St John’s Cathedral, Parramatta, location of William’s second marriage. Mrs Macquarie designed the towers, copying Reculver church in Kent (Author’s photo)
10 A Wife Lost and a New Marriage
Rebecca Cox died during a flood on the Hawkesbury River on 19 March 1819, the rising waters being so dangerous that her body was only able to be recovered by boat. Although this sad event ought to have burnt itself into the ancestral memory of her descendants, the Memoirs merely say: ‘In 1819 Mrs William Cox died, leaving five sons. In 1821 William Cox married again.’1 This follows a relatively lengthy discourse headed ‘Over the Ranges’ about the family’s pastoral expansion beyond the mountains, which does, however, put his activities into perspective. It explains how he and William Lawson found the grazing land around Mudgee, being guided towards it by a ‘blackfellow named Aaron’, who had been terrified of the natives there. Lawson was appointed to succeed William as ‘magistrate and commandant of the County of Westmoreland’ on 23 August 1819, as recounted already.2
The two ex-officers, and their sons, both collaborated and competed in opening up that country over the ensuing decades. The historical arguments as to why development was slow beyond the mountains have centred on Macquarie’s desire to see the land on the Cumberland Plain fully allocated first and his fear of convicts escaping. When the Governor made his semiceremonial journey along the Blue Mountains road in May 1815, he wrote in his journal about William’s ‘incredible labour and perseverance’ in constructing it and referred to ‘the New Discovered Country’ beyond.3 However, he proved restrained in allowing settlement there. His reluctance to allow expansion is shown by William’s 2000 acre reward for building the road having still not been officially laid out when Bigge visited Bathurst in 1819.
The significant expansion westwards only took place between 1825 and 1830. As noted in Chapter 7, Chris Cunningham suggests that this was really due to lack of interest.4 On the other hand, few men were needed to shepherd large flocks and stock had been allowed to be pastured temporarily beyond the mountains in 1816, after a drought.
Contrary to Cunningham’s theory, when William Lawson acquired 30,000 acres near Bathurst in March 1819, he did so before taking over his duties. In terms of the pastoralists’ territorial ambitions his letters are revealing. On 29 March 1819, he wrote to his agent in England, saying he had accepted the Bathurst appointment because: ‘my sheep and stock are more of them over the mountains … I have increased my Estates and property to three thousand acres’. He had already been rewarded for the 1813 expedition with a land grant. Now he told his agent that he also had land well outside the official limits.5
Nor was Cox far behind in this expansion. Bigge noted that ‘The more opulent settlers have begun to fence their estates with strong railings’ and that
This gentleman [Cox at Bathurst] has erected farm buildings, and made inclosures [sic], in which he is making experiments with the artificial grasses [clover, lucerne, sainfoin]. It is here that he has considerable flocks of sheep, amounting to 5,000, and herds of cattle, which from the late accessions of other occupants, have been obliged to resort to new and more distant tracts. Twenty four flocks, of which ten belonged to Mr Cox, were distributed over the Bathurst Plains and adjoining valleys in the month of November 1819, and the whole number of sheep then amounted to 11,000.6
This was in spite of the land still not having been made over to William officially. The Memoirs name other families in that area that time. Hassall was on the O’Connell plains, Lawson himself on the Macquarie Plains, while ‘On the right bank of the river were the brothers West, Mackenzie, Cox [the Hereford Estate], Hawkins, Piper and the Rankin brothers, Kite, Lee and Smith. Some of them had small farms.’7 In fact several, like John Piper, had a fair amount of land. What they were not were pioneers like Cox and Lawson. They simply aspired to be country gentlemen. This undermines the historians’ claims that few people were interested in the land beyond the mountains, although they were relatively few.
Commissioner Bigge’s account makes it transparently clear that it was the settlers who were pioneering development beyond the mountains, not the government. As the historian Geoffrey Blainey remarks: ‘Successive governors faced the dilemma: should they foster the wool industry or should they prevent the sheep and their shepherds [from] … endangering the prison? In the end the sheep were victorious.’8 Thus to a substantial extent it was the settlers, like William and his sons, who drove settlement policy in the colony.
In practice, the pastoralists were pursuing the only realistic economic development possible at that time, as was soon to be encouraged by Bigge’s report on agriculture.9 Pastoralism, it must be explained, was quite separate from the continuing allocation of smallholdings to ex-convicts, which had been official policy since the arrival of the First Fleet. It was also distinct from Governor Darling’s small grants in the late 1820s to the native-born and to the ex-officer migrants who arrived after 1815 and were often regarded as squatters. If William came relatively late to the ranks of the pastoralists – and it could be argued that, due to his liberal actions, he never was a true Pure Merino – he had first to rehabilitate himself and secure an alternative income. The New Discovered Country was to be where he achieved his family’s most lasting farming success.
Up to 1810 and the arrival of Governor Macquarie, land policy had been largely driven by acquisitive officers and officials. Six of the future landed gentry pastoralists had started off as New South Wales Corps officers: John Brabyn, Anthony Fenn Kemp, William Lawson, John Macarthur, John Piper and William Cox himself. Others included D’Arcy Wentworth, the medical officer, and Samuel Marsden, the chaplain. In the mid-1800s a new driver of land allocation had emerged: the patronage of the Secretaries of State for individuals. This continued for more than a decade, with grants proportional to the settler’s ‘means of cultivation’. In 1818 it was decided that prospective migrants, if they possessed £500 capital, could apply. John Ritchie records that 56 men did so in 1818, in 1819 applicants numbered 133, and in 1820 the number was 237, most saying that they ‘wished to farm sheep’. As explained earlier, Lord Liverpool restrained the move. But it had helped to increase ‘demands that New South Wales should be treated less as a gaol and more as a colony’.10
For most of his time Macquarie’s energies had been concentrated on putting Sydney in order and laying out the five towns of Castlereagh, Pitt Town, Richmond, Wilberforce and Windsor. In doing the latter he was invariably accompanied by William, who became a leading contractor, building the Glebe House at Castlereagh and repairing the court house at Windsor (which he later completely rebuilt, also constructing the rectory there for Marsden). During this decade William’s own holdings on the plain were supplemented in a chequerboard of ad hoc acquisitions. Several appear not to have been too scrupulous, as was noted in the case of James Watson.11 It is clear that William put pressure on him, as he did on a constable, to sell him a town plot.
The momentum of pastoralist expansion was only temporarily checked by Viscount Goderich, the Secretary of State, in 1831. Appreciating that the government had effectively lost control, he ordained that land should only be sold, not granted or leased. Until then, as John Darwin observes, ‘local free settlers … forced the abandonment of London’s attempts to restrain inland expansion’.12
From 1812 until 1827 the Secretary of State was that thoughtful politician, Earl Bathurst. He was dedicated to the goal of improvement and interested in the contribution the colonies could make to the mother country. This gave a measure of direction to the patronage, despite Bathurst combining his colonial responsibilities with being Minister at War, which kept him busy. New South Wales was far from being the most significant among many colonial possessions. The wars with France preoccupied the government from the mid-1790s until the defeat of Napoleon in 1815. Thereafter a severe depression, and unemployment, brought a rise in crime, during ‘a period of dramatic economic and social change’.13 The government was more interested in the colony as a repository for criminals than in its development, so Bathurst may have been something of a lone voice in the government on that score, even though it was he who commissioned Bigge’s report to ascertain what was actually going on and wished the sanction of transportation for crime to be more effective.
In terms of the expansion of settlement, the most important event of the second decade of the new century had been the 1813 expedition across the Blue Mountains, although Blaxland, Lawson and Wentworth were motivated not so much by ambition for land as by problems on the Cumberland Plain. These included drought and caterpillars (army worm) eating the grass.14 The three men were warmly praised by Macquarie for their ‘enterprising exertions’. He granted them 1000 acres each on the other side in February 1814.15 This was followed by the completion of the Blue Mountains road in January 1815, which was William Cox’s great achievement and for which he had been rewarded.
A further factor hindering western settlement, quoted by W. C. Wentworth in 1819, was said to be the cost to users of the road, in terms of labour and time. It took ten days to bring carts or livestock from Bathurst to Sydney. Wentworth called the road ‘excessively steep and dangerous’, whilst admitting ‘yet carts and waggons go up and down it continually’.16 In 1831 Bathurst settlers were still complaining about the cost of bringing their produce and stock to market and asking for a rent reduction in consequence.17 The crossing of the mountains and the building of the road did help to drive policy, but not fully until after Macquarie’s departure, as statistics show. There were only around 120,000 sheep in the entire colony in 1820.18 By 1830 there would be 504,775, mostly west of the mountains, and in the next five years wool exports would more than quadruple.19 Bigge had recommended ‘The growth of fine wool … [as] the principal, if not the only, source of productive industry’.20 Sheep needed pasture and the graziers eventually obtained it.
Bigge recorded that in 1821 William held 4000 acres beyond the mountains, with 5200 sheep, while William Jnr had 1270 acres, George and Henry between them 4500 and young Edward 300.21 Given Macquarie’s restraints, they were doing pretty well. Nothing that William told Bigge about agriculture mentioned the plight of the Aborigines.
By 1821 some half a million acres in the colony were owned by free settlers. True, most of the arable land was farmed by some 2000 ex-convicts. But of those half million acres, only 32,273 were under arable cultivation. The hugely greater part was ‘used for running sheep, cattle, horses, goats and swine’.22 This matched Bigge’s concept. He named William as one of ‘the principal proprietors of sheep and cattle’, along with Palmer Jnr, Throsby, Macarthur, Wentworth, Jamison and Marsden.23 Placing convicts with such farmers, who resided on their own estates (which not all owners did), was the model for the colonial landed gentry, whose westward impetus greatly increased under Governor Brisbane, utilizing the mountain road.
After William was succeeded at Bathurst by William Lawson the two agreed upon a joint venture in an area known to the Aborigines as ‘Munna’ along the Cudgegong River, which they called Mudgee. Lawson also took up 6000 acres on the Cudgegong. George Cox kept a journal of his energetic first inspection of the country around Munna. He rode out on 30 November 1821, accompanied by Richard Lewis, his father’s long-term supervisor, a settler named William Lee and four others ‘including one Native man and five horses’. They left Hereford at 6.30 am, with George noting the character and potential of the country and drawing maps. They covered between 22 and 27 miles a day, reaching a place named Mudgee at 2 pm on Sunday 2 December. In that time they had covered 137 miles (220 km) and established two cattle runs.24 Rolls comments: ‘These men were instinctive bushmen. The maps they made might be wild, but they never lost themselves.’25
In January 1822, George and Henry Cox mustered 500 head of cattle, some belonging to William Lawson and some to their own father, and set out for the nearer part of Munna. Here they built huts and stockyards and the same again 20 miles further on at Guntawang, leaving in charge the convict stock overseer, Theophilus Chamberlain. Over time Lawson’s sons, Nelson and William, and George and Henry Cox, acquired adjoining runs, over which they occasionally quarrelled and where they were attacked by Aborigines.26 Mudgee soon attracted more settlers. Rowland Hassall, Richard Fitzgerald and James Badgery were among the first.27 In 1820 Bigge had noticed that William had ‘from the late accessions of other occupants, been obliged to resort to new and more distant tracts’.28 Indeed William attempted to became a squatter far beyond Mudgee. This implies mounting settler pressures on land and the succeeding phases in the westward expansion, under Governors Brisbane and Darling, support this reading.
The first phase, under Brisbane, was of very short-term leases. There was much correspondence, for example on ‘the circumstance of considerable Tracts of land coming into the possession of persons, who do not possess capital sufficient to cultivate and improve them’. Others held on to uncleared land in the hope of selling later at a profit.29 The price to be charged was constantly debated. The leases produced a quick response from both Cox and Lawson. On 5 January 1822, Frederick Goulburn, the Colonial Secretary, who had taken over from Campbell,30 wrote to William conveying Sir Thomas Brisbane’s ‘sanction for your occupation of all the land extending two geographical miles in every direction from the spot where the 32-30 parallel of South latitude cuts the Cudgegong River for the use of your flocks and herds as a grazing run’. The lease could be revoked with six months notice.31 There was no mention of rent. A radius of two miles comprises a considerable extent of land, but this was now normal in the area. William Lawson was allotted a similar six monthly lease, adjacent to that given ‘on the 5th January last to William Cox’.32 When the six month leases were asserted to give inadequate tenure, Brisbane issued annual tickets permitting longer occupation.
By Brisbane’s time, expansion west of the mountains was becoming something of a Cox family business, as it was for the Lawsons and a few others. Lawson, originally a New South Wales Corps officer, had been the surveyor on the 1813 crossing of the Blue Mountains, as a reward for which he was given his first 1000 acres west of the mountains. After retiring from being superintendent at Bathurst, he settled at his mansion on the western slopes of Prospect Hill on the Cumberland Plain side of the mountains, and called it Veterans Hall. Eventually, his estates totalled at least 195,500 acres.33 The Lawson sons managed their father’s interests beyond the mountains, as did William Cox’s. It had been on Lawson pére’s advice that George Cox took up land around Mudgee. The 1822 Muster shows that William Cox’s holding had risen to 6955 acres, of which 3500 were cleared, with 5525 sheep. His sons’ holdings had not greatly increased. 34 But the family enterprise was central to William’s thinking. Although he had a hierarchical view of society, his actions as related throughout this biography demonstrate that he had quickly appreciated that, in practical terms, the confining English tradition of entail, which placed an estate in the hands of trustees, and primogeniture, which passed it to the eldest son, had no reality in the colony. In New South Wales it appeared that land was unlimited and pastoralists were creating dynasties within a generation, which was impossible in England.
Brisbane’s tickets were superseded by Bathurst’s concept that purchases and leases should be allowed in equal measure, while he also wanted the allocation of Crown lands to contribute more financially through sales. He was now, in 1824, following up his emissary, Bigge’s, proposals regarding the alienation of land and a pastoral economy, whilst under considerable domestic financial pressure. At home, in England, between 1820 and 1822, the collapse in the price of wheat and inflation had forced tax reductions and ‘exacerbated the ongoing fiscal crisis’.35 But although Bathurst wanted to help the colony pay its way, his orders became a confusing factor. They were passed on in a long letter from John Oxley, the surveyor general, to Major Ovens, the Colonial Secretary, in May 1825.
There were to be two ‘Distinct Classes’ of settlers, ‘the first class obtaining their Lands by purchase, the second by Grant … under certain limitations’.36 One historian comments: ‘In giving priority to sales [as opposed to grants] Earl Bathurst sought to increase the prospect of land being employed productively’.37 Among the limitations were that no land could be alienated as a grant until it had been on the market for six months and not purchased. The second class of settler was to be apportioned land in proportion to the ‘Extent of Capital’ intended to be spent on bringing the land into cultivation. But Oxley himself commented that there were no ‘important or essential’ differences between the new provisions and the previous rules.38 Matters were further complicated through an earlier provision regarding convicts. Brisbane had adopted a suggestion made by Oxley that emigrants should take one convict off the store for every 100 acres granted them. But from 1827 to 1833 the demand for assignees exceeded supply by about 200 percent.39 Brisbane may have created this situation deliberately by reducing the number available for assignment.40
The way in which Bathurst’s ideas complicated matters is also shown by the lengthy correspondence with Darling, Brisbane’s successor, over several years. Thus on 22 July 1826 the Governor reported the Executive Council’s fear that land having to be on the market for six months would cause ‘the total ruin of Persons who Came to the Colony as Settlers in the full and well grounded expectation of obtaining Grants of Land immediately after their arrival’.41 In September 1826 he was expressing the ‘expediency of deviating from the Instructions … in the case of Settlers … wishing to purchase’.42 Darling also raised the question of whether land should be allocated in ‘the immediate neighbourhood of the established Counties’ or only anywhere ‘within the range of the Settled Districts’.43 William Cox tried to exploit the former idea, as will be seen.
Further expansion followed when the Nineteen Counties were defined within the ‘prescribed area’.44 Holdings were to be in blocks of 1920 acres. But there was a lack of surveyors and the Secretary of State sent instructions allowing land to be allocated before it had been surveyed and valued. On 16 October 1828 Darling allowed unoccupied land adjacent to leases to be taken over, although half the applications were rejected, because the lands were not adjacent. The underlying story of the official letters is one of continual settler pressure on the boundaries of permitted settlement shown on the map on page 136.
William Cox asked, on 5 June 1825 if, as an official surveyor was at the Cudgegong River, he could purchase for his son Edward ‘two thousand acres at Dabee on this river and higher up than the stations furnished out by his brothers George and Henry’.45 Dabee was near Rylstone. This relied on the requirement for settlers to prove that they possessed at least £500 of capital as well as paying their own passages. William wrote to His Excellency Sir Thomas Brisbane:
I have the honour to state to Your Excellency that my son Edward Cox, who is arrived from England as a Free Settler, has applied to me as a reference as to his means of bringing a farm into a proper state of cultivation. In answer to which I beg to inform Your Excellency that independent of his own income [? may have meant capital], which is worth upwards of a thousand pounds sterling that I intend adding the same sum in stock to that amount, making in the whole upwards of two thousand pounds sterling.46
Edward was still only 20 years old and had been sent to Rawdon in Yorkshire at 16 for five years to learn sheep farming. In calling him a free settler William was realigning the truth, as he had when William and James had arrived as boys. Edward had been born in the colony at Windsor in May 1805 and was not a ‘free settler’. Although he did acquire the estate, which he named Rawdon, his true home was at Mulgoa, where at that time he was living in the unostentatious Cottage which William had constructed in 1811 for his sons. He later built the elegant mansion called Fernhill.
The next year an attempt by William to stretch the limits of occupation for his family failed, revealing a gap between the old tickets of occupation and the new leases and sales. On 9 December 1826 he wrote to Alexander McLeay, the new Colonial Secretary saying that:
the whole of the Tickets of Occupation, occupied by Myself and sons, in the Districts of Mudgee and [illegible] & to the N. East of Bathurst, having been taken up [with] Grants or Purchases by different individuals, I find it necessary to send my young cattle to a place called by the Natives ‘Binnea’, it lay about N. N. East from Mudgee & is supposed to be distant from thence about 50 to 60 miles.47
The surveyor, Oxley, quickly pointed out that Binnea was ‘considerably to the northward of the limits within which settlers are permitted to settle’ and ‘if the distance from Mudgee be accurately stated the situation requested by Mr Cox is on the SW side of Liverpool Plains’.48 It is worth commenting that although William had laboured hard and long in 1817 and 1818 to equip Oxley’s expeditions, there is no hint that he attempted to call in favours in return.
Oxley was writing only a few weeks after the problem of unauthorized occupation of Crown lands had caused Darling to create the new ‘limits of location’ on 5 September. Settlers were only allowed ‘depasturing licences’ within these limits. But the pressures from them when they saw sparsely wooded open grazing land ahead of them forced a policy change only three years later, although no settler was permitted to receive more than 2560 acres. William Cox, William Jnr and William Lawson were among those who applied for 2560 acre grants. The end result was that eventually Earl Bathurst ceased to insist that purchasers should have priority.49 The 1826 regulations had been promulgated ‘until His Majesty’s pleasure shall be known’; those of 1829 were issued ‘for the present’. This had the stamp of yielding to pressure, not of permanence. Despite Bathurst’s intentions, by 1831 Darling had only allotted 496,270 acres out of 1,700,000 acres of officially alienated land.50 The good intentions had been almost completely subverted by their own complexities, from which the Coxes benefited.
The grants brought conflict between neighbouring settlers as the result of land having been inadequately surveyed, if surveyed at all. Lawson had leased land adjoining Cox’s on the Talbragar, 35 kilometres west of Mudgee. In March 1830 William’s overseer, Michael Lahy, found a notice signed by Nelson Lawson. It read: ‘Within one month of the date of this you are to remove the heifer herd of Mr Cox in your charge now despasturing at Cox’s Point as the land is rented to me’. The herd was eight miles from Nelson Lawson’s stockyards and William promptly asked the Colonial Secretary if he was allowed to come near another person’s grant ‘when there were large quantities of land in various directions adjoining Lawson’s land’.51 The dispute then seems to have died.
In 1831 the new Secretary of State, Viscount Goderich, concluded that the way in which land was legally transferred (in distinction to the squatter occupations) was unsatisfactory. ‘The scheme of deriving a Revenue from quit rents,’ he wrote to the Governor, ‘seems to me also to be condemned both by reason and experience … the great bulk of the land, on which they are due, continues unimproved’ and ‘large tracts of land’ were ‘being appropriated by persons unable to improve and cultivate them.’ Accordingly he ordered that: ‘in future, no land shall be disposed of otherwise than by sale’. There would be a minimum price, but the highest bidder would ‘in all cases be entitled to the preference’. The revenue would help finance ‘the emigration [to the colony] of the unemployed British labourers, which would be of real and essential service’.52
This followed the ideas of a most unusual man, a former junior consular officer called Gibbon Wakefield. During three years of imprisonment for abducting a 15-year-old heiress, Wakefield had begun asking his fellow prisoners about their offences and devised a system for colonization. In his Letter from Sydney of 1829 he had argued that there was a chaotic granting of free land and that: ‘if settlement were concentrated, waste lands of the Crown could be readily sold and the proceeds applied to the emigration of labourers … ensuring a balanced, fruitful clinical society’.53
This sponsored emigration for unemployed English farm labourers was begun in the early 1830s. At the time of Goderich’s order Governor Bourke had not been persuaded. His biographer, Hazel King, writes: ‘The great territorial expansion of settlement in New South Wales during Bourke’s governorship had been carried out on the initiative of the colonists themselves … The Governor was able to convince the home government … that it was wiser to make a virtue of necessity and try to guide and control a movement which it could not prevent.’54 William Cox, with his sons, was one of those displaying that initiative, despite his advancing years and the serious illness he had been stricken by in 1828.
As might have been expected, Goderich’s orders were not received well by the Pure Merinos, who would now only be able to expand by buying and were going to be expected to pay the immigrant labourers, instead of enjoying cheap convict labour. In response to Goderich, a committee, uniting the exclusives, the emancipists and the relatively recent colonial bourgeoisie, petitioned the Governor about the level of quit rents. Its 52 signatories of both generations included William Cox, his sons William and James, the Macarthurs, John Blaxland and the Lawsons. ‘The value of land,’ the petitioners claimed, ‘must depend upon the demand, and the quantity to be disposed of … The Interior … discovers exhaustless tracts of land … suitable only for grazing.’ The more territory there was the less its value would be. That, and the reduced price of stock, would ruin farmers if the quit rents were not reduced.55 Darling received the petition in April 1831, but did not forward it to Goderich until September.56 By then ‘the grumbles, groans and apprehensions of the landowners had swollen into a roar of anxiety’.57 If the reforms put a brake on expansion, they certainly did not halt it. William Cox continued buying land until his death in 1837. In the longer term the land sales did provide revenue for assisting immigrants.
Although Francis Forbes, the Chief Justice, had supported the protest it was to no avail.58 A government notice of 16 September 1831 decreed that ‘persons desirous of completing the purchase at five shillings per acre, of the whole, or any portion … not less than one square mile [640 acres], shall pay in portions’. Characteristically, William lost little time in applying. He asked, under an old warrant from Governor Brisbane of 3 May 1825, to purchase 4000 acres, of which he intended to retain 2560, or four square miles.59 Land was being assessed in square miles, or the equivalent acreage. Next, on 16 April 1833, William was granted 640 acres (one square mile) of the government reserve at Mudgee ‘bounded south by the Cudgegong river, east by Mr George Cox’s 4,000 acres’.60 William Jnr made similar approaches. Notwithstanding Goderich, the late 1830s were, in Atkinson’s words, ‘a time of great economic expansion … the Macarthurs themselves had never been richer; they were leaders among the landed gentlemen’. The Coxes also prospered, unaware of the disasters to follow in the 1840s.61
Nor did the Goderich reforms stop the parallel pressures from the much loathed (by the exclusives) squatters. The exclusives had their capital tied up in their land, whereas the squatters had theirs in cattle and sheep, having taken the land for nothing. The initial squatter image was first applied to poorer farmers who made use of vacant land, both within and beyond the limits of location. But the use of the term broadened from its original pejorative sense. By the time when the great age of pastoral occupation began, around 1835, the term ‘squatter’ covered a wide range of people, from predatory ex-convicts robbing their neighbours to such respectable immigrants as the younger sons of the gentry, officers of the army and navy, clergymen, lawyers and doctors, even a few women, who all considered themselves to be, or aspired to be, gentry.
The situation was complicated by many exclusives having themselves been partial squatters. In 1834 Chief Justice Forbes himself, who had stock depastured on the Liverpool Plains, beyond the limits of location, told Bourke plainly: ‘I am a squatter in the District’. Not many exclusives would have been so honest.62 In 1836 Bourke sought to legalize squatting beyond the limits of location.63 Competing territorially with squatters for land, and for political ascendancy with emancipists, the Pure Merinos were slowly eclipsed, although not until after Bourke’s day. ‘It was the next Governor, Sir George Gipps, who was to see the immigrants and the native-born absolutely in the ascendant, although the transition was becoming evident even in 1835.’64
Obviously either obtaining land from government, or squatting on it, was not the only way of expanding an estate. Making direct purchases from individuals was less problematic. As always, William Cox seized opportunities. In the 1820s his old friend John Piper had been earning more as the Naval Officer at Sydney than the Governor did and had accumulated extensive properties, including 2000 acres ‘at Bathurst’.65 He got into financial trouble in 1827, through deficiencies in his collection of customs duties and his chairmanship of the Bank of New South Wales. On 29 June 1827, having become one of Piper’s trustees, William wrote suggesting paying off £500 of his debts in exchange for land, saying he was glad ‘the lands were all sold … Vaucluse not selling would have thrown us out.’ This meant Piper was spared having to sell his elegant Henrietta Villa at Point Piper.66
On 11 October 1832 William wrote from his Hereford farm at Bathurst about an exchange of land ‘from the other side of the water’, presumably to acquire it. He was in touch again on 24 March 1835. These friendly letters always began ‘My dear Piper’ and concluded with family news.67 As well as helping to save Piper, the purchases resulted in an enlargement of the Cox estates west of the mountains. As mentioned earlier, by no means all the settlers around Bathurst were pioneers. Piper, like Mackenzie of Dockairne and others, had simply aspired to be country gentlemen.68 There was even a Bathurst Hunt, whose riders wore green coats and chased dingoes.
The frequent changes in the way land was allocated in the first three decades of the nineteenth century meant that there was no standard pattern by which estates were accumulated. There was no inherited land, apart from Jamison’s original 500 acres. John Macarthur’s vision had been of ‘an extensive wool exporting country controlled by men of real capital, with “estates of at least 10,000 acres each”’.69 But few early settlers possessed substantial capital, in the way the Blaxlands had done. Most collected land piece by piece, like William Cox, who was more typical of his generation, with his 29 different plots as well as various houses and urban plots.70 But this was misleading. He had worked collectively with his sons in a family enterprise from as early as 1804. The family’s Mudgee holdings alone eventually came to 100,000 acres. Quite a number of pastoralists were bankrupted by the 1840s depression, including John Blaxland’s estate (he had died by then). Yet the landed gentry did not collapse. The Coxes themselves suffered, but survived, having a great measure of determination in their genes.
Early on during this turbulent time, just as Bigge was leaving the colony, William, bereft of his first wife for two years, remarried. His new bride was Anna Blachford. She was 32 years younger than him and they were married by Samuel Marsden a mere month after she arrived in Sydney. A copy of the marriage certificate provided by the (now) Cathedral Church of St John Parramatta shows that the wedding on 23 January 1821 was by special licence.71 Given that William was a contemporary with whom he had both collaborated and quarrelled for many years, Marsden might have mentioned the occasion in his correspondence (now in the Mitchell Library), but he was evidently too preoccupied with missionary work in New Zealand. The witnesses are given as George Cox and Mary Ellen Lenouf, the latter an incorrect transcribing of Leroux, the family with whom Anna had arrived from Hobart aboard the Queen Charlotte on 18 December 1820. On the way out there from Sydney the brig had set a record run of 48 hours. Returning, she sailed from Port Dalrymple with a cargo of 20 tons of salted meat, 60 bushels of wheat and four passengers. They were Captain Watkins of the 48th Regiment, Lieutenant Leroux of the same, Mrs Leroux and ‘Miss Blackford’ (a frequent misspelling of her surname).72
St John’s Cathedral, Parramatta, location of William’s second marriage. Mrs Macquarie designed the towers, copying Reculver church in Kent (Author’s photo)
Anna was the daughter of Joseph Blachford, a London merchant, and Susan Pike, and was born at Brading in the Isle of Wight in 1796. Her gravestone in New Zealand has inexplicably been altered to suggest that she died at the age of 80 and so would have been born in 1789. Although Mowle’s Genealogical History of the Pioneering Families of Australia gives this date, the Isle of Wight records show that her parents were only married at Newport on 22 April 1793 and contemporaries commented on how young she was. She died on 26 August 1869. It is said in the same Cox family document that she was both the niece of George Wilson Leroux, and that she was Mrs Leroux’s sister, but Mowle has her being the niece. It is more likely that she was the sister. She had travelled out with them three years earlier, when he was posted to Hobart as part of the 48th Regiment, taking over duties in the colony. Van Diemen’s Land was then administered as an integral part of New South Wales. They had reached Port Jackson on 30 August 1817 and the Hobart Gazette reported their arrival at Hobart on 27 September.
Leroux himself became District Coroner at Launceston. In 1820 he was also the Naval Officer (in charge of customs duties) for which he received a barrack allowance.73 He was bound to have been in contact with James Cox for two reasons. James was a magistrate at Port Dalyrymple in 1820 and was also a merchant supplying meat to the army garrison. It is a reasonable presumption that James provided an introduction to his father when Leroux was posted to the mainland.
The 48th Regiment continued to form the colonial garrison until 1824. Leroux must have been provided with accommodation, where Anna would have stayed. The family memoir quotes a letter from Robert Murray to D’Arcy Wentworth, saying:
Old Mr Cox has got a licence to be married to Lt Leroux’s wife’s sister of the 48th Regiment. They landed from the Derwent a fortnight ago. He saw her three times, approved and they consented She is not yet twenty.74
Anna was a lot older than that, but the rapidity of the engagement is unquestionable. There is an often quoted account of her elaborate sarsanet wedding dress, with a lace pelerine, in a letter to Elizabeth Piper dated 21 December 1829, but it unquestionably refers to the 1828 wedding of her sister, who had followed her out and married Francis Beddek, the Windsor solicitor.75 Governor Darling’s despatch of 22 December 1828 shows that he had granted Anna’s sister and another lady, a Miss Wylde, ‘a Reserve of two Square Miles of Land each on their Marriage, subject to His Majesty’s confirmation … Miss Blachford is sister to Mrs Cox, the wife of the second Magistrate in point of seniority in the Territory, and is married to a very respectable professional Gentleman of the name of Beddek, who arrived here last year … the measure will, in this Community, be attended with many beneficial consequences.’76 Beddek was Windsor’s first solicitor. It was commented wryly that the area needed one, the locals being so disputatious. He became entwined with the Cox family, living for a time in Claremont Cottage at Windsor and eventually drafting William’s will. It seems from the ‘Reminiscences’ of Edward’s wife, Jane Maria, that their mother also came to join the Coxes. If Leroux’s wife was indeed another sister, she must have written very encouraging letters home about colonial life. Anna herself, because of her youth, quickly made an impression on the way of life at Clarendon. The number of servants was increased, William built a new and elegant dining room as an addition to the house, and – as the Sydney Gazette recorded – they began to give parties and dances in a way that William never had before.