by Richard Cox
Clarendon, James Cox’s mansion on the banks of the South Esk River, Tasmania (Author’s photo)
His first wife had died and he had then married the daughter of Lieutenant Governor Collins, Eliza. He acquired other farms, naming some after his father’s Dorset origins, notably Fernhill (which came to him through his second wife) and Winburn and founded the village of Lymington. After Tasmania became a colony in its own right in 1824 he was a member of the Legislative Council, later from 1851 to 1854 being a member of the first elected House of Assembly there. He also helped to found the Cornwall Bank.
James died on 17 March 1865, leaving life occupancy of the great house to Eliza. His grandson, also James, inherited next, but sadly two generations later the estate was acquired compulsorily by the government in 1915 under the Closer Settlement Acts with £22,000 compensation, following the early death of the third inheritor, John Claud Cox. It was divided into nine lots. The widow of John Claud was able to keep the homestead block, but eventually found it untenable with only 687.5 acres. The house was endangered by its weight being too great for the foundations and in 1962 the then owner donated the homestead to the National Trust of Australia (Tasmania), which has gradually restored it to the original state, including reconstructing the magnificent – but overweight – portico. James and his descendants had lived there for a century and his descendants have been active ever since with agricultural pursuits. James had been, in every way, a chip off the old block.
Henry Cox, the fourth son, had been born at Devizes in 1796 and, like George, had travelled out with his parents on the Minerva. He assisted at the first depot during the mountain road building, where William recorded him helping to count what proved to be a satisfactory 75 pieces of pork in a cask, but did not mention him again. He married in 1823 and settled initially with his wife Frances at The Cottage – a house that was much in demand and at times was shared – until in 1825 he built Glenmore at Mulgoa, a sandstone bungalow with attic rooms beneath a hipped roof and with large wine cellars, today a golf clubhouse. Here, like George, he cultivated vines, orchards and wheatfields and eventually bought some of Captain Waterhouse’s famed sheep and cattle. However this was not on the 400 acres, named as being at Bringelly, granted to him by Macquarie in 1821, because that land lacked water.37 In the early 1850s he transferred most of the sheep to his estate of Broombee at Mudgee, but appears to have leased the run to his brother George (it was only eight miles from Burrundulla). He was not a magistrate and seems to have taken little interest in public affairs, although he did join his father and his brother George in the address by Landed Proprietors and Merchants in July 1825 supporting Governor Darling.
Glenmore, Henry Cox’s house at Mulgoa (Author’s photo)
Henry was involved in an historically interesting potential conflict with the local Aborigines in 1848 on another run he owned near Wellington on the Barwon River, where the natives had extensive fish trap enclosures. The Commissioner of Crown lands advocated creating a reserve for them of one square mile. There was no suggestion that Henry had acted improperly towards the Aborigines, although others might have done so, but the idea of such a reserve was novel. The Attorney General declined to allow it.38 Henry died on 1 April 1874, having made no great impact on the society around him, nor does he seem to have been active in the construction of St Thomas’ church at Mulgoa, which Edward and George had strongly supported.
In many ways the life of Edward, William and Rebecca’s youngest son, reveals more about the society they all lived in, while his son made a real impact on the colony. As already mentioned, Edward’s first grant of land at Mulgoa had been obtained for him at the age of four by Rebecca. As a 16-year-old he was sent by William to learn sheep farming in Yorkshire. On his return his father obtained the farm which they called Rawdon on the Bathurst plains for him, as detailed in Chapter 10. Edward then obtained for himself a far rarer colonial commodity – a locally born heiress. This was Jane Maria Brooks, the daughter of an exploitative and rich ship owner and trader, Richard Brooks. Once she had acquired a gentleman husband her memoirs show her as having become something of a snob, but not as talented a letter writer or hostess as her sister-in-law, Elizabeth.
Edward Cox, seen in middle age
Jane Maria’s ‘Reminiscences’, which were only compiled by her between 1870 and 1880, when she was old, described both her upbringing and the early days of her marriage. Her father, captaining a ship with a letter of marque, meaning he was an authorized privateer, also made ‘a great deal of money’ when chartered to bring prisoners out in 1808. She remembered Elizabeth Macquarie and dinners given by John Piper at Point Piper, and enjoyed five or six very happy years before she married, which positions her in the era. She married Edward in the mid to late 1820s and, if as an heiress she looked for a handsome husband, as well as a gentleman, she obtained one. A portrait of Edward in middle age shows him as good looking, with wavy hair, elegantly dressed in a well-cut suit with a wing collar and extravagant bow tie, holding a gold (?) knobbed cane.
Jane Maria had been born in London in 1806, ‘the year Mr Pitt died’, and after she married Edward they ‘went to live at Mulgoa Cottage, it was a very pretty place … and my two brothers in law [were] about two miles on either side [Henry and George], so that my dear parents were not concerned for my safety, besides we had a grand neighbour in Sir John Jamison’. This must have been after George vacated The Cottage and built Winbourne, not far down the road. After many years at The Cottage, Edward embarked on building what would become one of the colony’s most distinguished houses, probably in 1839. He brought 20 stonemasons from Ireland to build this house, Fernhill, the name yet again echoing his father’s Dorset beginnings.
The internationally known architect Philip Cox, another descendant, describes Fernhill as ‘one of the grander houses built by the early settlers … on a gently rising hill from which panoramic views along the Nepean Valley are gained’. He refers to its magnificent circular verandah and single shaft stone columns, and remarks, in a sentence that reinforces the view of the second generation proposed above: ‘There is a magic in these buildings which dispels all thought of an earlier Australia which had to be tamed. Instead, a languor prevails, and a sense of belonging, suggesting a gentle life by the early settlers, which is far from the truth.’39 Indeed it was extremely tough, as George’s letters from Mulgoa in the 1840s show.
Broadbent remarks that the house reflects ‘the confidence, wealth and social status of the “pure merino” pastoralist who built it’. Even in its unfinished state ‘it is one of the grandest and most impressive country houses built in colonial New South Wales’. During the years of depression building work somehow continued, although in 1840 Jane Maria feared they would never complete the house, and it may not have been until 1845 that the family moved in. It is thought to have been designed by the architect Mortimer William Lewis, who also designed W. C. Wentworth’s Vaucluse.
Of their earlier days at Fernhill Jane Maria wrote ‘I remember Sir Francis Forbes, William Charles Wentworth and many other military men’. She then said cattily of Forbes, ‘He was persuaded to give a Grand Fancy Ball, but it was like a great many other foolish things, a failure’.40 Her memories, like Elizabeth Cox’s letters, conjure up a very different style of domestic living to that of the previous generation. Even so, the hardships of expanding estates beyond the mountains, as Edward continued to do, were still considerable, although in the 1820s quite a few settlers around Bathurst were simply living the life of country gentlemen, rather than pioneers, as John Piper did. This said, there were frequent ambushes on the road by bushrangers and George always sent cheques in two halves by different mail coaches.
Living grandly and farming sheep at Rawdon were by no means everything that Edward achieved. He became both a magistrate at Mulgoa and a member of the Legislative Council, while he gave five acres of land for the Mulgoa church in 1836. Records show that he made wine, being given permission to import vine dressers from Europ
e in 1847, as were his brother George and James King, his father’s long-serving aide, who also lived at in The Cottage at Mulgoa for a time but moved out when it became too crowded.41 Another cottage, Claremont Cottage at Windsor, also still standing today, was lived in by the solicitor Francis Beddek, after he married Anna Cox’s sister in 1828.
Edward’s Cox’s mansion, Fernhill, at Mulgoa, sold for A$50 million in 2012 (Courtesy of Philip Cox)
Although the 1840s brought disasters for many, they were happily not fatal for Edward. He, along with his late father, was a shareholder in the Bank of Australia, having 18 shares of £50 each and 12 of £100, making a total of a substantial £2100. In 1843 the bank went under. As Governor Gipps explained in a despatch to Lord Stanley, the bank having been formed on the joint stock principle, ‘every Shareholder in it is liable for the debts of the Bank to the full amount of his property’.42 So shareholders not only lost their capital, they had to pay the bank’s debts. William Snr had owned 10 shares of £100 each and his executors paid up, even though this was so long after his death, as George Cox’s letters show. Edward was one of a committee set up to sort out the shareholders’ affairs. He was not bankrupted, although the intended upper storey of Fernhill was never built. But this was a great deal better than it was for families like that of John Blaxland, who lost everything. Fernhill, Glenmore, Winbourne and the Burrundulla estate at Mudgee survived, when Blaxland’s administrators were paying 5s in the pound on the debts of Luddenham in the Mulgoa valley and Newington. To repeat Bennett’s remark: ‘Castles in the air had suddenly faded’. Happily, the dream did not fade for Edward’s children either.
His son, Edward King Cox, born in 1829, inherited the Rawdon merino stud and became an outstanding breeder of stud stock, winning many awards for his wool, particularly the grand prize at the Exposition Universelle in Paris in 1878. He also bred shorthorn cattle and racehorses, winning the Sydney and Melbourne Cups. Racing was a tradition in the family too, William having been a co-founder of the Racing Club in 1825. He was appointed to the Legislative Council in 1874.43 So this grandson of William was, like his uncle George Cox, a true inheritor. He was fortunate in having a rich mother and became more distinguished than his father, earning a place in the Australian Dictionary of Biography, which his father has not. Another son, James Charles Cox, became a distinguished medical practitioner, presaging the move of later generations into the professions.
A candid personal account of those catastrophic 1840s was left by George Cox in a series of letters to his sons unearthed among old papers at Burrundulla, having lain unread for 100 years. They have been edited by a descendant, Edna Hickson. George was William Snr’s fourth son. He married Eliza Bell, a daughter of Archibald Bell, a family friend who has featured frequently in this account, in 1822. They lived for a time at The Cottage at Mulgoa, before Edward and his new wife did, until building their own mansion, Winbourne, in 1824, the year their son Henry George Cox was born. A visitor described it in 1836 as ‘a substantial mansion, having the features of an Englishman’s park’.44 George added a second storey in 1842 to meet the needs of his growing family, which eventually totalled four girls and six boys. He had been a JP at Mulgoa since 1827.45 He donated 38 acres of land for the construction of a parsonage, after Edward had given land for the church, where many Coxes lie buried. What was more remarkable about him was his uncomplaining fortitude.
George Cox was an obviously thoughtful man and concerned with agricultural improvements, who emulated his father in his organization of the Winbourne estate, which was not only self supporting and raised stock, but had extensive vineyards. In 1846 George produced 1000 gallons of wine, largely from the burgundy grape, which he presumably marketed. He also produced ‘Shiraz, Sherry and Oportos’. The following year he won third prize for one of his wines at the Richmond Show, one of the local agricultural shows which survived the demise of the Agricultural Society. He worked hard to improve the quality of the wool from his flocks, collaborating with his son George Henry, who ran the estate at Mudgee.
The 1840s depression hit George very badly. He does not seem to have been a shareholder in the ill-fated Bank of Australia, in fact was an executor dealing with its affairs, and he shared the burden of dealing with his father’s liabilities. But he was hit by the fall in the value of sheep and cattle, with rapidly rising interest rates on bank loans. Eventually a cow would fetch only £2 10s from a butcher, if a buyer could be found at all. George was reduced to boiling down carcasses for tallow, a disgusting job which he did himself on the farm, in order to get £26 a ton for the resulting product.
Most of George’s letters were sent across the mountains to George Henry at Burrundulla, where he built the present homestead in 1864 and which is now the Coxes’ only surviving estate. His son became a national figure, who at the same time maintained that the ownership of land carried social and political obligations. He became the first mayor of Cudgegong in 1860, after having been a member for Wellington on the first Legislative Assembly at the age of 32. In 1863 he was appointed to the Legislative Council, where he sat until his death. He continued family support for the church at Mulgoa as well as promoting the construction of one at Mudgee. His grandson describes him as having ‘combined Parliamentary and Church obligations with supervising the conduct and improvement of thousands of acres and such menial tasks as classing his extensive merino flocks’.46 He built the present Burrundulla mansion in 1864. But in a way it was George who had already saved Burrundulla in 1847 when he ‘set up a system of tenant farmers, but continued to work most of it himself’. He also sold some of the farms to tenants.47 These were 40 acre plots on the Cudgegong River, where the tenants were able to buy later on a similar system to Edward Gibbon Wakefield’s ideas. This also served the expansion of food production needed locally after the gold rush of 1851 at Gulgong.
Mulgoa church, endowed by the Coxes (Author’s photo)
Edward Cox’s tomb at Mulgoa (Author’s photo)
In 1822 Commissioner Bigge wrote to the Secretary of State: ‘In the colony of New South Wales there exists a Spirit of jealousy and animosity amongst the higher Classes of the Inhabitants, that has destroyed the comfort of Private Society and impeded the advancement of Public Institutions’.48 This has been described in some detail in the last chapter. Happily it seems as though this ‘spirit’ did not motivate the second generation of the Cox family in their relationships with others, even though some of that generation were more politicized than their forbears. The catalogue of their achievements is more constructive. If this chapter has emphasized the country houses which William’s sons built it is because they represented a large part of the sons’ ambitions in life. But they did not fall into the trap of overweening ambition that caused George Hobler’s equally magnificent Aberglasslyn to be abandoned and which gave ‘a lesson on the pride, pretensions, avarice and eventual downfall of the high flying pastoralists of the 1830s and 1840s’.49
One important part of his sons’ inheritance from William was commonsense and, as was especially shown in George’s reactions to adversity, a quiet determination to get on with the job in hand, which had also characterized James. As Dyster has remarked, if those who survived the disastrous 1840s – Australia’s first depression – ‘no longer played the undisputed role that they had twenty years before … In their home districts they were still the men given pride of place.’50 In 1867 Bennett was still able to list the Coxes among 30 families who were ‘the landed gentry of that part of the colony’.51 Geographically this left out the one estate still in Cox hands today, Burrundulla.
In 1901 the authors of the Memoirs reckoned that William had a thousand descendants. Even allowing for the families of the early days having been much larger than in the twentieth century – William had ten children, his son Thomas fathered ten, George also ten – after a further century or so the number must have greatly multiplied. Most have pursued professional careers. Many have been military officers – a Cox fought and was killed at
El Alamein. Among the men, and more recently women, there have been academics, architects, authors, at least one spy, lawyers (many), diplomats, property developers and even – perish the thought – a stage entertainer. The family at Burrundulla still breeds racehorses and sheep and now makes wine. William’s genes run strong and many of his descendants, in all generations, have displayed his two great qualities: organizational ability and determination.
Burrundulla, the one remaining estate still in family hands (Courtesy of Christopher Cox)
Bibliography
1. Printed Primary Sources
Army List, 1795–1835, National Archives, Kew, London.
Bennett, Samuel, History of Australian Discovery and Colonisation, Hanson & Bennett, Pitt Street, Sydney, vol. 1, 1865.
Bigge, John Thomas, Report of the Commissioner of Inquiry into the State of the Colony of New South Wales, its Government and Police; Management of the Convicts, their character and habits; State of Society; Agriculture and Trade, British Parliamentary Papers, (448), vol. 10, 539, June 1822.
Bigge, John Thomas, Report of the Commissioner of Inquiry on the state of Agriculture and Trade in the Colony of New South Wales, British Parliamentary Papers, vol. 10, 136, 13 March 1823.
Burke, Sir John Bernard, A Genealogical and Heraldic History of the Colonial Gentry, Harrison, London, 1891, pp. 74–76, 2nd ed. 1895, pp. 781-84.
Burke, Sir John, Heraldic History of the Commoners of Great Britain and Ireland, H. Colburn, London, 1835, vol. 4, subsequently updated and republished.