Macquarie’s great experiments: Patersons Plains and Wallis Plains
When Lachlan Macquarie arrived in Sydney at the end of 1809 to take up the position of Governor of New South Wales, he carried instructions from the Secretary of State for the Colonies. Among them was the command to expand agricultural and pastoral activities in the interests of the colony’s self-sufficiency. In following this instruction, Macquarie’s most important acts were to establish settlements at Patersons Plains and Wallis Plains: these settlements were to inaugurate farming outside the Sydney Basin.
Governor Lachlan Macquarie
Patersons Plains straddled the Paterson River between today’s Paterson and Woodville. Wallis Plains occupied the right (southern) bank of the Hunter River above and below its confluence with Wallis Creek. Unusually, these settlements were based on serving convicts apart from one emancipist at Patersons Plains and one free man at Wallis Plains. Farmers in earlier years, for example in the Hawkesbury, had included numerous emancipists but almost all of the farmers at Macquarie’s Hunter Valley settlements were still prisoners of the Crown. Having committed offences in Sydney they had been moved as a punishment to the penal station at Newcastle from where some worked as timber-getters along the Hunter and its lower tributaries including the Paterson River. Macquarie gave them a chance of freedom and economic independence.
The first settlers at Patersons Plains
Among the first men settled at Patersons Plains were John Swan, Benjamin Davis and George Pell, who had been given the task of procuring 500 cedar logs to be used in building a hospital in Sydney and to extend Government House. As a reward for completing the job, Macquarie offered them the opportunity to become farmers at Patersons Plains from which a few cedar trees had already been removed. They settled on the western bank of the river in 1812 near Old Banks, which became a military outpost.
Across the river were two other sawyers, John Reynolds and 16-year-old free man John Tucker jnr, who were also beneficiaries of Macquarie’s policy. Other convicts took up grants in following years, and by 1821 the settlement numbered a dozen holdings plus a glebe in the hands of the Rev George Middleton. The convicts were all ‘tenants at will’ (the Governor’s will, that is) with no title to their holdings. It was inferred, though, that they would gain ownership if they made a success of farming, which was an incentive and a boost to their confidence.
These men, and their womenfolk, were industrious. They cleared their blocks, established crops (principally wheat, maize, barley, vegetables and peaches) and raised pigs and cattle. Their first harvest was brought in during 1813, and the small surplus achieved was sold or bartered in Newcastle. Larger surpluses followed and went increasingly to Sydney.
The holdings of Patersons Plains, 1812-1821 (today’s roads added)
(Brian Walsh, Woodville Uncovered)
The site of Old Banks today: Swan, Davis and Pell had holdings on the far side, Reynolds and Tucker on the near side.
(Wikipedia)
As it happened, some of the convict farmers who settled in the area between 1812 and 1818 were later to lose their holdings to the ‘regularisation’ of the land by means of formal surveys that led to the land rush by free settlers taking up large land grants. Others lost out to the short-lived Clergy and School Lands Corporation which was intended to be responsible for providing religious and educational services. In effect these men were evicted from the land they had broken in and farmed for several years, and their holdings were eventually incorporated into the farms of free settlers. Some others of the early convict farmers of Paterson Plains had died or moved on by the time these changes had occurred.
Macquarie’s visit and verdict
Visiting Patersons Plains in 1818, Macquarie was happy with what he saw. His Journal recorded:
We proceeded up this Branch [the Paterson River] to the Farms some time since permitted by me to be occupied by 6 well behaved Convicts and two Free men. Arrived at the first Farm (young Tucker’s) at 1/2 past 11 o’clock . . . where we landed and walked about for some little time examining the improvements and nature of the Soil, which last is most excellent. We then proceeded to view the rest of the Farms on both sides of this beautiful River - finding the Soil of all of them very good - and much more ground cleared than I had any idea of.
The tiny settlement had not been without difficulties for the authorities. Some settlers had probably aided escaped convicts and there had been disputes about who had rights to what land, but Macquarie’s main goals had been achieved. No serious conflict with Aboriginal people had occurred, relationships within the community appear to have been reasonably harmonious and the convicts had become productive farmers needing little government support. They had justified the confidence Macquarie had placed in them.
Macquarie saw Patersons Plains as a template for another such settlement. This was to be a few miles away at Wallis Plains, founded in 1818 and destined to become the site of Maitland.
Wallis Plains
Wallis Plains (now Maitland) was first settled by Europeans in 1818 and 1819. As at Patersons Plains, its dozen original settlers were mainly convicts deemed by Governor Lachlan Macquarie to be sufficiently trustworthy to be provided with land on which to establish small farms. Ten or eleven of them, all men except Molly Morgan, had been transported from Britain to the infant Sydney and had then committed further crimes. They were thus subject to transportation once more - to the penal colony at Newcastle which was established specifically for such repeat offenders.
One of the 12, John Eckford (whose parents were convicts) was a free man in his teens, and another (William O’Donnell) may have been a retired non-commissioned officer who had served in the British army in India. O’Donnell may have been convicted of an offence in Sydney.
The settlers were mostly over 30 and a small number were over 50: their average age in 1818 was 43. Some had skills - Patrick Riley was a carpenter - and some (like Molly Morgan and John Smith) were later to prove they had genuine entrepreneurial ability. Most had come from towns and cities in Britain and initially would have had little knowledge of farming: they would have had to learn the necessary skills and routines and come to grips with the seasons and with the trials of nature.
Like Patersons Plains, the site of Wallis Plains had been chosen for its soil quality and access to fresh water, and the local lagoons gave them access to fish and wild fowl to supplement the food they grew. Soldiers provided them with security against runaway convicts and Aborigines raiding their crops.
The Wallis Creek farms functioned on the Patersons Plains model in terms of tenure arrangements and crop/livestock assemblages. The settlers did well, despite the depredations of three floods, one of them very large, in their first two years. Substantial losses of crops and perhaps livestock as well as damage to habitations must have resulted, but the settlers rebuilt and carried on. They too produced surpluses for sale or barter at Newcastle and Sydney, obtaining tea, sugar, coarse clothing and other items for their efforts.
By 1821 there were several huts and cottages at Wallis Plains along with stables, sheds and pigsties. Most of the allocated land had been cleared of the original bush for grazing and for crops. The settlement comprised 30-40 people, including wives and children, convict labourers and the small detachment of soldiers to guard and supervise them all. They were spread over three miles of floodplain land roughly equally on the sites of today’s central Maitland and the lower portion of East Maitland. Their economy was simple in the extreme, semi-subsistence farmers feeding themselves and disposing of any surpluses to the government.
Henry Dangar’s 1823 map of Wallis Plains holdings superimposed on the modern street configuration.
(Cynthia Hunter, Bound for Wallis Plains, p 21)
The original holdings differed from those shown here and they had not been surveyed.
A risky experiment vindicated
The extension of farm settlement from emancipists to serving convicts must have seemed risky. As repeat offenders the pioneers at Patersons Plans and Wallis Plains were probably considered ‘the worst of the worst’, but they had behaved well at Newcastle. Macquarie offered them a better life than the one they were experiencing in the new penal colony, where work conditions and brutal military rule made life even more unpleasant than it had been in Sydney.
The Governor reasoned that, with a measure of freedom, assistance allocated to help them clear their holdings and the possibility of title to their land if they made a success of their farms, those chosen for the new settlement had sufficient incentive to make good. And so it turned out. Essentially, the two settlements were bold experiments, part of Macquarie’s vision of developing a commercial economy beyond what was needed to support a gaol function. His method, focused on convicts, was progressively humanitarian and unusual - even remarkable - for its time.
So long as the settlers could plant, nurture and harvest their crops, tend to their animals, supplement their diets from the natural bounty of the land and the lagoons, and ship whatever surpluses they achieved down the river, the experiment had a good chance of success. The risk Macquarie took in trusting the convicts, as it happened, was small. He was not let down, even though some may have helped escapees from Newcastle - which could have seen them summarily evicted and returned to harsh conditions at the penal station. A few of the settlers eventually secured ownership of their holdings.
The arrangement worked for the convict farmers, though the ones who were eventually evicted from Patersons Plains were presumably not pleased at losing their holdings. It also worked for the government, which saw convicts off its hands and functioning productively. There were disputes over land because the first holdings had no surveyed boundaries, and no doubt some of the farmers did not get on well with their fellows, but no threat to the viability of the experiment ever developed.
Patersons Plains and Wallis Plains achieved Macquarie’s objectives. His thinking was vindicated and a functioning agricultural economy in the Maitland area was established. The convict economy was soon to be overrun, however, by the development of the town that became Maitland and by the rapid growth of commercial farming on large estates nearby and including in the valley of the Paterson River.
The free settlers of the colony, thinking convicts unworthy of being given opportunities and encouragement, were not enamoured of them or of what they saw as Macquarie’s ‘promotion’ of their interests. They thought the convicts should not have been allowed to become virtually free farmers. But the pioneers at Patersons Plains and Wallis Plains repaid Macquarie’s faith and vision, and in spades. They built the first European communities and economy of the Maitland area. The more entrepreneurial among them, like Molly Morgan and John Smith, provided some of the services that by the end of the 1820s saw Wallis Plains develop into the small town that soon became known as Maitland.
References
Hunter, Cynthia, The Settlers of Patersons Plains, Paterson Historical Society, Paterson, 1997.
Hunter, Cynthia, Bound for Wallis Plains: Maitland’s convict settlers, Maitland City Council, Maitland, 2012.
Keys, Chas, ‘Our past: Macquarie, convicts and Patersons Plains farms’, Maitland Mercury, 27 August 2021.
Keys, Chas, ‘Our past: Wallis Plains – our first European settlers 1818’, Maitland Mercury, 3 September 2021.
Keys, Chas, ‘Our past: Convicts of Wallis Plains and Patersons Plains in 1820’, Maitland Mercury, 10 September 2021.
Walsh, Brian, European Settlement at Paterson River 1812 to 1822, Paterson Historical Society, Paterson, 2012.
