57 This was the focal point. If men worked and behaved well, in William’s view also, they merited encouragement and the starting point toward emancipation was the ticket. Yet when Bigge asked him whether issuing them led to good conduct among the convicts, he replied guardedly: ‘I think that tickets of leave are preferable to emancipations. In the first instance the holder is always amenable to the magistrates as a convict in case of misconduct … an emancipated man is out of the reach of the jurisdiction of the magistrates for offences committed by him.’58
This was a considerable admission. On 9 November 1819, two weeks before William’s interview on agriculture, Macquarie had admonished all the magistrates over the issuance of memorials (for indulgences) ‘on behalf of any person whatever’, no doubt at Bigge’s insistence.59 Not that this stopped William doing so. In May 1820 he tried to obtain a relaxation of sentence for a John Stubbs who had been sent to Newcastle. Campbell, the Colonial Secretary, responded that unless the man’s conduct had been ‘steady and correct’ he should be retained there, ‘as in the late case of another person who had been recommended by Mr Cox’.60 However, Macquarie himself performed a volte face by later strongly defending William’s recommendations, which he said ‘must necessarily rest with those who have the superintendence of men confided to them’. He went on to tell Bigge: ‘I feel that too much stress has been laid on the rumours to his [Cox’s] prejudice, and perhaps they have had even too much influence on my own conduct towards him latterly’.61
Pardons had become another explosive subject. In his report the Commissioner said: ‘In consequence of the suspensions on the annual distribution of pardons … Mr Cox and the magistrates of Windsor have thought themselves justified in giving passes to these men [who had laboured on the normal roads] to work as it is termed “upon their own hands” … such a pass having been given more frequently than by any other person, was vulgarly termed “Captain Cox’s liberty”.’ Bigge seems to have been criticizing both tickets given for government work and private employment.62 He concluded that ‘Mr Cox, a gentleman much distinguished for experience and sagacity, has observed a want of authority over their convict servants’.63 This begs the question of whether William was considered a ‘soft touch’ by the convicts. The complaints laid against him at Bathurst, summarized in Chapter 8, suggest so.
Macquarie saw emancipation as the route to bringing convicts back into society. As a magistrate, William did not object to emancipists being appointed to the bench, and had long collaborated with Simeon Lord. This was another major source of disagreement in the colony between the Governor and the exclusives. Macquarie: ‘saw the necessity … of extending to them [ex-convicts] the same consideration … had they never been under the sentence of the Law’.64 William’s neighbour and fellow magistrate, Archibald Bell, also a former New South Wales Corps officer, saw convicts as ‘once having been tainted, unfit for associating with afterwards’, except for those sent out for ‘political errors’. For prisoners to become emancipated was one thing, but for them to be raised to an official position, like the magistracy, was unacceptable. He had refused to sit alongside the emancipist JP Andrew Thompson, who Macquarie so admired, and believed that ‘the feelings and sentiments of the respectable persons in this Colony are uniform on that subject’.65 Bell’s position was less extreme than Marsden’s, less liberal than William’s.
Back in London Bathurst decreed that ‘No emancipist was to be appointed to civil office or the magistracy until he had p
roved himself qualified by his conduct and character’. By 1817 he had been ‘compelled to conclude that most of the emancipists elevated to positions of trust were unfit for such preferment’ and urged restraint on Macquarie.66 This was to be the official line, and the attitude of the majority of the settlers, for the next two decades.
Almost equally controversial was the Governor’s policy of allotting ex-convicts small land grants as the foundation both for their rehabilitation and the development of agriculture, even though its origins went back to Grose’s time. To then give them convict servants was even more so. Interviewing William about convicts in December 1820 Bigge probed him over it. Had the ‘practice [of assignment] been changed since the arrival of Govr Macquarie?’ William replied that it had changed about 1811 and ‘it is now customary to assign convicts to those who hold as small a quantity as five or ten acres of land, provided the District Constable reports to the magistrate they are enabled to maintain them’. This frequently meant assigning them to ex-convicts. William said Macquarie had ‘informed me for my guidance that it was his wish that this should be our general mode of distributing them’.67
Ritchie describes what had resulted: ‘Only two fifths of the ex-convicts to whom Macquarie had granted land throughout his administration continued to occupy their farms in 1821 … they lived in rudimentary hovels and exhausted their soil by overcropping; they worked in paddocks beside their convict assignees in shared defeatism’.68 William was all too familiar with this miserable situation on the Hawkesbury, which Bigge himself observed in the aftermath of the 1819 flood. He did not approve. Back in 1811 he had ‘been careful to prevent Prisoner settlers being set down for servants’ as a magistrate and rejected many without ‘the Means of Maintaining themselves’.69 He now told Bigge, ‘If a convict is badly inclined he has a greater opportunity of doing wrong than if placed with a respectable settler’, adding that ‘many instances have occurred where they both have combined to commit the same crime’.70