Foreword:
A Contradictory Character

The stock, when valued, was considered worth twenty five percent more than the purchase money, consequently the farm did not stand Mr Cox in sixpence. What made things even better was that Mr Cox paid him with bills on the regimental agents.

Joseph Holt, Irish rebel and farm manager for William Cox, paymaster of the New South Wales Corps, October 18001

MEMORANDUM

Paymaster William Cox, of the New South Wales Corps, is dismissed the Service.

London Gazette, 16 April 1808²

Mr Cox is a Sensible, intelligent Man, of great arrangement, and the best agriculturalist in the colony.

Governor Macquarie, recommending William Cox to be the commandant at Bathurst, 24 June 1815³

Let a foreigner, a stranger, be told that it is the Convict, the refuse of our Country, that [sic] have performed nearly all the labour that has been done here in the short space of thirty years, and I think he would be astonished.

William Cox to Commissioner Bigge, 7 May 1820⁴

I have received also a grant of land of 100 acres for my Services on the Western road. I have sold it to Mr Cox. He gave me £25 for it, he paid me in money and a cow, and several orders, that I have paid.

James Watson, emancipated for working on the Bathurst road, in complaint to Bigge, 29 November 18205

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.

William Cox to Commissioner Bigge, 4 December 1820⁶

What is to be made of these contradictory statements by and about the man who made his name building the first road across the Blue Mountains for Governor Macquarie? William Cox had been dismissed from the army in 1808 for the ‘malversation’ of the New South Wales Corps’ funds, in order to buy himself land. Yet he managed to recover from bankruptcy and become a leading pastoralist in the colony in the 1820s, helping to carry through the pastoralist development which gave Australia its first significant exports, as well as championing the rights of ex-convicts. By the time of his death in 1837 he had become a ‘national’ figure. The contemporary quotations heading this foreword show that, as well as being a pioneer he was a man whose contradictory character, but constructive actions, not to mention his temperament, make him what one historian calls ‘a fascinating if roguish character in early Australian history’ and, when building the Blue Mountains road, ‘a humane yet seemingly inspiring taskmaster’.⁷ Having arrived in the colony in January 1800, in charge of a shipload of convicts on the Minerva, when he became noted for his humanity, he went on, after recovering from bankruptcy, to die one of the wealthiest men in the colony. He has many memorials. New South Wales is littered with Cox roads, while a Coxs River runs out of the mountains west of Lithgow. An obelisk stands on Mount York, commemorating his road building achievement, and he has a memorial window in Sydney’s St Andrew’s Cathedral. Although a Federal Department of Transport building in Canberra was named after him as recently as 1986, few people today know who he was.

The Blue Mountains road was an outstanding achievement by any standard. With a gang of 30 convicts Cox constructed more than 100 miles of roads across appalling terrain, rising to over 4000 feet, in a few days over six months. The road gave access to the extensive grazing around Bathurst, at the time when the colony was expanding and was soon to need more land. At the age of 50 he shared his convict labourers’ privations, often sleeping in a bark hut in bitter weather. In this respect he was a forerunner of the distinctively Australian ethos that a leader must prove himself to his men to be accepted by them.

If you were to lay the literary pages devoted to convicts end to end they might almost make a pathway from Sydney to the mountains. Those devoted to the early colonial gentry would barely carpet the drawing room at Government House. Because some made their fortunes – and the colony’s – from merino sheep they became known as Pure Merinos. Very little of substance has been written about them since Samuel Bennett’s often acerbic History of Australian Discovery and Colonisation, published in Sydney in 1865. Many Pure Merino families were bankrupted by the Bank of Australia’s crash in 1843 and a catastrophic fall in the value of sheep and cattle. In Bennett’s words, ‘Castles in the air faded’. William had died in 1837, so never saw this. But the family survived. He had realized early on that the English landed gentry’s system of primogeniture and entail was irrelevant in Australia, due to the abundance of land, and he ran his estates as a family enterprise, which was how they survived.

In many ways William’s career reflects both the ambitions and the flaws of early Australian development, in what it must be remembered was a harsh and unfamiliar environment. He was a man of determination, an outstanding manager, often more fair minded than his contemporary landowners. He was considerate of the ex-convicts who he recognized had created the colony by their labour. He appreciated that when the British government had sent out female convicts as well as men at the very beginning it was inevitably creating a future generation of free-born British citizens, with citizens’ rights. He supported the campaigns for trial by jury and an elected assembly. He had a lifelong concern with improvement, being a founder vice president of the Agricultural Society (still flourishing today) in 1822. Yet he maintained an eighteenth-century view of entitlement to the spoils of office, both as a magistrate and an administrator.

Commissioner Bigge described William in 1822 as one of the six best farmers in the colony.8 At his home estate of Clarendon on the Hawkesbury he set the pattern of an ambitious landholder, employing large numbers of convicts and also helping deserving men towards emancipation, for which he was heavily criticized by Bigge. He and his contemporary free settlers were driven by the lesson of eighteenth-century England that the ownership of land spelt wealth, power and social position (which was still entirely true when Jane Austen was writing in the early nineteenth century). The pastoralist gentry’s eventual failure to retain pre-eminence in the colony has been described by one historian as being ‘nearly as significant and as interesting as any success in Australian history’.⁹

All land ownership in the colony depended ultimately not upon the Crown, as the government liked to think, but on the dispossession of the Aborigines. William was aware of their plight, but he did little about it. As a magistrate on the Hawkesbury he proposed tough measures against Aborigines after the murder of settlers in 1816. However, he employed them (as guides) both on making the road in 1814 and as farm workers at Mulgoa later, finding they worked just as well as whites if properly fed and paid. He was also accused of advocating the massacre of Aborigines at Bathurst during the ‘Black War’ of 1824, although this is far from proven.

As a person William was outwardly strong-minded and straightforward, although described by a daughter-in-law in later life as irascible and not liking to be contradicted, but by then he was 68. He was actually a man of contradictions. His innocent expression in a portrait of him as a young officer hardly prepares one for the stern face of the magistrate. One reason for his not being as well known as his contemporaries, the outstanding example being John Macarthur, is that William seldom courted publicity. He probably never got over the disgrace of his bankruptcy and therefore avoided controversy. Governor Brisbane put him forward for the first Legislative Council in 1824, although only officials were chosen.

A century and three quarters after William’s death, Clarendon on the Hawkesbury is long gone, the farm now an RAAF airfield, the name preserved only on a railway station. But his descendants still run the family estate at Mudgee, where land was first acquired in 1821. It continues as an operational family estate. The Coxes still breed racehorses and support the Jockey Club, which they helped to found in 1825. By contrast the Macarthurs’ Camden, which encom-passed 60,000 acres in the 1820s, is now almost swallowed up by Sydney and is effectively an entertainment complex and theme park, with paint ball games and one historic colonial house.

William’s highly eulogistic Memoirs were ghosted and published 64 years after his death.