Bathurst, New South Wales

“ From the hill whence I saw Bathurst the view in every direction (except north-east, where it was bounded by a range of equal height between me and the river) was very extensive; the country to the southward and south-west was broken into low grassy hills with four intervening valleys. The rivulets derive their main supply from those hills, and from the range upon which we had travelled the greater part of the day: almost every hollow contained a running stream, having its source in springs near the summit of the hills. ”

“ All these are either the work of, or have been improved by, the present governor; who has even caused a road to be constructed over the western mountains, as far as the depot at Bathurst Plains, which is upwards of 180 miles from Sydney. The colonists, therefore, are now provided with every facility for the conveyance of their produce to market; a circumstance which cannot fail to have the most beneficial influence in the progress of agriculture. ”

“ This large and fertile tract of country, is in general perfectly free from underwood; and in many places, is without any timber at all. Bathurst Plains, for instance, where there is a commandant, a military depot, and some few settlers established, have been found by actual admeasurement, to contain upwards of sixty thousand acres, upon which there is scarcely a tree. The whole of this western country, indeed, is much more open and free from timber than the best districts to the eastward of the Blue Mountains. ”

“ There had been a change, Lord Bathurst pointed out, from the time when convicts sought to have the sentence of transportation commuted "even for the utmost rigour of the law," to the present when men convicted of slight offences sought the punishment of transportation which was the penalty of greater crimes. Altogether the conditions of the Colony had altered. The free settlers had increased, many convicts had become settled on the land, population and wealth had become great. The growing number of convicts transported made it more difficult than in earlier years to enforce discipline ”

“ They did not appear to me to impede in any manner the navigation of the river; the open reaches had apparently depth to float the largest vessels, and there was certainly breadth sufficient for that purpose. Nothing in fact can be imagined grander or more beautiful than we have hitherto found the river, and that too so near Bathurst that no reasonable expectation could have been formed of finding it such as we did. Many good specimens of agate forming on granite were found on the hills, chiefly where the limestone appeared in the largest and most continued stratum. ”

“ W. Evans, Assistant Surveyor, by order of the Government, that fine pastoral country, the Downs of Bathurst, and the rivers Macquarie and Lachlan, were shortly afterwards discovered. During the following year (1814) a practicable line of road was constructed, by convict labour, over mountain-ridges, which in some parts have been since ascertained to be three thousand four hundred feet above the level of the sea; and thus was thrown open that extensive range of sheep and cattle pasturage, which has since been of such immense value to the colony. ”

“ The party were now glad to direct their steps towards Bathurst; but before they finally quitted these parched levels, they shaped a course to the eastward, with the view of meeting with the Castlereagh, the channel of which (one hundred and eighty yards in width) Mr. Oxley experienced no small difficulty in crossing, as the rains which had fallen on the mountains to the south-east, whence it derives its principal sources, had swollen its waters to the level of its upper banks. ”

“ Owing to their prior information, the authorities were able to establish mining laws and good government before the rush set it, and Bathhurst was freed from the wild orgy of lawlessness which marked the days of the 'forty-niners.'
"All this, Jim, was a wonderful jump forward for New South Wales, and the town of Sydney boomed. But it was equally bad for the other provinces of Australia, and Victoria, being the nearest, suffered most. Almost every man able to wield a pick or rock a miner's cradle, deserted his work and rushed to Bathurst. ”

“ But the Government, while loyally supporting their officer in Parliament, were somewhat disturbed by reports from the Colony. The affairs of Vale and Moore, the condition of the female convicts as they learned of it in Bayly's letter to Sir Henry Bunbury, the strained relations between Governor and free settlers created a sense of strong misgiving. Meanwhile in England the number of crimes to which the punishment of transportation was affixed was rapidly increasing. On 23rd April, 1817, Lord Bathurst proposed to Lord Sidmouth that they should send a Commission of Inquiry to New South Wales. ”

“ Lord Bathurst concluded with a vigorous description of transportation as it should be and as it had become "... you will in the whole course of your inquiries constantly bear in mind that transportation to New South Wales is intended as a severe punishment, applied to various crimes, and as such must be rendered an object of real terror to all classes of the community." ”

“ The Police Regulations published on the 1st of January, 1811, were of an exceedingly stringent character, but not more so than the turbulent and peculiar population of Sydney required. Lord Bathurst approved them but took exception to one clause. His objection was that "it gave power to a single magistrate to inflict corporal punishment on free men as well as on convicts." [143] Macquarie denied that it did so, adding "No free man is ever corporally punished by the sentence of the superintendent of police or any single magistrate. ”

“ But in earlier years when he and Pitt were close friends it was the religious interests of the Colony alone which he attempted to influence.
From 1803 to 1812, Lord Hobart, Mr. Wyndham, Lord Castlereagh and Lord Liverpool held successively the seals for War and the Colonies. But in June of the latter year Lord Bathurst came into office and he remained Secretary until 1827. In August, 1812, Henry Goulburn, as Under-Secretary for the Colonies, replaced Robert Peel, who had in that position made his entry into official life. Goulburn remained in this office until the end of 1821. ”

“ Part of the reserved land of the township has been given to smallfarmers--a class very essential to the increase of population, but by no means numerous in New South Wales, and least of all at Bathurst, where the land is laid out chiefly in large sheep farms. ”

“ Lord Bathurst was ready to accept these recommendations in their entirety, [66] Macquarie, however, argued ably and successfully against them. [67]
"It appears to me," he wrote, "by no means necessary, towards the internal management of this Colony, that the Governor of it should have the power of granting absolute pardons." But there were, he thought, objections to its withdrawal. "At the hour of death a convict feels more from the idea of dying a convict than for death itself. I have myself been more than once induced ... to grant pardons to men in this state, who had ... ”

“ The following gentlemen composed the governor's suite: Mr. Campbell, secretary; Captain Antill, major of brigade; Lieutenant Watts, aid-de-camp; Mr. Redfern, assistant surgeon; Mr. Oxley, surveyor general; Mr. Meehan, deputy surveyor general; Mr. Lewin, painter, and naturalist; and Mr. G. W. Evans, deputy surveyor of lands, who had been sent forward for the purpose of making farther discoveries, and rejoined the party on the day of arrival at Bathurst Plains. ”

“ And he does hereby make this public declaration and notification that the said Proclamation so issued and published, during His Excellency's late Public tour of inspection in the Southern part of this Territory ... is wholly without force and authority."
"Fortunately," wrote Field to Lord Bathurst, "the private understanding between Governor Macquarie and Lieutenant-Governor Erskine was too good to permit a quarrel between them ”

“ Macquarie on a trip to the fine pasture lands beyond, where he founded a town and named it Bathurst, after Lord Bathurst, the Secretary of State. This was a measure of great importance to the colony, for the country between the mountains and the sea was too limited and too much subject to droughts to maintain the two hundred and fifty thousand sheep which the prosperous colony now possessed. Many squatters took their flocks along the road to Bathurst, and settled down in the spacious pasture lands of the Macquarie and Lachlan Rivers. ”

“ Occasional open downs of this kind, and not unlike the South Downs in England, extend along the banks of the Macquarie for upwards of one hundred miles. Bathurst is reckoned one of the most flourishing and desirable situations in the whole colony, and the view of these plains from the high land to the eastward upon the road from Sydney is very interesting. The prospect of an extensive district naturally destitute of timber is rare in Australia, and therefore it surprises and pleases the eye of the traveller. ”

“ The inconvenience of a want of plan for roads and streets is strikingly obvious at Bathurst. A vast tract had indeed been reserved as a township, but then, no streets having been laid out, allotments for building could neither be obtained by grant nor purchase. The site for the town was therefore only distinguished by a government house, jail, courthouse, postoffice, and barracks; while the population had collected in 60 or 80 houses built in an irregular manner on the Sydney side of the river, and at the distance of a mile from the intended site of the town. ”

“ Between 1810 and 1820 the lot of the settlers was no easy one, and those who came intending to amass a fortune and return to England found their project a mere dream, and that they needed steady perseverance before they could make their way in the Colony itself. Bigge noticed that New South Wales was unlike any other British Colony, inasmuch as the colonists looked upon it as their future home. ”

“ The colony of New South Wales, is, I believe, the only one of our possessions exclusively inhabited by Englishmen, in which there is not at least the shadow of a free government, as it possesses neither a council, a house of assembly, nor even the privilege of trial by jury. ”

“ But their success has been complete: it is the very triumph of human skill and industry over Nature herself. The cornfield and the orchard have supplanted the wild grass and the brush; a flourishing town stands over the ruins of the forest; the lowing of herds has succeeded the wild whoop of the savage; and the stillness of that once desert shore is now broken by the sound of the bugle and the busy hum of commerce.
The Colony of New South Wales is situated upon the eastern coast of Australia ”

“ The green pastures and naturally clear state of this district, formed the first inducements to settlers to occupy a spot, which is now distant from Sydney by the road 121 miles, about fifty of which cross the wildest and most barren mountains imaginable, and which then had no road at all leading to it, except a difficult mountain-pass only recently discovered; consequently, the district was portioned out chiefly in large grants to persons whose means enabled them to cope with the difficulties of approaching the new settlement; and the society at Bathurst Plains is esteemed very good ”

“ Possessed as it is of a most salubrious and diversified climate, fertile soil, and unbounded extent of territory, it evidently contains every requisite for the formation of a great and flourishing community; and whenever it shall be blessed with a free government will offer much greater facilities for the development of industry and the acquisition of wealth, than are to be found in the United States. ”

“ I was told at Sydney not to form too bad an opinion of Australia by judging of the country from the road-side, nor too good a one from Bathurst; in this latter respect, I did not feel myself in the least danger of being prejudiced. The season, it must be owned, had been one of great drought, and the country did not wear a favourable aspect; although I understand it was incomparably worse two or three months before. The secret of the rapidly growing prosperity of Bathurst is, that the brown pasture which appears to the stranger's eye so wretched, is excellent for sheep-grazing. ”

“ When Colonel Macquarie landed at Sydney at the close of 1809 the population of the settlement he was to govern was already over 10,000. In the twenty-two years which had passed since the foundation of the Colony of New South Wales in 1788, the numbers had increased at a rate of nearly 500 a year—an increase in population then without parallel in the course of modern colonisation. ”

“ The deeper and more fundamental cause lay in the fact that the children of the convicts felt that New South Wales offered them a chance of free and honourable careers such as, weighted with the shame of their parentage, could not have been before them in the older country. Nationalism, the strongest characteristic of the Australian of to-day, is a legacy from these sons of exiles for whom Australia was a land of hope and promise, and the sense of a national character seems even at that early time to have impressed itself upon the observer. ”

“ The tracks and impressions made by the feet of the natives were certainly made when the ground was very soft and marshy, whilst their guneahs were merely the branches of trees, and erected in places which we found to be swamps, but which in summer would, in comparison with the plains, be dry ground, the waters from them being drained off into the river.
The Blue Mountain range is by far the highest in New South Wales; the ranges westerly, though high when viewed from the low grounds from which they rise, cannot in any respect be compared with them. ”