A note on Structure

1812 to 1831

1812-1831: A note on Structure

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  A Note on Sources
  
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  1812-1831: Overview
  
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  A chronology of events 1812-1831
  
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  Families, Farms, Floods and Droughts: 1812-1816
  
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  Comings and Goings:1812-1816
  
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  Interactions and the Development of a New Paradigm: 1812-1816
  
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  Farms, Floods and Droughts: 1816-1831
  
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  Comings and Goings:1816-1831
  
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  Interactions and the Development of a New Paradigm: 1816-1831.
  

A Note on Sources

A study of various memorandum, payments and rewards, trial evidence and memoirs strongly suggest that Governor Macquarie’s journal, his despatches and the Sydney Gazette, provide only an incomplete picture for the period under study, particularly the declaration of martial law in the second half of 1816.
A number of memoirs and reminiscences have proven particularly valuable in illuminating official records. Despite some chronological and factual mistakes, James T Ryan, Reminiscences of Australia, 1894 Reprinted 1982, provides insights not covered in official sources. Samuel Boughton (1841-1910), under the nom-de-plume of Cooramill¹ published a series of recollections in the Hawkesbury Herald from 1903-1905 which also are valuable. Alfred Smith, 1831-1917, provided another viewpoint in the Windsor and Richmond Gazette around 1910.
Despite my commitment to primary sources there are a number of authoritative secondary works which it would be churlish to ignore. In particular I have directly referenced: V. Ross, A Hawkesbury Story, Library of Australian History, Sydney, 1989; J. Brooks and J.L. Cohen, The Parramatta Native Institute and the Black Town, University of New South Wales Press, 1991; J. Brook, Shut out from the World, The Sackville Reach Aborigines Reserve and Mission 1889-1946, Jack Brook, 1994; and Sue Rosen, Losing Ground, Hale and Iremonger, 1995.

1812-1831: Overview

The period 1812-1831 saw the emergence of a paradigm in the minds of settler society in which they, the settlers, had an active, interventionist role and the First Peoples of Australia had a passive and receptive role. The paradigm was shaped by the growing triumphalism of British victories over Napoleon, the combination of theology and classicism, the growth of evangelism; the influx of free settlers; and the resistance of First Peoples to the attractions of civilisation as the settlers saw it.
The growth of settlement on the Nepean Hawkesbury valley shaped Governor Macquarie’s interventionist policies, prompting Macquarie to formalise the term Aborigines in an official way to describe the native people of NSW.²
Macquarie’s policies in 1814 towards Aboriginal people displayed a zealous endeavour to civilise and evangelise. His views were those of the paternalistic master: “it seems only to require the fostering Hand of Time, gentle Means, and Conciliatory Manners, to bring these poor Un-enlightened People into an important Degree of Civilization”³ However, by 1816 his thinking had shifted towards proscribing “certain Rules, Orders, and Regulations to be observed by the Natives, and rigidly enforced and carried into Effect by all Magistrates and Peace Officers in the Colony of New South Wales.”⁴ This shift in his thinking probably reflected not only an Aboriginal rejection of Macquarie’s paradigm of the relationship between settlers and Aboriginal people, but also the pressure of influential free settlers, in particular William Cox on the Nepean Hawkesbury.
Macquarie was not alone in his determination to control and engineer the lives of the lives of the First People of Australia. Whether it was Robert Howe calling for civilisation and evangelisation, Fidelis calling for extermination, or Saxe Bannister using the plight of the First People to justify the end of transportation; the voices from this period were uniform in their assertion of the right of the settlers to determine the fate of the First People of Australia in the pursuit of their ambitions. Macquarie’s intervention initiated nearly two centuries of deliberate social engineering.
This period also saw Hawkesbury properties become springboards for the original settlers and their families to expand beyond the County of Cumberland as exhausted soils, crop diseases, pests, floods and droughts reduced the Hawkesbury’s ability to meet the needs of an ever increasing population.

1812-1816: Families, farms, floods and droughts

By 1816 much of the Nepean Hawkesbury valley was settled. The Hawkesbury was closely settled, mainly with small holdings granted to convicts and soldiers. Many of these small holdings had been sold and consolidated. Robert Forrester⁵ by 1813 had lost his Cornwallis farm. Simon Freebody⁶ lost his farm at Cornwallis in 1818. Obadiah Aiken, the ex-soldier, sold his farm on the junction of the Nepean and Grose Rivers to Matthew Kearn in 1806. When it was rented to the Lewis’ in 1816 it was still known as Kearn’s Retreat – despite Kearn having been executed in 1813 for murder.
There were large holdings; Clarendon, a 400 acre grant in 1804 to William Cox’s children, was the base of his holdings. Cox was entrepreneur, property owner, magistrate and commander of the garrison. William Cox received 2,000 acres as a result of his road building activities. This was the first grant of land west of the Blue Mountains. Edward, George and Henry, the sons of William Cox received grants at Mulgoa between 1810 and 1816. Later they were involved in the settlement of the Mudgee district. George Cox also became a member of the Legislative Council. Archibald Bell was granted 1,500 acres at Richmond Hill in 1809. Eliza Bell, one of Archibald Bell’s daughters, married George, son of William Cox in 1822. John Brabyn, soldier and magistrate, had 1,100 acres by 1828, including Clifton Cottage, Richmond. His youngest daughter, Elizabeth, by a second marriage, married Charles, son of the Reverend Samuel Marsden⁷. His eldest daughter, Jennifer, by an earlier marriage, appears to have been unaware of her father’s holdings as she received only the cutlery on his death, the land going to his other daughters. The Reverend Samuel Marsden had numerous land holdings stretching along South Creek, from Mamre in the south to Creek farm which stretched into the town of modern Windsor. As the trustee of the estate of George Barrington who died in 1804, Samuel Marsden bought Barrington’s fifty acre farm on Freeman’s Reach.⁸ John Bowman was a free settler who arrived in 1798 with his wife Honor. He was given a 100 acre grant at Richmond which he called Archerfield; it was to become the base for extensive family landholdings. His eldest son, George, was an early settler on the Hunter. His youngest son, William, became a landholder on the western plains. Both William and George were members of the Legislative Council in the 1850s. Edward Lutterell/Luttrell, a surgeon with an impeccable background arrived in 1804 bringing his wife and eight children. Hungerford, his eldest son, who had twice sailed with Captain Withers, captain of the ship which brought the Lutterells to NSW, deserted in Sydney. Hungerford, a surgeon like his father died of a fever off the coast of Africa. One of Edward’s daughters eloped with Captain Withers. Further disappointment came with a four hundred acre land grant at Mulgrave that was inadequate for Lutterell’s needs. A naval appointment by Governor Bligh ended in ignominy. Macquarie was contemptuous of Lutterell’s behaviour and only helped Lutterell because of the size of his family. His second eldest son, Edward, who shot Tedbury at Parramatta, was lost at sea in 1811. Robert was killed by Aboriginal warriors, probably near Penrith in 1811. It was one of Edward’s younger sons who led a punitive party in 1816. In January 1816 Lutterell transferred to Hobart and died there in 1824. His fifth son, Oscar, was killed by Aboriginal people in 1838 near Melbourne.⁹¹⁰
Hawkesbury families formed strong networks through marriage. Class and background appear to have had a strong influence on marriages. Some of these networks got on well with Aboriginal people. Others not so.
James Raworth Kennedy and his sister, Elizabeth Moore Kennedy, the children of a Kent clergyman, arrived on the Sovereign on the 5^th of November 1795. Elizabeth Moore Kennedy married Andrew Hume¹¹ in 1796; Hamilton Hume, 1797-1873, the explorer, was their son. In 1825, Hamilton Hume married Elizabeth Dight, daughter of the surgeon, John Dight and his wife Hannah. The Dights were Hawkesbury settlers who resettled at Richmond after the loss of their property in the 1806 flood.
James Raworth Kennedy was the father of John, Jane, Eliza Charlotte and Louisa Sophia.
John Kennedy married Caroline Best in 1813 at Appin. At Appin they were neighbours to the Broughtons and Byrnes.
Eliza Charlotte Kennedy married William Broughton. Louisa Sophia Kennedy died unmarried.
Jane Kennedy became John Howe’s second wife in 1811. Their son, James Howe, 1814-1861, married Ann Dight, the sister of Elizabeth Dight in 1847. James Howe’s sister, Sophia Howe, married Samuel Billingsby Dight in 1838; who, upon Sophia’s death, married her older sister Emma Howe.
Catherine Broughton Howe, another sister of James Howe, married Andrew Hastings Doyle, son of Cyrus Matthew Doyle and Frances Biggers, in 1837. Frances Jane Howe, another sister to James and Catherine, in 1832 married James George Doyle, son of Andrew Doyle and Isabella Norris.
Elizabeth Anne Moore Howe, another of James’ sisters married George Dight, brother to Samuel in 1841.
As well James Howe had two half sisters, Elizabeth Charlotte and Mary from John Howe’s first marriage to Frances Ward who died in 1802. Elizabeth Charlotte was Thomas Dargin’s first wife, dying in 1834. Mary had three husbands, George Loder, who she married in 1816, Thomas Dargin who she married in 1835 and Laban White who she married in 1846.
Thus in one generation, the families of Kennedy, Howe, Broughton, Hume, Dight, Doyle and Dargin were all related by marriage and became first cousins. These families spread across the Nepean, Hawkesbury and Hunter valleys.¹² It is possible to speculate that the Broughton, Kennedy, Hume and Byrne family network had positive connections with the Aboriginal community around Appin in 1816.
Sarah, widow of Thomas Hodgkinson, gave birth to his son John Hoskisson, shortly after her husband had been killed in 1799. John Hoskisson married Sarah Freebody¹³ in 1818. John’s mother married again to Thomas Upton and their daughter, Lucy, probably born in 1802, married Henry Forrester, son of Robert and Isabella Forrester in 1819. Serjeant Fleming’s widow, Elizabeth, married Benjamin Jones and they farmed the 30 acre grant made to her son, Henry Fleming, at Bardonarang. Elizabeth’s older daughter, Eleanor, married the constable, David Brown,¹⁴ in 1800. Young Henry was a successful farmer. In 1810 he married Elizabeth Hall, daughter of George Hall, a Coromandal free settler. His first son, Joseph, born 1811 became the MLA for West Moreton. His third son, John Henry born 1816, led the Myall Creek massacre in 1838. Murder charges against John Henry did not appear to have hindered him from becoming a Justice of the Peace in later life. Richard Rouse gave his Berkshire Park estate on the west bank of South Creek to his daughter Mary on her marriage to Jonathon Hassall in 1819. William Faithfull had benefitted from the patronage of his old company commander, Captain Joseph Foveaux. In 1804 he married Susannah Pitt, again benefitting through land grants, as Susannah was related to both Prime Minister Pitt and Lord Nelson. William Faithfull’s third marriage was to one of Archibald Bell’s daughters. By 1828 he owned nearly 3,000 acres, most of it in the Hawkesbury. Two of his sons, William, born in 1806, and George, born in 1814, were involved in the Broken River massacre and subsequent punitive expedition near Benalla in April 1838.¹⁵ After a few months at Bontharambo they “abandoned their squattage on account of the depredations by the blacks who murdered six of their men”; William retired to his father’s Springfield grant on the Goulburn Plains and George to Wangaratta. William later became a member of the Legislative Council. The Reverend Joseph Docker, curate of St. Matthews at Windsor, 1829-1833, resigned and bought John Brabyn’s Clifton at Clarendon before selling and moving south and settling in the Faithfull’s slab hut at Bontharambo. Unlike the Faithfulls, Docker got on well with the local Aboriginal people and prospered. ¹⁶
Joseph Holt’s vision of the Hawkesbury being “finest land in the world” was narrow and ill-founded, but typical of the period, even as poor farming methods, pests, disease, floods, drought and soil exhaustion led to new frontiers to the north south and west. Hawkesbury families were in the forefront of that expansion.
‘The Hawkesbury lies low under the Blue mountains and is the finest land in the world. It produces two crops a year and I lived in that part of the world thirteen years and thirteen years before I went there the land was in cultivation and it never got one pound of manure, nor did it want any. At my leaving the country, the farmers throws the dung in the rivers and burns the straw, to get it out of the way.”¹⁷
The harvest of 1812 appeared to have been the last good one for a number of years as drought set in during the year and was not broken till the floods of 1816.
‘The accounts of the harvest are equally favorable in all the Settlements of the Territory. The work of reaping has almost every where subsided, and the nimble flail succeeds. The grain is, it may be said without exception, very fine and full; smut, blight, and other diseases that are incidental to this valuable grain have been less observable than at any former season, and the crops are in general said to be uncommonly productive.’¹⁸
On the 16^th of August 1813, Hannibal Macarthur noted: “The season for the Stock is very unfavourable, a colder winter has never been remembered, and as the Frosts have been attended by a most astonishing Drought the grass is cut off and the cattle are starving throughout the Colony.”¹⁹
Macquarie’s note in April 1814 that the “seasons appear to have undergone a complete change in this climate within the last three years”²⁰ confirmed the Gazette’s observation of 22^nd January 1814 that in the Hawkesbury “the long succession of drought has been very severely felt indeed”.²¹ The drought continued into December 1815 with no sign of abatement.
‘The general appearance of the harvest is by no means gratifying. The best lands are not expected to yield 20 bushels of wheat, per acre, while others will be scarcely worth the reaping. The length of the droughts that have been so disastrous in their consequences is unprecedented, as we cannot recollect so totally uninterrupted a succession of dry weather to have ever before lasted beyond the middle or somewhat nearer the latter end of October.’²²
The effects of the drought were so bad that some settlers were given permission to take their stock across the Blue Mountains. Magistrate Robert Lowe received permission to do so in December 1815.²³ It is likely that Cox and Hassall also shifted their flocks and herds across at this time.²⁴
As in previous years the drought coincided with expansion of settlement and outbreaks of violence: in 1814 on the Nepean; and in 1816 along the Nepean Hawkesbury Valley and across the Blue Mountains at the Government depot on the junction of the River Lett and the Cox River. The pattern was repeated in 1824 and 1838, but not in the Nepean Hawkesbury Valley. While the relationship is clear, the reasons are not. The paradigm, which continues to cloud our understanding of relations between Aboriginal people and settlers, is a dichotomous one developed initially by David Collins, in which Aboriginal people encroached upon the farms and had to be driven off. It may have been, however, that it was settlers who encroached upon Aboriginal people for food and water during times of drought. I do not believe that there is enough evidence to indicate why there was increased conflict in years of drought.
The drought broke in the last week of May 1816 with four days of heavy rain that caused flooding in the Nepean Hawkesbury Rivers in early June, sweeping away houses, crops and animals. At the end of the month there was another flood of similar intensity. The rough weather extended to sea and affected a number of boats operating out of the Hawkesbury. Floods may have been a greater challenge for hunter gatherers than drought.

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