William Cox(1764–1837)

William Cox was born at Wimborne Minster in Dorset on 19 December 1764, eldest son of a farmer and miller. He trained briefly as an architect, worked as a Wiltshire estate steward, took a lieutenant's commission in the New South Wales Corps, and sailed for the convict colony at Sydney Cove with his wife and four small sons aboard the Minerva, reaching Port Jackson on 11 January 1800.

He settled as a farmer on the Hawkesbury, and under Governor Lachlan Macquarie's drive to give the colony competent administration he was made senior magistrate at Windsor in 1810. Macquarie came to rely on him as the man he turned to when a project had to be delivered.

The Blue Mountains, the sandstone scarp twenty miles inland that the colony had failed to cross for twenty-five years, were finally penetrated by the Blaxland, Lawson and Wentworth expedition in 1813. Macquarie now needed a wheeled road. On 14 July 1814 he gave the contract to Cox, with a target of a hundred and one miles from the Nepean to the Bathurst Plains in twelve months, a party of thirty convicts and eight guards, twelve feet wide and nowhere steeper than one in twelve. Cox started on 18 July and reached Bathurst Plains on 14 January 1815. The road was complete in six months, a hundred and one miles built in a hundred and seventy-six working days.

The achievement was the discipline. Cox laid out the route each morning ahead of the party, supervised the rock-cutting personally, and slept in a tent at each working camp through the six months. He treated the convicts on the principle that men working far from supervision needed praise and good rations more than the lash, and the party finished without a single escape. Macquarie inspected the road in May 1815, pardoned every convict on it, and granted Cox land at the Bathurst Plains and at Mulgoa.

He built three more roads under Macquarie's commission, ran Mulgoa as a working estate, and served twenty-five years as a Hawkesbury magistrate. He died at Mulgoa on 15 March 1837, seventy-two years old, and is buried in the Cox family vault at St Thomas's church there. The road over the Blue Mountains, broadly the line of the modern Great Western Highway, was the route by which the wool industry, the gold rushes and every later westward movement of settlement went. The Cox name carries him from a Dorset miller's family into the foundation event of European settlement of the Australian interior.