William Cox(1764–1837)

William Cox was born at Wimborne Minster on 19 December 1764, eldest son of William Cox, a Dorset farmer and miller, and Elizabeth Bullen. He was schooled at the Wimborne grammar school, trained briefly as an architect, and worked for a decade as a Wiltshire estate steward before buying himself a lieutenant's commission in the New South Wales Corps in 1797. The Corps was the infantry regiment garrisoning the convict colony at Sydney Cove, raised by the government in 1789 specifically for that posting; it was already notorious by 1797 as the *Rum Corps*, the trading-and-distilling officer cartel that ran the colony's economy through the imported-rum monopoly. He sailed for New South Wales with his wife Rebecca and their four small sons aboard the *Minerva* in 1799 and reached Port Jackson on 11 January 1800. He was thirty-five.

The first decade in the colony went badly. He was appointed paymaster of the Corps in 1801, ran into accounting trouble over the regimental funds when sums consumed by the rum trade could not be reconciled to the books, was court-martialled, found guilty of irregularity, and broken to the half-pay list in 1807. His family lands at Clarendon on the Hawkesbury were forfeit. He stayed in the colony as a private farmer through the Bligh-and-Macarthur years and the 1808 Rum Rebellion (he was a minor figure but on the rebel side), and was restored to a magistracy at Windsor on the Hawkesbury in 1810 under Governor Lachlan Macquarie. Macquarie liked him. The Macquarie governorship was the colony's first attempt at administrative competence; Cox, by 1813, was Macquarie's senior magistrate in the Hawkesbury district and the man Macquarie turned to when a project needed somebody who would deliver it.

The Blue Mountains, the sandstone scarp twenty miles inland from Sydney that the colony had failed to cross for twenty-five years, were finally penetrated by the Gregory Blaxland, William Lawson and William Charles Wentworth expedition in May 1813. The three men found a route along the high ridge of the mountains down to the western plains beyond, and named the country at the foot of the descent Bathurst after the colonial secretary. Macquarie now needed a wheeled road across what the three men had walked. On 14 July 1814 he gave the contract to Cox, with a target of completing the hundred-and-one miles from the Nepean River at Emu Plains to the Bathurst Plains in twelve months, with a party of thirty convicts and eight guards. The road specifications were: minimum twelve feet wide; minimum twelve-foot wheel-clearance on the rock cuttings; grade nowhere over one-in-twelve. Cox started on 18 July at Emu Ford 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 technique was straightforward and the achievement was the discipline. He laid out the route each morning ahead of the party, marked the line with notched trees, set the convicts to grub and clear in two-hundred-yard sections, supervised the rock-cutting on the steeper grades personally, and slept in a tent at each successive working camp through the six months. He treated the convicts (most of them sentenced for theft or political offences) on the principle that men working in the bush far from rum supply and far from supervision needed praise and reasonable rations more than they needed flogging, and the party finished the job without any escapes and with only two minor disciplinary incidents recorded in his diary. Macquarie inspected the road in May 1815, gave each convict a pardon, granted Cox a thousand acres of the Bathurst Plains in fee simple and a further twelve hundred acres at Mulgoa on the Nepean. The Cox-built road, the foundation engineering work of the modern Australian highway network, was the route by which the New South Wales merino-wool industry, the gold rushes of the 1850s, and every subsequent westward European-settlement movement in the colony went.

He built three more roads under Macquarie's commission (north to Mudgee in 1816, south to Goulburn in 1819, the Cox's River crossing in 1822), ran Mulgoa as a private estate of about ten thousand acres, fathered eight more children with his second wife Anna Blachford, and served twenty-five years as a Hawkesbury magistrate. He retired to Mulgoa in 1825, wrote his *Memoirs of William Cox, J.P.* in his last decade (published posthumously by his grandson in 1901, the foundational primary source for the road), and died at the Mulgoa property on 15 March 1837, seventy-two years old. He is buried at St Thomas's church, Mulgoa, in the Cox family vault. The road over the Blue Mountains, the Great Western Highway in its modern alignment, is broadly the line he laid out; the village of Cox's River on the highway carries his name. The Cox name in the English-side catalogue is otherwise the *cock* young-man-leader byname and the Welsh-Marches Coch convergence; he carried it from a Dorset miller's family into the foundation event of European settlement of the Australian interior.