The Travelling Table

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A tale of ‘Prince Charlie’s table’ and its life with the MacDonald, Campbell, Innes and Boswell families in Scotland, Australia and England, 1746-2016

Carolyn Williams

Published by Carolyn Williams Woodford, NSW 2778, Australia

Email: [email protected]

First published 2016, Second Edition 2017

People

Prince Charles Edward Stuart or ‘Bonnie Prince Charlie’ (1720-1788) Allan MacDonald (c1720-1792) and Flora MacDonald (1722-1790) John Campbell (1770-1827), Annabella Campbell (1774-1826) and family George Innes (1802-1839) and Lorn Innes (née Campbell) (1804-1877) Patrick Boswell (1815-1892) and Annabella Boswell (née Innes) (1826-1914) The Boswell sisters: Jane (1860-1939), Georgina (1862-1951), Margaret (1865-1962)

Places

Scotland Australia

Kingsburgh House, Isle of Skye (c1746-1816) Lochend, Appin, Argyllshire (1816-1821) Hobart and Restdown, Tasmania (1821-1822) Windsor and Old Government House, New South Wales (1822-1823) Bungarribee, Prospect/Blacktown, New South Wales (1823-1828) Capertee Valley and Glen Alice, New South Wales (1828-1841) Parramatta, New South Wales (1841-1843) Port Macquarie and Lake Innes House, New South Wales (1843-1862) Newcastle, New South Wales (1862-1865) Garrallan, Cumnock, Ayrshire (1865-1920) Sandgate House I and II, Ayr (sometime after 1914 to ???)

Auchinleck House, Auchinleck/Ochiltree, Ayrshire

Cover photo: Antiques Roadshow Series 36 Episode 14 (2014), Exeter Cathedral 1. Image courtesy of John Moore

Contents Introduction .……………………………………………………………………………….. 1

At Kingsburgh ……………………………………………………………………………… 4

Appin …………………………………………………………………………………………… 8

Emigration …………………………………………………………………………………… 9

The first long journey …………………………………………………………………… 10

A drawing room drama on the high seas ……………………………………… 16

Hobart Town ……………………………………………………………………………….. 19

A sojourn at Windsor …………………………………………………………………… 26

At Bungarribee ……………………………………………………………………………. 30

Bound for Capertee …………………………………………………………………….. 33

In the Capertee Valley ………………………………………………………………….. 39

To Parramatta ……………………………………………………………………………… 47

…. and on to Port Macquarie ……………………………………………………….. 54

The table stays in Port Macquarie while Annabella wanders ……….. 60

Newcastle: the table’s final home in Australia …………………………….. 63

The table’s final voyage ……………………………………………………………….. 65

To Garrallan ………………………………………………………………………………… 70

With the Boswell sisters at Sandgate House I and II ……………………… 74

Auchinleck House ………………………………………………………………………… 75

Postscript …………………………………………………………………………………….. 77

References and Acknowledgements ……………………………………………. 78, 79

Appendices: Maps of the table’s journeys …………………………………… 80

Campbell family tree …………………………………………………………………… 83

To my mother

Ruth Isabell Williams (née Campbell)

(1928-2016)

The travelling table

When they left Skye [in 1816] … my grandfather took with him to Lochend as a household treasure an old-fashioned mahogany writing table which the Prince1 was said to have used at Kingsborough. This table he took to Australia, and after many long journeys and strange adventures it was brought back to Scotland in 1865 by me, and is now at Garrallan, Old Cummock.

From Annabella Boswell’s Journal, p.204.

Some 200 years after that journey from the Isle of Skye to Lochend (in Appin, Scotland), the table made an appearance on the Antiques Roadshow. Having survived “many long journeys and strange adventures” it is, remarkably, still in the possession of the Boswell family.

Antiques Roadshow Series 36 Episode 14 (2014), Exeter Cathedral 1. Image courtesy of John Moore.

The ‘grandfather’ in Annabella Boswell’s story is John Campbell (1770-1827) and the gentleman on the right in the photograph above is the current owner of the table, John Boswell, a descendant of John Campbell through Annabella Boswell. John Campbell was my 4th great-grandfather. His son, Patrick, was my ancestor and Patrick’s sister, Lorn, was Annabella Boswell’s mother. This makes Annabella Boswell my 1st cousin four times removed, so John Boswell is a distant cousin of mine.

1 Prince Charles Edward Stuart or ‘Bonnie Prince Charlie’ (1720-1788). Charles was the grandson of deposed King James II of England and Ireland, and VII of Scotland, and sought to reclaim the throne for the Stuarts.

In this piece I trace as best I can the adventures and long journeys of the table from Scotland to Australia and back 40 or so years later to the present day. Focusing on the table as a means of tracing a part of my family history creates a different angle on a familiar story (there are already several published accounts of this family). It first of all extends the story back to before the table came into John Campbell’s possession and the circumstances through which it became invested with meaning and value that continues to this day: the Jacobite uprising of 1745-1746 and the flight of ‘Bonnie Prince Charlie’ to the Isle of Skye following his defeat at the Battle of Culloden. The table, and John Campbell’s attachment to it, piqued my curiosity about the broad historical forces that shaped my Campbell ancestors’ lives and propelled them to Australia in 1821.

Of course, most of the table’s story is unknown, as is the story of its human companions. But there are moments when the table becomes visible and can therefore be located in space and time. The table first makes an appearance in Annabella Boswell’s Journal, then in her unpublished writings and her Will, and finally on the Antiques Roadshow. Where there is no documentary evidence, I surmise the table’s location from around 1798 (when John Campbell acquired it) until it came into Annabella Boswell’s possession from her comment that John Campbell was an admirer of the Prince. If, for that reason, the table was a treasured possession, Campbell would have kept it with him and used it throughout his life. So to locate the table from 1798 until his death in 1827, I follow the movements of John Campbell; then, after his death, George Innes (Annabella Boswell’s father), who bought the table and gave it to Annabella when she was still a child. Annabella Boswell’s writings provide us with enough information to identify probable and actual locations of the table from around 1828 to the time of her death in 1914. Through the generous assistance of the Antiques Roadshow I was able to contact John Boswell, and the information he provided about the table’s whereabouts since Annabella Boswell’s death enabled me to complete the story.

That the table provides a visible line of continuity across generations of a family is of course due to its identity as ‘Prince Charlie’s table’ (as it was called in the family) and its longevity as an object. It has simply outlived all but its current owner while itself remaining relatively unchanged over the 275 or so years of its life. Of course, the table has suffered wear and tear from use and as a result of its remarkable travels, and it has been modified and strengthened. Annabella Boswell tells us that the table was done up and a plaque attached for identification purposes in the early 1860s, after it had been lost for a time. The plaque reads (citing the incorrect year): “This table was used by Prince Charles Edward, at Kingsborough Isle of Skye 1745”. But objects also create continuity through functioning as vectors of stories and an ‘aide-de-memoire’, producing durable memories and maintaining affectional ties to people and places long gone. For these reasons objects are invested in, cherished and preserved, hung on to and then handed on – in the case of this table, for nearly 300 years. And lest human memory fails, a more durable entity – the affixed plaque – will tell future generations about the table’s association with the Prince.

The table’s enduring physicality also invites speculation about what it was witness to well beyond the timeframe of a human lifespan, the specific places and buildings it inhabited at different times, the people who wrote at it and what they wrote. Fortunately, much of this information is readily available through the past efforts of Campbell family historians. But more than a passive object and silent witness, the table was a participant in those events and acts of writing through furnishing a surface to write on. Whenever I read a letter or document that its owners have written, I can’t help but see the writer’s writing companion, the table. I think about the table’s contribution to

maintaining social connections and filial ties half a world away at a time when the ‘letter’ – and the network of people, systems, roads, vehicles, ships and objects that ensured its delivery – was the only technology of long-distance communication. Annabella Boswell’s letters, journals and documents would have been written at the table. And now John Boswell writes his correspondence to me at the table.

As I follow the table and its human companions I briefly note the historical context and features of the places in which they resided and the means by which they got there. All of the table’s travels – whether from Scotland to Australia and back again, or when it changed hands within the family and travelled to other places with them – relied on some kind of transport. During its lifetime the table has witnessed astounding developments in technology and transportation. Over the course of its travelling life (including to the Antiques Roadshow) sail had given way to engine-powered ships, and horses and carts, bullocks and drays had given way to engine-powered land vehicles – railways, cars and trucks. It is even possible that the table may one day fly. In its early life the table’s travels involved hazardous sea voyages and journeys on barely passable roads. Nowadays we can scarcely imagine what it took, in terms of developments in ship technology and sailing techniques, navigational charts and instruments (which themselves co-evolved with European trading and colonisation of faraway places), dependence on the vagaries of the weather, seas and winds, and the sheer hard work of the crew, to sail around the world in a pre-engine, pre-GPS age. Then, once in Australia, developments in 19th century engineering and road building allowed the table and its human companions to travel to places that Europeans had only recently set eyes on.

But transport was only a part of an array of resources that had to be mobilised and assembled together to move the Campbell family and their possessions half way around the world in 1821. Immigration to Australia required the mobilisation of networks of influential friends and family to provide finance and letters of recommendation to government authorities, for example. Vehicles and the labour required to move people and their possessions would have had to be organised, as would a panoply of servants to disassemble then reassemble the household elsewhere. This labour (by humans and non-humans alike), through which the movement of people and things is accomplished, is mostly invisible in written accounts of immigration and travel. It only becomes noteworthy and thereby rendered visible to history when this movement is thrown into jeopardy or stopped altogether – through accidents, shipwrecks or other calamities – or when such travels are still novel, non-routine, hazardous and not yet taken for granted. Fortunately, there are several such accounts that I can draw on to help in my imaginings of some of the table’s adventures.

In a sense it doesn’t matter if the Prince used the table while at Kingsburgh and whether or not this can be verified. What matters is that the table thereafter became invested with this association and this has defined its identity, meaning and value to this very day. Perhaps the table still works as an aide-de-memoire of Annabella Boswell and the family’s history in colonial Australia; certainly, it would have gained value as an ‘antique’. But, from its appearance on the Antiques Roadshow, it seems the table has over time gained more value and meaning through its association with the Prince. Whether by virtue of its physical properties, its historical significance, its capacity to make human memories and social ties durable over time or its growing material value as an antique, the table has survived and provided a line of continuity in this family for nearly 220 years.

* * * *

At Kingsburgh

‘Prince Charlie’s table’ was known as an ‘architect’s table’, the earliest of which were possibly made around 1740. It was a practical table, for use in a ‘gentleman’s library’, with a top that could be raised to different angles for drawing or reading. It had a retractable writing surface, concealed compartments and candle holders. It is unclear where the table was made, who bought it or how it came to be at Kingsburgh House on the Isle of Skye. Nevertheless, it found itself there by 1746 for in that year ‘Bonnie Prince Charlie’ famously fled by boat to Skye, disguised as Flora MacDonald’s maid, following the defeat of his army at the Battle of Culloden. This event is memorialized in the Skye Boat Song, still taught to Australian school children well into the 20th century, which begins: “Speed, bonnie boat, like a bird on the wing / Onward! the sailors cry; / Carry the lad that's born to be King / Over the sea to Skye”.

Flora MacDonald Jacobite Heroine, National Portrait Gallery London. Charles Edward Stuart 1720-1788 by William Mosman c1750, Scottish National Portrait Gallery.

The Prince stayed at Kingsburgh House on the night of 29th June before setting off early the following afternoon and eventually escaping to France by ship. While at Kingsburgh the Prince was said to have used the table, perhaps to write short letters to his supporters. And so the legend of ‘Prince Charlie’s table’ was born. Flora MacDonald was soon after briefly imprisoned in the Tower of London for aiding the Prince’s escape.

Kingsburgh House at the time of these events was the family home of Flora MacDonald’s future husband, Allan MacDonald, whose father Alexander was also briefly imprisoned for aiding the Prince’s escape. Alexander MacDonald, who was at that time Lord MacDonald’s Chamberlain (estate administrator) at Kingsburgh, continued living there until his death in 1772. Flora and Allan married in 1750 and briefly lived at Kingsburgh House before settling nearby on their own ‘tack’: land leased from their kinsman and clan chief Lord MacDonald. The growing MacDonald family returned to live at Kingsburgh sometime before or around 1760, after Allan took over his father’s duties as Chamberlain, and Allan eventually acquired the ‘tack’ of Kingsburgh. While living at Kingsburgh

House, Flora may well have used the table as a reminder of the Prince – it was rumoured that she fell in love with him2.

In 1773 James Boswell (who was a relative of Annabella Boswell’s husband) and his companion, Dr Samuel Johnson, toured the Hebrides. While on the Isle of Skye they stayed a night with Allan and Flora MacDonald at Kingsburgh House. After Johnson's death in 1784 Boswell published his Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides, based on a diary he had kept during the tour. The Journal included an elaborated account of the events of 1746, compiled from what Flora MacDonald told them and information provided by others involved in the Prince’s escape. It is quite possible that the table the Prince was claimed to have used was the very one on which Boswell wrote up his notes of that conversation with Flora MacDonald. This is not entirely fanciful. Boswell records that, while at Kingsburgh House, he and Dr Johnson slept in the same room as the Prince, and Johnson in the very same bed that the Prince had used; further, there was a table in the room on which Johnson left a note he had written overnight. It read, “With virtue weigh’d, what worthless trash is gold”, apparently in admiration of the Highlanders who had resisted the considerable reward offered for giving up the Prince.

Of course, when the Prince stayed at Kingsburgh House the table was a relatively new piece of furniture and was therefore more Above: Samuel Johnson likely to have been in the parlour or library than in a bedroom. By by Sir Joshua Reynolds, c1772. Tate Gallery, London. the time Boswell and Johnson stayed at Kingsburgh some 30 years later, the table could have been relegated to the bedroom Top: James Boswell in which the Prince had slept or may have been somewhere else by Sir Joshua Reynolds, 1785. in the house. In any event, the table and its connection to the National Portrait Gallery, London. events of ‘46 were apparently not brought to the visitors’ attention for Boswell did not comment on it in his journal.

Soon after, in 1774, the MacDonalds – who Boswell tells us in his Journal were experiencing financial difficulties like many of the ‘tacksman’ class at the time – migrated to North Carolina on the eve of the American War of Independence (1775-1783). Ironically, in this context the MacDonalds supported the British Hanoverian King George III whose predecessor, George II, ‘Bonnie Prince Charlie’ had attempted to depose. Allan MacDonald and two of his sons served with the British militia forces but Allan and one son were captured and imprisoned in 1776. Flora and the other

2 There are many accounts of ‘Bonnie Prince Charlie’s’ relationship with Flora MacDonald and his escape to France. Authoritative sources all report Flora taking a lock of the Prince’s hair and being given one of the sheets from the bed in which he slept and in which she was buried. All information on the MacDonalds is from: Flora Frances Wylde (1875). The Life of Flora MacDonald (written by her grand-daughter). London and Edinburgh: William P. Nimmo; Allan Reginald MacDonald (1938). The Truth about Flora MacDonald. Inverness: The Northern Chronicle Office; Elizabeth Gray Vining (1967). Flora MacDonald in the Highlands and America. London: Geoffrey Bles; Hugh Douglas (1993). Flora MacDonald: the Most Loyal Rebel. Stroud, Gloucestershire and Dover NH: Alan Sutton.

children spent the following 2 years on or about their North Carolina plantation where they were regularly subjected to terrifying and life-threatening raids by marauding bands of robbers from both sides of the conflict. Flora returned to Britain in 1779 and her husband in 1784, returning to Skye in 1780 and 1785 respectively. Flora MacDonald never again lived at Kingsburgh House, dying at nearby Peinduin in 1790. After Flora’s death Allan again took up residence at Kingsburgh, dying there in 1792.

Did the table go to America with the MacDonalds and return safely with them? Historian James Hunter tells us that, once they purchased their plantation in North Carolina, “Allan and Flora installed their children, their 8 servants and such furniture, books and other possessions as they had been able to ship with them from their previous home beside Loch Snizort”3 (Kingsburgh). But it seems they lost everything, including the plantation. Allan MacDonald, in a statement to the British Government claiming compensation for his losses in North Carolina during the war, said that all the furniture was plundered by the enemy4. Flora and the children moved around for protection and therefore had to travel light, eventually reaching safety in New York. The only baggage Flora had with her was a few things salvaged from their plantation5. The MacDonald family was reunited in New York and travelled on to Canada and eventually back to Skye. From these accounts I think we can confidently say that the table stayed safely at Kingsburgh House.

In 1795 the second Lord MacDonald succeeded his father as owner of the Skye estates and the building of a new Kingsburgh House commenced at a different site on the estate. The table is likely to have stayed in the old Kingsburgh House until the new house was completed.

The following year, Annabella Boswell’s grandfather, John Campbell of Lochend, accepted the position of Lord MacDonald’s Chamberlain at Kingsburgh and resigned his commission in the army. Campbell married Annabella Campbell, daughter of Col. John Campbell, Laird of Melfort, in December 1797. The couple took up residence in the new Kingsburgh House in 1798, the year it was completed. Most if not all 13 Campbell children were born here from 1798 to 1815, including my ancestor, Patrick Frederick (born 1805), and Annabella Boswell’s mother, Georgiana Lorn Morshead (born 1804), known as ‘Lorn’. Annabella Boswell tells us that, for the older Campbell children in particular, growing up at Kingsburgh House gave a reality to the tales they heard about the Prince Col. John Campbell of Lochend (from their father and others on Skye, no doubt) and made a (1770-1827). deep and lasting impression on them. So Annabella’s mother, Retrieved from Ancestry. Lorn, who would have told Annabella this story, certainly understood the significance of the table.

3 James Hunter (1994). A Dance called America: the Scottish Highlands, the United States, and Canada. Edinburgh: Mainstream, p.16. 4 Douglas, op.cit., p.208. 5 Vining, op.cit., p.154.

‘New’ Kingsburgh House. Source: http://canmore.org.uk/collection/1006957

‘New’ Kingsburgh House was home to the table from 1798 to 1816. While at Kingsburgh, the older Campbell children, including Patrick and Lorn, were perhaps first allowed to use the table. John Campbell would have written letters at the table, including one to his 16 year old daughter Margaret who in 1815 was at school in Edinburgh. Responding to her request for more pocket money, he also advises her that “Attention to your Education neatness in dress and appearance economy in every thing and a regular attendance to your religious duty are the only way to gratify your friends to make yourself happy & to Fit you for Filling your station in Life …”6.

But the years the Campbells spent on Skye, from 1798 to 1816, were some of the most tumultuous in the history of the western Highlands and Hebrides. In the early years at Kingsburgh, John Campbell would have sat at the table to write reports to his employer, Lord MacDonald (or his trustees, for Lord MacDonald was often away overseas with his regiment). Soon after inheriting the Skye estates in 1795, MacDonald initiated the first of the island’s many clearances. Long term hereditary tenants across the Lord’s lands, which covered at least half of Skye, were served with notices of eviction and encouraged to move on to ‘crofts’: small holdings established on the less productive areas of the estates. Crofts were too small for subsistence farming and the tenants were subject to regular increases in rent. As a result, the ‘crofters’ had to seek employment in the Lord’s rapidly expanding and (at that time) highly profitable kelp business. The best farms on the estates were consolidated and rented to new tenants engaged in broad scale sheep farming. Thus began a process that was to lead to increasing conflict, misery, destitution, famine and mass emigration over the subsequent decades.

To stem the flow of the Highland and Hebrides workforce from Scotland, the British government passed laws which regulated emigration numbers and imposed a prohibitive cost on the sea passage to Canada. This soon led to a surplus population of the poorest tenants and the indigent

6 Transcription of letter in Robert Lee (1992). My Great, Great, Grandmother Margaret Campbell. Privately published, p.39. Lee tells us that lack of punctuation was a feature of letters at the time.

dispossessed – displaced by sheep and blighted by crop failures – who could not afford to leave. Trapped, unemployed, increasingly desperate and restive, this sector of the Highlands and Hebrides population was aggressively targeted for recruitment into military service in the Canadian Regiment7.

This is the situation that John Campbell found himself in over the years 1798 to 1805. If Kingsburgh and other estates began to be ‘cleared’ during his tenure as Chamberlain, John Campbell would have overseen the process. Perhaps he met with deputations of tenants and received their memorials and petitions addressed to Lord MacDonald, their absent landlord and clan chief, pleading not to be evicted8. Certainly, it is known that in 1801 alone 267 tenants on 56 farms were dispossessed9 including, perhaps, some on Kingsburgh. J.M. Bumstead, in his book on the Highland clearances, quotes from several documents written by ‘MacDonald’s Skye chamberlain’ and ‘John Campbell’, both of whom Campbell historian John Moore identifies as our John Campbell. Campbell is clearly attempting to quell the unrest and stem the flow of emigration, for instance by relocating the best of the dispossessed tenants to other lands on the Lord’s estates. If this is indeed our John Campbell, the letters and reports reveal him to be not particularly sympathetic to the plight of the unhappy tenants, disagreeing with MacDonald’s trustees’ decision to give a rent reduction for the present year (1803) because it signals that MacDonald has yielded to “a few restless infatuated people”10. But other quotes reveal Campbell is struggling to know what to do with the surplus population of the poorest tenants and dispossessed indigents who were trapped on Skye and for whom he seems to have had some compassion. Reporting on the crop failure in 1802, Campbell adds that “I am realy at a loss how to manage the great population and little employment here is realy distressing”11. A few months later, Campbell reports the failure of the next (1803) crop and the sickness, hunger and yet another wave of prospective emigrants it is creating12. The table would have been ‘complicit’ in these events as Campbell sat at it to write these reports and the necessary documentation, orders, leases and so on.

John Campbell resigned as Chamberlain in 1805, perhaps sick of being caught between the interests of the tenants and Lord MacDonald or perhaps following a falling out with him. In any event, Campbell then leased Kingsburgh and farmed and grazed sheep and cattle until 181613. Though they may have been its beneficiaries for a time, the Campbell family (and the table) while living on Skye witnessed and participated in one of the most dramatic social and economic upheavals in Scottish history.

Appin

In 1816 John Campbell took the table with him across the Sea of the Hebrides to Appin on the west coast of Scotland to take up residence at his late father’s estate, Lochend. This would have been the

7 See J. M. Bumstead (1982). The People’s Clearance. Highland Emigration to British North America 1770-1815. Edinburgh and Winnipeg: Edinburgh University Press and University of Manitoba Press. 8 James Hunter and Cailean Maclean (1986). Skye. The Island. Edinburgh: Mainstream, pp.62-66. 9 Bumstead, op.cit., p.85. 10 Bumstead, op.cit., p.140. 11 Bumstead, op cit., p.150. 12 Bumstead, op.cit., p.150. 13 Information supplied by John Moore.

second sea voyage for the table, but this time in company with the by now large Campbell family. Campbell did extensive renovations to Lochend House and to the gardens which his father had laid out. While there, Campbell seems to have also been working as Factor (manager) of the Argyll Estates belonging to his kinsman, the Marquis of Breadalbane. Lochend is now Kinlochlaich, a tourist attraction featuring display gardens, a plant nursery and self-catering accommodation. The Campbells and the table resided at Lochend until 1821 when they left for Australia.

In its final year at Lochend, the table would have been party to the written arrangements for the Campbell family’s emigration from Scotland to Australia.

Kinlochlaich House (Lochend), Appin, Argyllshire, Scotland. Source: http://www.kinlochlaich-house.co.uk/

Emigration

In the late 18th and early 19th centuries, the Scottish Highlands and Hebrides were still suffering the effects of the failed Jacobite rebellion: the dismantling of the clan system and the Highland way of life. Highlanders were disarmed, Highland music and the use of Gaelic language were discouraged, and Highland dress and the wearing of tartan were banned for a time. As noted previously, reforms in land tenure led to social and economic collapse, mass emigration and rapid depopulation. The end of the Napoleonic wars following Bonaparte’s defeat at the Battle of Waterloo in 1815 brought an economic recession to Europe and Britain, affecting the western Highlands of Scotland in particular.

The situation in Scotland was dire, but for John Campbell the reason for leaving may have been more personal and pressing. He had been experiencing severe financial difficulties and was in considerable debt to his wife’s brothers, General Sir Colin Campbell and Captain (later Admiral Sir) Patrick Campbell. The prospect of a fresh start in a new land, the promise of a quick economic recovery and, perhaps, escape from creditors would have been appealing14.

14 See Campbell Alexander (2014). A Family History. https://sites.google.com/site/camalexanderfamilyhistory/ and Phyl Macleod (1994). From Bernisdale to Bairnsdale: the story of Archibald and Colina Macleod and their descendants in Australia, 1821-1994. Privately published, ISBN 0 646 20030 5.

The idea of immigration to Australia in particular would have been encouraged by reports from the Campbell family’s extensive connections15 of the wealth that could be made there in a short time, and by the British government’s policy of offering well-off settlers free land and free labour in the form of transported convicts. Publications encouraging immigration to Australia in preference to America were also appearing at this time16. John Campbell would have had no problem finding influential patrons to recommend him for immigration to the relevant colonial authorities17.

The move was nevertheless a huge wrench and the Campbells were not young. By 1821 John had turned 50 and Annabella was in her late 40s. Certainly we know from a letter written by Annabella Campbell that she was a reluctant emigrant18. The Campbells’ eldest sons, John, Archibald Alexander (‘Alex’ or ‘Sandy’) and William had already joined the army and were serving with the British East India Company. Their eldest daughter, Colina, had married Archibald MacLeod – scion of an old landholding clan on Skye – at Kingsburgh House in 1815. Three MacLeod children were born at Appin over the following few years. The MacLeods, similarly facing bleak economic prospects in Scotland, decided to immigrate to Australia with the Campbells. Second eldest Campbell daughter, Margaret, then age 21, Barbara Isabella (twin of William, and known as ‘Isabella’) then 17, and 16 year old Lorn also accompanied their parents, as did 15 year old Patrick (my ancestor, the oldest son to come to Australia) and four other children aged 14 to 5. Eight year old Arthur Wellesley Wellington (known as ‘Wellington’) stayed behind, possibly due to illness, but followed a few years later.

The first long journey

Annabella Boswell takes up the story:

I have heard my mother say that when the family started from Lochend on their distant journey [to Australia], their first stage was to Inveraray, from whence they crossed to St Catherine’s, and travelled to Loch Goilhead in a coach, thence by boat to Glasgow. From Glasgow they went to Edinburgh by the canal, and from Edinburgh to London by sea, in what was then called a Leith smack, a comfortless little coasting vessel, and finally embarked in May 1821, for Tasmania, then only known as Van Diemen’s Land, and a penal settlement.

From Annabella Boswell’s Journal, p.206.

15 Including, perhaps, John and Annabella Campbell’s distant relative and also a relative by marriage, Elizabeth Macquarie, wife of then Governor of New South Wales, Lachlan Macquarie. John Campbell’s sister, Margaret, married John Campbell of Airds, Elizabeth Macquarie’s (née Campbell’s) brother, in 1803. As her eldest brother, ‘my’ John Campbell would more than likely have been at his sister’s wedding, as would Elizabeth, the groom’s sister. Elizabeth Campbell married Lachlan Macquarie in 1807. 16 One of these was William Charles Wentworth’s A Statistical, Historical and Political Description of the Colony of New South Wales (1819). 17 Campbell’s story gives an insight into how this system of patronage through family and military ties worked. Lord Melville (then First Lord of the Admiralty) had connections to the Campbells through mutual ties to the Duke of Wellington who was a close friend and army colleague of Sir Colin Campbell, Annabella Campbell’s brother. Melville recommended John Campbell for immigration to the Earl of Bathurst (then Secretary of State for the Colonies). Bathurst then wrote a letter of recommendation to the Governor, which Campbell carried with him to Australia, ensuring he was given preferential treatment. See Alexander, op.cit. 18 Transcription of a letter dated November 1822 from Annabella Campbell to her daughter Margaret Robertson, in Lee, op.cit., pp.44-46.

To get some sense of that journey and what it involved I tried to re-trace it in more detail. Appin is on the west coast of Scotland where Loch Ness and its companion lochs westward meet the Sea of the Hebrides. There is no direct ‘as the crow flies’ route south to Inveraray from Appin as there is mountainous country and large lochs in between. There are 2 possible road routes from Appin to Inveraray that the Campbells could have taken, based on what I could find out about roads in existence at the time. One route took them south to Connel, a journey which in itself involved 2 water crossings – at Dallachulish and Connel itself. From Connel they could reach Inveraray via Dalmally travelling on a military road which had certainly been built by then19. Another possible road route at the time was northwards from Appin to Inveraray via Glencoe, Tyndrum and Dalmally on another military road (see Appendix for map). These military roads linked army garrisons and were built in the wake of the 1745-6 uprising to quell any further rebellion in the Highlands. And although I have no idea which of these roads they would have taken to Dalmally where they both meet – though perhaps to minimise water crossings they took second route – there was only one road from Dalmally to Inveraray. This, too, was also an old military road which is nowadays the A819.

One of the many miracles of the internet is Google’s ‘street view’ maps of just about anywhere in the world. I took a Google street view drive along the A819 from Dalmally to Inveraray, about 23 km in distance. The road ascends to a high point (Monument Hill), which the modern route now skirts around, then descends. The road is narrow, steep and winding, and quite hazardous in places. And this is the improved, re-aligned and sealed road of today20! In 1821 it would have had a bone- shaking rough stone surface. At the time of the Google street view capture (June 2014), the road around Monument Hill was damp and shrouded in mist; away from the hill it was dry and sunny. From the road you can see Loch Awe. As I took my desktop drive to Inveraray along the A819 in the not-quite footsteps of my Campbell ancestors, I wondered if any of them expected that they would never see Scotland again for, apart from Lorn, this is indeed what happened.

After perhaps resting overnight at Inveraray, seat of Clan Campbell, our travellers then crossed to St Catherine’s on the other side of Loch Fyne by a ferry boat and continued by coach to Lochgoilhead on what seems on a contemporary map to be the one and only possible road. This is still a minor country road, the B839, so the going for our travellers and their numerous coaches and carts some 200 years earlier would have been even rougher. I took a Google street view drive along this road too. It is a narrow one-lane wide strip of asphalt 10 km long in various states of disrepair, ascending the mountains through a series of hairpin bends and winding through country now apparently mainly dedicated to forestry operations before descending into Lochgoilhead. Although the Wikipedia entry for Lochgoilhead tells us that it used to be an important stop for travellers between Inveraray and Glasgow, in 1821 it is doubtful that the road from St Catherine’s to Lochgoilhead would have even been surfaced as it seems it was not a military road. At Lochgoilhead, Annabella Boswell tells us, the party then got a boat to Glasgow and then a boat to Edinburgh via the Forth and Clyde Canal, which would have involved passing through many locks.

19 See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dalmally and http://www.oldroadsofscotland.com/militaryroadscaulfeild.htm 20 See www.sabre-roads.org.uk/wiki/index.php?title=A819

Forth and Clyde Canal from Glasgow to Edinburgh. Source: Wikipedia

I imagine that this trip from Appin to Edinburgh could have taken several days or more, with people and possessions being loaded onto and then unloaded from coaches, carts and boats at least 10 times before taking the Leith smack to London where they were unloaded again. I imagine scenes of chaos at each transit point, with the 2 Campbell parents, 8 of their children (the older ones and servants no doubt helping take care of the younger children) and servants loading or unloading belongings. The younger children would have been tired and tetchy. If the MacLeods travelled with them, this would have added 2 more adults and 3 more children under the age of 5.

The “comfortless little coasting vessel”, the Leith smack.

We don’t know if the table travelled the same route as the Campbell family and on the same transports or if it was sent by boat directly to London from Appin with other furniture and possessions. But in that case why didn’t the Campbells also go directly to London by boat? Perhaps they wanted to say ‘goodbye’ to friends and family on the way.

Once in London, our travellers were beset by a series of delays. The reasons are well-documented. In letters to his father and brother in Parramatta, John Macarthur Jnr – then a Barrister at Inner Temple and an advisor to settlers going to Australia – reports on the events. Macarthur tells us that the Lusitania was not the ship on which the Campbells and their travelling companions originally intended to sail to Australia. They were to have sailed on the Royal George along with the new Governor of New South Wales, Sir Thomas Brisbane, and his entourage which included Archibald

MacLeod’s brother, Dr Donald MacLeod, who was Brisbane’s personal physician. But a serious quarrel with the charterer of the Royal George led John Campbell to charter his own ship, the Lusitania, owned and captained by ex-naval officer William Langdon21. It is clear from Macarthur Jnr’s letters that, while in London, John Campbell and Archibald MacLeod met with him and that they carried with them on the Lusitania a letter from Macarthur to his father in Australia22.

The hurried arrangement of a replacement ship led to more delays and confusion. But after a month or two in London (perhaps in storage somewhere), the table finally found itself being loaded onto the Lusitania along with the possessions of the other passengers, provisions, merchandise, livestock and feed, agricultural implements probably and possibly even a Landau coach23. John Moore, who has done extensive research on the Campbell family, pieced together this evocative story from the available information, including the letters of one of the Lusitania’s passengers, Janet Ranken:

The Lusitania had been expected to sail in mid-May but was delayed until 21 May before finally reaching Gravesend on 3 June ready for boarding. Believing the ship was at Gravesend the Rankens had sent down the servants with the dogs the day before, and took a steam packet on 3 June for the 30 mile journey down the Thames. Complete chaos must have greeted them at the wharf with passengers, servants, luggage, not to mention dogs etc but more disturbing no sight of the Lusitania. As night fell, doubt must have crept upon them that the ship wouldn’t arrive. It had taken over a day for the Lusitania to travel a similar distance from the dock, finally arriving at 6 pm. There would be no further delays … except for favourable winds to speed them on their voyage to Van Diemen’s Land. At least the provisions, livestock and merchandise had been loaded the day before at the West India Docks24.

Added to the chaos was the spectre of drunken sailors. In a letter to her sister dated 1st June 1821, Janet Ranken reports that her husband warned her off boarding the Lusitania at the London Docks because “[t]he sailors will all be drunk [for the first day], which would make it very unpleasant for me”25. This is why they would be joining the ship at Gravesend, travelling down the Thames by steam packet.

The merchandise mentioned in the extract above would likely have been purchased in London by Campbell, MacLeod, the captain and perhaps some of the other passengers with a view to selling for a handsome profit in Australia. We will see more of this merchandise later.

21 A. B. Ranken (1916). The Rankens of Bathurst. Sydney: S.D. Townsend & Co. However, Annabella Boswell says that it was Campbell and Ranken who chartered the Lusitania, and Alexander says that it was Campbell and MacLeod who chartered the Lusitania. For an account of the quarrel with the charterer of the Royal George, reported in letters from John Macarthur Jnr in London to his brother and father in Parramatta, see pages 180-184 in Alexander, op.cit. 22 Alexander, op.cit., p.189. 23 The National Museum of Australia holds in its collection a Landau coach which is claimed to have been brought to Australia by George and Janet Ranken on the Lusitania and used by the Rankens for their journeys between Sydney and Bathurst. Historian John Moore doubts this story, given the Landau was a town coach unsuited to travelling the very rough roads on the 200 km or so journey to their home in Bathurst and given that the cargo manifest cannot be located. Besides which, the coach seems rather large to be accommodated in the hold (presumably) of a small ship. 24 Story from John Moore, https://www.facebook.com/Bungarribee- -place-of-a-king-192249967461389/ 25 Ranken, op.cit., p.9.

By the time the Lusitania departed Gravesend in mid-June 1821, the passengers (numbering around 40) comprised John and Annabella Campbell with 9 of their children, son-in-law Archibald and three MacLeod grandchildren aged 4 to 2 and another on the way, an unknown number of their servants and retainers including three gardeners and several paying passengers. Included in the Campbell entourage were newlyweds George and Janet Ranken. From another old Scottish landed family, George Ranken26 had married his first cousin, Janet Ranken Hutchinson, a month before they left for Australia, following Annabella Campbell’s intercession with Janet’s mother to allow the marriage. The other passengers we know anything about were Scotsman James Robertson (who seemed to be an associate of George Ranken) and a well-to-do Englishman, John Rotton, whose previous connection (if any) with the Campbells is unknown27. On top of this were the captain and his wife, and an unknown number of crew.

For people like the Campbells, used to travelling the seas around the Scottish west coast and islands, this would still have been a daunting voyage. The Lusitania, at 245 tons, was smaller than the Friendship, one of the smallest ships in the first fleet of convicts transported to Australia in 1788. I can’t find an image of the Lusitania, so the Friendship will have to serve as a comparison. At 278 tons and 23m long, the Friendship was slightly larger than the Lusitania. You can see from the perhaps exaggerated size of the figures standing on the deck of the Friendship (below) how small the Lusitania would have been.

Convict transport ship Friendship by Frank Allen. Source: http://firstfleetfellowship.org.au/ships/hms-friendship/

26 George Ranken’s younger brother, Arthur, who arrived in Australia in 1826, would go on to marry the Campbells’ youngest daughter, Annabella (born 1815), in 1837. 27 John Rotton’s younger brother, Walter, arrived in Hobart on the Mariner soon after the Lusitania and became a lifelong friend and associate of Patrick Campbell. Both settled in the Hunter Valley, NSW.

Reproduced with permission from Robert Lee (1992). My Great, Great, Grandmother Margaret Campbell, p.7. The map is based on Captain William Langdon’s log, kept at the Tasmanian Archives.

A drawing room drama on the high seas

My grandfather and Mr George Ranken chartered the ship in which they sailed and, in addition to their own families, took a few passengers and retainers. The Captain also took two or three passengers, and had his wife on board, so that there were several conflicting interests which helped enliven the voyage, and to make it less tedious, if also at times not quite so agreeable as it might have been had the party been differently constituted.

From Annabella Boswell’s Journal, p.206.

This extract from Annabella Boswell’s Journal, commenting on the passengers on the Lusitania, suggests that relations between the travellers were at times strained, no doubt especially during the more than 3 months at sea from St Jago (Santiago, Cape Verde Islands) to King George’s Sound (now the site of Albany), Western Australia.

Boswell continues her mother’s recollections of the voyage:

The Lusitania put in at St Jago, where all enjoyed a delightful time and made many pleasant excursions, enjoying especially the fruit and flowers so abundant in that fine climate. I have now in my possession a few pretty little shells picked up at that time by my dear mother and long treasured by her. My grandfather’s party received great attention from the American Consul, who was much fascinated by one of their number. No especial incidents marked the voyage after leaving St Jago, but of course, when crossing the line, all the old-fashioned ceremonies attending the visit of Neptune to the strangers on board were carried out, in some cases rather roughly. A warm and life-long friendship began on the voyage between my mother and Mrs George Ranken. They were but then newly married, a handsome young pair, full of life and energy.

From Annabella Boswell’s Journal, pp.206-7.

Porto Praya, in the island of St Jago by Thomas Medland, 1806. The Royal Society.

The Lusitania arrived at St Jago, now Santiago, the largest of the Cape Verde Islands, on 7th July 1821. The Cape Verde Islands were at the time a Portuguese colony and centre of the Portuguese slave trade from West Africa. The ramifications of this become apparent in Janet Ranken’s account of the voyage and their week-long stopover at St Jago in letters to her mother and sister in Scotland. In a letter to her mother, Janet describes the wretched “naked blacks” in their village near the shore and dining with the American Consul who had “plenty of slaves”. She also recounts an excursion inland with her husband George, Annabella Campbell and the older Campbell daughters and son Patrick, their servants and some other passengers, to a wealthy plantation owner’s homestead. Here they stayed with slaves attending to their every need. Ranken also reports that a convict ship had caught up to them and that the ships would be leaving St Jago together28. In a later, less discreet letter to her sister, Ranken speaks scathingly about St Jago as a “horrible place”, of the heat and sun, the dry and barren landscape, the bad accommodation and food but, again, the plethora of fruit and slaves29. This is a somewhat different account than that in Annabella Boswell’s Journal, which Annabella’s mother would have told her when she was a child.

As to the interpersonal tensions alluded to in Boswell’s journal and the ‘drawing room drama’ of my invention, Janet Ranken’s letters are the only other source of information (apart from the captain’s log) about what happened on board the Lusitania. Ranken’s letter to her sister reveals that there was no love lost between herself and ‘Mrs Campbell’ (Annabella). Even though it was Annabella who interceded on Janet’s behalf with her mother to allow her marriage to George, Ranken’s attitude towards Annabella seems to be primarily one of irritation and annoyance. Ranken reports that, as it left St Jago, the Lusitania was fired on from the shore because the captain had apparently failed to pay the port dues30. Gunpowder and shot rained down on the ship which so frightened ‘Mrs Campbell’ that she was ill for 3 weeks31. In a later reproduction of the same letter elsewhere32, it is clear that the following sentence in the original letter was edited out of the earlier publication, The Rankens of Bathurst (1916). The next sentence reads: “Indeed Mrs Campbell was so much frightened that she told me she had miscarried her twintyeth child but gude forgive me I think she hardly sticks to the truth in family concerns …”. The reader can imagine Janet’s eyes rolling as Annabella tells her this.

After leaving St Jago, Ranken tells us, the travellers were “becalmed for weeks together”, the men amusing themselves by harpooning sharks and shooting at whales and the women disputing which of the men would kill one. Ranken doesn’t mention Neptune’s visit as they crossed the equator, which had so obviously impressed itself on Annabella Boswell’s mother, Lorn. But she reports that

28 This is likely to have been the Malabar which left Gravesend on 22nd June, a week or so after the Lusitania, and reached Hobart about a week before the Lusitania. The Campbells and their entourage would have certainly seen the Malabar at Gravesend, loading its prisoners, and then again in the harbour at Hobart. 29 See Janet Ranken’s letters reproduced in Ranken, op.cit., pp.8-13. 30 However, the Captain’s log (which is held in the Tasmanain archives), transcribed by Robert Lee, reports that the problem was the Governor had not hoisted the signal to allow them to pass, which could have meant he hadn’t paid the port dues. 31 Ranken, op.cit., pp.8-13. 32 Patricia Clarke and Dale Spender (1992). Life lines: Australian women’s letters and diaries 1788-1840. North Sydney: Allen and Unwin, p.150. The comparison of the same letter in two different publications and to the original is a reminder to family historians to access the original documents where possible. How to account for the editing of the letters in the original 1916 Ranken publication? Was it because of a desire to edit out sections that would reflect badly on people or were in some way unsavoury according to the morals of the time?

some matches were made on the voyage, one of which was between Margaret Campbell and James Robertson. They married in February 1822, several months after arriving in Hobart. In a third, fully transcribed version of that same letter to her sister, it is clear that Janet Ranken is disgusted by Margaret’s infatuation with Robertson, Margaret having apparently fallen in love with him in an unseemly short period of time, a few weeks after they met i.e. on board the Lusitania. Ranken tersely comments: “I hate swooning damsels”33. Ranken also reports on the death of one of John Campbell’s servants, gardener John Nicholson, who fell asleep in the sun, suffered sunstroke and died 9 days later. There was a solemn burial at sea.

All the while the table was languishing below decks in unaccustomed tropical heat, lashed together with other furniture and possessions, provisions and merchandise, perhaps in company with some livestock still (the Rankens’ dogs likely travelling above deck), oblivious to the drawing room dramas, ceremonies, match-making efforts and tragedy being played out above.

Soon after the funeral of Nicholson, Ranken tells us, a breeze came up and sent them speedily on their way where they finally reached landfall at King George’s Sound (now the site of Albany, Western Australia) on 16th October 1821, some 3 months after leaving St Jago. Here, the crew went looking for fresh water while “the gentlemen went ashore and brought home a great variety of flowers”34. We know something of King George’s Sound at that time from the journal of naval officer Phillip Parker King who stopped off there during his expeditions to survey the west coast of Australia in 1818 and again in December 1821, 2 months after the Lusitania arrived. King noted the abundance of sea birds, fish and sharks, shellfish and seals, and the beautiful plants and wildflowers which botanist Allan Cunningham (who accompanied King on both voyages) added to his collection35. This would have been the scene that welcomed the Lusitania to the shores of Australia.

Ranken reports that the landing party from the Lusitania did not encounter any ‘natives’. But Phillip Parker King’s second expedition which arrived 2 months later certainly did. King’s sketch of Oyster Harbour in King George’s Sound (below) was probably made during the second expedition for they did not encounter any Indigenous people on the first, though they had brought Port Jackson Aboriginal man Boongaree with them to assist communication. King reported that the first expedition party saw evidence of Aboriginal habitation: the elaborate stone fish traps built at the mouth of every creek and the smoke from their camp fires. But on the return visit in December 1821, when they stayed for 2 weeks, King’s party had extensive friendly interaction with the Indigenous people of Albany and south coastal areas – the Minang clan of the Noongar people. Unless they were anchored at a different area in the Sound, the passengers on the Lusitania must surely have at least seen the fish traps and smoke from the camp fires.

33 Transcription by Robert Lee of original letter in the Mitchell Library, State Library of NSW—Miscellaneous Document ML DOC 930. 34 Ranken, op.cit., p.13. 35 Phillip Parker King (1827). Narrative of a Survey of the Intertropical and Western Coasts of Australia Performed between 1818 and 1822. Vols 1 &2. Project Gutenberg Australia e-books http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks/e00027.html and http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks/e00028.html

Phillip Parker King’s sketch of Oyster Harbour, King George’s Sound, probably from the second voyage in 1821. Note the Indigenous people around the shore. Source: King’s Narrative of a Survey …

Hobart Town

The table arrived in Hobart on the Lusitania on 29th October 1821 after a voyage of some 140 days or around 4 and a half months. Already in port were the convict ship Malabar, the Prince Leopold, Emerald, Sophia and Victorine, and the Caroline, a whaling and sealing ship.

Hobart Town Gazette and Van Diemen’s Land Advertiser 3rd November 1821.

In the same newspaper on the same day this advertisement appeared:

So now we know what some of the Lusitania’s merchandise consisted of.

John Campbell travelled on to Sydney by the Lusitania with the intention to present his letter of recommendation to Governor Brisbane (whose term as Governor would begin on 1st December) and make arrangements for a land grant while the family stayed in Hobart. Accommodation was found for them at Restdown, a property at Risdon Cove on the eastern shore of the Derwent River. The table was likely unloaded at Hobart with other household items for the Campbell family’s use for what would turn out to be a nearly 6 month sojourn there. Though it is unlikely, the table could have gone on to Sydney with John Campbell on the Lusitania and put into storage, for it is unclear where he would have stayed until he secured housing for the family36.

The Lusitania left Hobart for Sydney on 18th November. George Ranken followed a few days later on the Grace to secure a land grant in Van Diemen’s Land (Tasmania) from the Governor37.

The Lusitania arrived in Sydney on 30th November:

The Sydney Gazette and New South Wales Advertiser Saturday 1st December 1821. Note that the two ‘M’Cloud’ boys are not Colina and Archibald MacLeod’s sons.

36 It is possible that Campbell stayed with the Macarthurs in Parramatta, at least for a short while, for he certainly had a letter to deliver to John Macarthur from his son in London. 37 Request denied but Ranken soon secured a land grant at Bathurst. See Alexander, op.cit.

This advertisement, appearing the following week, reveals more of the Lusitania’s merchandise:

The Sydney Gazette and New South Wales Advertiser Saturday 8th December 1821.

On arriving in Sydney, John Campbell would have quickly called on the new Governor, Sir Thomas Brisbane – another Scot and closely connected to Campbell through family and military ties38 – to present his letter of recommendation from Earl Bathurst. The response was prompt. Campbell was authorised to take possession of 2000 acres of land on Eastern Creek in the District of Prospect west of Sydney in February 182239. The property was eventually named Bungarribee40. It is highly likely that John Campbell also met up again with Lachlan and Elizabeth Macquarie in Sydney before they departed for England in February 1822. Perhaps he even stayed with them.

In the same month, Campbell also completed his first official duty in the colony: to provide Governor Brisbane with a report on the state of the Government Agricultural Establishments in Sydney, Liverpool, Rooty Hill and Emu Plains, and make recommendations for improvements. This required extensive travel on horseback in the middle of a hot Sydney summer but it certainly would have familiarised him with the land and the opportunities it presented to him. It is clear from the report that Campbell was an expert on agriculture, animal husbandry and estate management41.

Soon after, having just taken possession of his land grant on Eastern Creek and being assigned convict labour, Campbell started clearing, planting and building. It seems he sent for his two remaining gardeners John Maclean42 and John Livingstone at this time. From notices appearing in the Hobart Town Gazette and Van Diemen’s Land Advertiser, Maclean and Livingstone were still in

38 In another letter sent from London to his father in Parramatta (not the letter sent with John Campbell on the Lusitania), John Macarthur Jnr reports on what he’s found out about Campbell’s and MacLeod’s difficult financial situations and their quarrel with the charterer of the Royal George. Macarthur Jnr also outlines the ties between Governor Brisbane and John Campbell so that Macarthur Snr might understand the debt of gratitude owed by Brisbane to Annabella Campbell’s family and therefore to Annabella’s husband, John. The letter indicates that it was the Duke of Wellington who secured Brisbane’s appointment as Governor and that it was Sir Colin Campbell (Annabella’s brother and close friend and colleague of Wellington) and Sir Alexander Campbell (Annabella’s uncle and similarly close to Wellington) who first introduced Brisbane to the Duke’s notice, thereby securing for Brisbane the Duke’s patronage. See Alexander, op.cit., pp.183-184. 39 The property is on the corner of the Great Western Highway and Doonside Road at what is now the suburb of Doonside and forms part of the Western Sydney Parklands. The house site itself, a heritage site, is now incorporated into a housing development. 40 ‘Bungarribee’ is possibly the name of the local Aboriginal tribe that originally occupied the area. 41 This report is reproduced in Alexander, op.cit., pp.208-219. 42 After John Campbell died in 1827, John Maclean worked for John Macarthur at Elizabeth Farm (1828 Census) before becoming head gardener and Acting Superintendent at The Royal Botanical Gardens, Sydney. In 1835 Maclean succeeded Archibald MacLeod as Superintendent of Agriculture on Norfolk Island where he drowned in a boating accident in 1839. His land grant Warrangee in the Capertee Valley was acquired by his namesake brother-in-law around 1837.

Hobart in February 1822 but were soon to leave. By September 1822, according to the Land and Stock Muster, Campbell had wheat, barley and potatoes under cultivation, and a number of cattle and pigs.

Meanwhile, back in Hobart, the Campbell family (and the table) had settled in at Restdown. The Campbells and the table would have been transported there by boat up the Derwent River or perhaps the long way around by road. Annabella and the children stayed at Restdown for the duration of their time in Van Diemen’s Land, for several newspaper notices in February 1822 – including a robbery attempt in which the alleged perpetrator was killed – place them there. The MacLeods seemed to have settled in premises in the centre of Hobart Town – where Archibald established himself in banking and business – as well as at a residence, Roseway Lodge, at New Town, a few miles away. Colina MacLeod’s 4th child was born at one of these locations in January 182243. The Rankens rented a separate house, for it is clear in the unexpurgated version of Janet’s letter to her sister that she did not like her husband’s idea of sharing a house with the Campbells because “Mrs Campbell does best to visit, she will give you a highland welcome when you go to see her but I should not like to be door neighbours”44. Why that was so is not explained. Ranken also tells her sister that the scenery on the trip up the river by sail boat (to visit the Campbells at Restdown for Christmas) reminded her of the Scottish highlands. That must have been some comfort to the highland Campbell family in particular who spent their first Christmas in Australia, in 1821, at the height of summer – though, Ranken tells us, it was a cold summer.

What kind of place had the immigrants come to? By 1820, Hobart had become the main port and market for whaling and sealing in the Southern Ocean. Early that year, Commissioner John Bigge had visited Hobart and Van Diemen’s Land as part of his Enquiry into the State of the Colony of New South Wales. From his subsequent series of reports, published in 1822, we have a picture of Hobart at the time, albeit focused on Bigge’s concerns: the convict system, agriculture, and judicial and ecclesiastical matters. We also have Governor Lachlan Macquarie’s journal of his visit to Van Diemen’s Land from April to July 1821, a few months before the Campbells arrived.

Hobart would have been a bustling town, as Macquarie observed, with a population of some five and a half thousand people, nearly 70% of whom were convicts or ex-convicts45. While there, Macquarie inspected the fruits of his building program, the new road to Newton (New Town) and the brewery being built there46. Buildings completed or in progress at the time, which Bigge also noted, included Government House, St David’s Church, barracks extensions, the gaol and the hospital. A defence battery, a signal telegraph station (barely visible on the top of Mount Nelson in the centre of the painting below) and water mill had been built earlier47. Janet Ranken, in her abovementioned letter to her sister written from Hobart just after Christmas 1821, describes seeing from her window the “beautiful little cottages with there fruteful gardens and hedges of roses and I

43 Information from the Hobart Town Gazette and Van Diemen’s Land Advertiser’s birth notice for this child and information in Macleod, op.cit. The child was christened at Roseway Lodge. 44 Clarke and Spender, op.cit., p.151. 45 Historical Records of Australia Series 1, Vol. 10, p.578. The vast majority of these were men. 46 Lachlan Macquarie Governor of New South Wales. Journals of his tours in New South Wales and Van Diemen’s Land 1810-1822 (1979). Published by the Library of Australian History in association with The Library Council of New South Wales, Sydney, p.179. 47 John Thomas Bigge (1822). Report of the Commissioner of Inquiry into the State of the Colony of New South Wales. Project Gutenberg Australia e-book http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks13/1300181h.html

see a very neat church and a stipple and I can see a signal post where they hoist a large flag when ever they see a ship”48.

South West View of Hobart Town Van Diemen’s Land by Deputy Surveyor-General George William Evans, 1820. National Library of Australia.

Apart from the many immigrant and merchant ships coming and going, during their time in Hobart our travellers on the Lusitania would have seen these convict ships arrive: Claudine (15th December), Providence (18th December) and Lord Hungerford (26th December). This may have been the first time they had seen convict transport ships and the workings of the convict labour system, although they would certainly have seen the Malabar at Gravesend, the ship that likely caught up to them at St Jago. Perhaps the men and older Campbell boys, at least, watched as convicts were offloaded from these ships. Bigge, in his report on convicts in Van Diemen’s Land, describes the system of sorting and allocating newly arrived convicts before they were landed. The skilled craftsmen amongst them were assigned to government work, the settlers then chose from the remainder and those left over were assigned as labourers on public works, for example the buildings that Governor Macquarie inspected. Our travellers may have also seen convicts arriving in Hobart from other penal colonies (Newcastle, Port Macquarie, Sydney) or being shipped from Hobart to other penal colonies and institutions – female convicts with children, for example, were sent to the female factory in Parramatta. They may have seen convicts marched to Port Dalrymple (Launceston) or sent by boat up the Derwent River to George Town. The Port Arthur convict settlement, some distance from Hobart, had yet to be established.

The stark fact, and one that would have confronted our travellers on a daily basis, was that convicts still serving their sentence outnumbered free settlers almost 3:1 and moved freely about Hobart Town as they did in Sydney. Bigge tells us that, once landed, convicts assigned to the government

48 Clarke and Spender, op.cit., p.151.

had to find their own lodgings, often boarding with previously arrived convicts who had built wooden shacks for themselves. The recently completed gaol was meant only to house those who had engaged in criminal acts since arriving and the barracks were for the soldiers. To pay for private lodgings (or build their own shacks), convicts had to work to earn money in the time outside their assigned work or provide domestic services to their landlord. This was enabled by generous ‘knock off’ times and Sundays off. Bigge also tells us that theft and other crime committed by convicts was widespread. Indeed, it was a convict who had been killed when apparently attempting the robbery at Restdown. The fact that he was killed by a guard posted to protect the premises confirms the threat was real49. The Campbells were likely very glad to leave Hobart.

This mingling of convicts and free settlers was the new arrivals’ first but not last experience of life in this open air prison colony called New South Wales. But class lines between the free settlers and convicts were clearly drawn, at least by Janet Ranken. Again, in her letter to her sister, she remarks that Hobart Society was “abominable” and speaks disapprovingly of a wealthy man who married a convict woman. Ranken kept this convict woman at a distance telling her sister that, even though the convict wife befriended Mrs Macquarie when the Macquaries visited Hobart, and the convict woman’s sister and daughter had called on her soon after she arrived, she would not be returning the call because “evil communications corrupt good manners”50, whatever that meant. Janet must have been horrified when Patrick Campbell married the grand-daughter of a convict 10 years later51.

Although they encountered convicts and ex-convicts every day, our travellers were unlikely to have seen any of the Indigenous people of the Hobart area – a band of the South East Mouheneenner clan of the Tasmanian Parlevar people – for, as Bigge noted in his report on agriculture in Van Diemen’s Land, ‘natives’ were nowadays rarely seen in Hobart. Tasmania’s Aboriginal inhabitants had been subject to a particularly vicious campaign of elimination and by 1821 perhaps 2000 were left in the whole island; by 1835, only 20052.

The February 16th 1822 edition of the Hobart Town Gazette and Van Diemen’s Land Advertiser published a notice of Margaret Campbell’s wedding to James Robertson a few days earlier. In the same paper appeared a notice that the Lusitania, having returned from Sydney with passengers, horses and merchandise, had left Hobart Town for England via Macquarie Island53. The ship’s

49 Hobart Town Gazette and Van Diemen’s Land Advertiser 9th February 1822. 50 Clarke and Spender, op.cit., p.152. 51 Little did anyone know at the time how much the Campbells’ lives would become so entwined with those of convicts. Apart from being assigned convict labourers to work their various properties, Annabella Boswell’s paternal uncle Major Archibald Clunes Innes would become Commandant of the Port Macquarie penal settlement from November 1826 to April 1827, Patrick Campbell would become a superintendent of convicts at the Norfolk Island penal colony from May 1825 to May 1826 and would later marry the grand-daughter of a convict, and Archibald MacLeod would become Superintendent of Agriculture on Norfolk Island from 1829 to 1835. Of course, the agricultural labourers on Norfolk Island were convicts and Colina MacLeod and her children were caught up in the convict mutiny there in 1834, holed up at Longridge Agricultural Station in fear for their lives, while her husband and eldest son were off the island. See Macleod, op.cit. 52 The extent of the massacre of Indigenous Tasmanian people has been a particularly contentious topic of debate in Australia’s ‘history wars’. Figures quoted here are from historian Lyndall Ryan’s Abduction and Multiple Killings of Aborigines in Tasmania: 1804-1835 http://nationalunitygovernment.org/pdf/Aborigines_in_Tasmania.pdf 53 Macquarie Island, half way to Antarctica from Hobart, had only recently been mapped. Captain Langdon had probably been chartered to supply provisions to the sealing station on Macquarie Island.

captain, William Langdon, continued trading between England and Australia on the Lusitania and other ships and became very wealthy. Langdon and his second wife eventually settled in Tasmania where he became a member of the Legislative Council. He died at Derwentwater at Sandy Bay, Hobart, in 187954.

The Rankens, MacLeods and Campbells didn’t stay long in Hobart. The Rankens relocated to Sydney in February 1822 and then settled on their land grant Kellosheil at Bathurst (at present day Eglinton) in Autumn 1823. The MacLeods stayed in Hobart until late 1825 when they too relocated to Bathurst, Archibald having been appointed Superintendent of Agriculture there. At some point the Robertsons moved onto their land grant northwest of Hobart near present-day Hamilton – which was then on the frontier and under constant attack by bushrangers – before relocating to Sydney in 1826.

Here for now we must leave our fellow travellers on the Lusitania and follow the Campbell family and the table northwards to Sydney. Presuming the table had been offloaded on arriving in Hobart on the Lusitania, Monday 15th April 1822 found it aboard the Castle Forbes bound for Port Jackson in company with the Campbell family.

Hobart Town Gazette and Van Diemen’s Land Advertiser Saturday 20th April 1822.

They arrived in Sydney a week or so later:

Sydney Gazette and New South Wales Advertiser Friday 26th April 1822.

54 Entry on William Langdon in the Australian Dictionary of Biography.

From this newspaper account it seems that Colina and Archibald MacLeod’s eldest daughter, Annabella (‘Miss Annabella Campbell McLeod’), then aged around 3, came to Sydney with her grandmother Campbell55.

Sydney was much larger than Hobart, with a population of some thirteen and a half thousand people, around 60% of whom were convicts or ex-convicts56. Presumably, soon after arriving, the family travelled to Windsor where John Campbell had secured temporary tenancy of Government House from Governor Brisbane while lodgings at Bungarribee were being built.

A sojourn at Windsor

Whether the table arrived in Sydney with John Campbell on the Lusitania or nearly 5 months later with the rest on the family on the Castle Forbes, its next home for a year (unless it was put into storage) was Government House at Windsor on the bank of the Hawkesbury River. Built in 1796, this timber house was constructed for the commanding officer of the garrison of soldiers stationed at Green Hills (Windsor), though governors stayed there when visiting the settlement. It had been one of the key sites of the 2-year ‘Rum Rebellion’ beginning 26th January 1808, in which the New South Wales Corps – including John Macarthur Snr who was then an officer in the Corps and a leader of the rebellion – arrested Governor William Bligh and declared martial law. Government House was taken over by supporters of the rebellion who lit bonfires there on the night of the ‘coup’ and from there suppressed local opposition to the rebellion and exercised control over the Hawkesbury district57.

Green Hills (Windsor) 1807. Unknown artist. State Library of NSW. Government House is the small building on the top of the hill at the far left of the painting. Source: http://www.environment.nsw.gov.au/Heritage/research/rumtrack.htm

55 This is confirmed in Annabella Campbell’s letter of November 1822 to her daughter, Margaret Robertson, in Tasmania, in Lee, op.cit., pp.44-46. The newspaper report above contains some errors regarding the Campbell children who were on board the Castle Forbes. 56 Historical Records of Australia Series 1, Vol 10, p.575. 57 http://www.environment.nsw.gov.au/Heritage/research/rumtrack.htm

Lachlan Macquarie took over as Governor in 1810 and restored order in the colony. Macquarie and his wife Elizabeth stayed at Government House in Windsor from 1st to 8th December 1810 during their tour of the Hawkesbury region. Macquarie’s journal entry for 1st December reads:

At halfpast 5,O'Clock we arrived at the Ferry on the Left Bank of the River and at 6,O'Clock landed in the Government Garden on the Green Hills and took possession of the Government House – or, more properly speaking, – Government Cottage; most beautifully situated on the Summit of a very fine Bank or Terrace rising about Fifty feet above the level of the River; of which, and the adjacent Country, there is a very fine view from this sweet delightful Spot.

From Lachlan Macquarie Journals of his Tours in New South Wales and Van Diemen’s Land 1810- 1822, p.26.

Macquarie inspected farms in the district and named and laid out the 5 Macquarie towns: Windsor, Richmond, Castlereagh, Pitt Town and Wilberforce. While staying at Government House, he received and answered a great number of Petitions and Memorials from settlers.

Source: https://lynnesheritage.wordpress.com/2014/02/09/old-government-house-windsor-2/

Let’s assume that the table went from Sydney to Windsor in a cart, dray or wagon with the Campbell family in coaches, as perhaps it did in that journey from Appin to Lochgoilhead a year earlier. The scenery and landscape on this journey, however, was entirely different with dry, broad flat plains of woodland and creeks (and by this time many large farms) replacing the damp, verdant mountains and glens of Scotland. The road from Sydney to Parramatta at that time was very good, as attested to in accounts of travels at that time. The road from Parramatta to Windsor, first made in 1794 and gradually improved, particularly under Governor Macquarie, was a vital highway for the colony and would have been busy with wagons and drays bringing produce from the rich agricultural area of the Hawkesbury to Sydney. Perhaps our travellers saw convict gangs and camps along the road; perhaps they saw ‘native villages’ and the Indigenous Darug people of the Cumberland Plain.

Windsor at the time had about the same population as Hobart, with around 60% of them convicts and ex-convicts58. The clan of Darug people living in the Hawkesbury district had similarly been subject to vicious campaigns of elimination as they came into conflict with settlers over access to traditional food sources, particularly yams, along the river59. This, along with the ravages of disease brought by the Europeans, meant that by the 1828 Census Aboriginal Returns there were only a couple of hundred Aboriginal people living on the Hawkesbury River, and about 70 living in the Windsor district. The Campbells may have encountered some Indigenous people on the roads and streets of Windsor as they may have in Sydney.

In Windsor at the same time as the Campbells was Thomas Sherland, the grandfather of young Patrick Campbell’s future wife. Sherland was a soldier in the Veteran Company garrisoned at Windsor. The Veteran Company had been formed in 1810 when Governor Macquarie disbanded the mutinous New South Wales Corps and sent most of them home to England as a new regiment. The Veteran Company provided the guards for William Cox’s party as they built the first road across the Blue Mountains in 1814-15, though it’s not clear if Sherland was one of them. The Company’s barracks were literally around the corner from Government House60. Benjamin Singleton – father of Patrick Campbell’s future wife Hannah (then 9 years old) – and the Singleton family were also probably still in the Windsor area in early 182261. Thomas Sherland and his ex-‘wife’ Lucy Lane (Benjamin Singleton’s mother-in-law, who was also living in the district with her then husband), the Singletons and Campbells may even have passed each other in the streets of Windsor. Although it is unlikely that there was any socialising between the Campbells and these other families at the time, the Campbells’ presence in Government House would have been known to everyone in the district.

John Howe, a prominent settler in Windsor who also held various public offices and was then district Coroner, would have known the Campbells. Howe also knew Ben Singleton very well. Singleton was a member of Howe’s expedition of 1820 which found an overland route – shown to them by Aboriginal guides – from Windsor to the Hunter Valley along what is now the Putty Road. Perhaps John Campbell spoke to Howe and Singleton, or to Howe at least, about the rich grazing and agricultural land they had discovered along the Hunter River. We certainly know Campbell was soon interested in acquiring land there.

58 Historical Records of Australia Series 1, Vol 10, p.575. 59 Kate Grenville’s 2005 novel The Secret River (Melbourne: Text) is a vivid evocation of life on the Hawkesbury River in the early 19th century and relations between settlers, convicts and the Indigenous people. The novel is based on Grenville’s convict ancestor, Solomon Wiseman, and his family (novelised as the Thornhills). My convict ancestor, William Singleton, and his family (the Singletons mentioned above) were also living on the Hawkesbury in the Windsor area at the same time and probably knew the Wisemans. 60 Private Thomas Sherland was possibly recruited into the New South Wales Corps from the Savoy Military Prison in London in 1796. In 1796-7 he was in the detachment of Corps on the notorious convict transport ship, Britannia, the voyage of which featured in the 1970s Australian television drama Against the Wind. Sherland’s daughter, Mary, was born on the voyage but Sherland and his ‘wife’, Lucy Lane, separated soon after arriving in Sydney. Fourteen year old Mary Lane Sherland married Benjamin Singleton in Windsor in 1811. After the Veteran Company was disbanded in 1823, and Sherland along with all the veterans received a land grant (which is doubtful he ever worked), he seems to have led a dissolute life and spent a short time in prison before settling in Singleton, possibly with his daughter Mary Singleton, where he died in 1839 at age 77. 61 Sometime in 1822, or perhaps not until 1823 when the rough and perilous ‘Bulga Track’ (now the Putty Road) was officially opened, Singleton relocated his large family to his land grant in the Hunter Valley at what is now the site of the town of Singleton.

John Campbell wrote of Government House to son-in-law James Robertson in Tasmania in May 1822: “… though small it is a smart place situated close to the Town of Windsor 35 miles from Sydney by an excellent road – and just on the banks of the river Hawkesbury but comfortably out of reach of the Floods which you have read of tho’ I could pitch a penny piece from the door into the river …”62. He goes on to describe the house, the outbuildings and stables, pasture and garden areas.

If the table were at Government House, John Campbell would have sat at it to write this letter to Robertson and letters to Governor Brisbane dated June and July 1822. In these letters, Campbell asks for several more workmen to be assigned to him at Bungarribee to quicken the Campbells’ departure from Government House, the Governor apparently having indicated that he needed to use it himself. Campbell also asks for some employment to maintain his family until his farm is productive and requests land grants for his 4 sons in the colony, though the youngest was then only 11 years old. Campbell tells the Governor that one particular piece of land has caught his eye – the ‘Grose Run’ near the confluence of the Nepean and Grose Rivers at what is now Yarramundi – and that he would like this to be granted to Patrick (who was then 16 years old) along with cattle, convict workers and rations from the government stores63. It is clear from these letters that John Campbell was already under financial stress which only worsened by the time of his death 5 years later.

This was a busy time in John Campbell’s life. Apart from the continuing farming and building work at Bungarribee, in July 1822 he was appointed as one of 15 founding committeemen of the newly formed Agricultural Society of New South Wales and in the following years was judging livestock at Society shows in Parramatta.

Meanwhile, in Windsor, Annabella’s life seemed to be relatively quiet. Perhaps she sat at the table to write a letter to daughter Margaret [Robertson] in Tasmania, dated November 1822, consoling her on the loss of her first baby. Annabella also reports on life in Windsor. She tells Margaret that husband John and son Patrick are always at the farm (Bungarribee) and that the younger boys Charles, Dalmahoy and Moore are at school, along with their youngest sister Annabella and their niece of nearly the same age, Annabella MacLeod, Colina’s daughter. Annabella reports that Lorn had been away staying with a family and Isabella had been staying with the Cox family at nearby Clarendon64. She adds that one of the Cox sons seems to have taken a liking to Isabella, which Annabella approves of, for though not very good looking he “is rich and has cattle land”. As for herself, Annabella tells Margaret that she has a cow at Windsor, out of their flock at Bungarribee, from which is made butter and cheese, and that she is also raising poultry and pigs. Annabella is also happy that she hasn’t made many acquaintances for she prefers to be ‘retired’, but reports that the heat of late Spring in Windsor bothers her and gives her headaches65.

In the same letter to Margaret, Annabella relays the contents of a letter she received from Lady Campbell – wife of Annabella’s uncle, Sir Alexander Campbell, who was then Commander-in-Chief of the Madras Army – especially news of Annabella’s 3 sons (and Margaret’s brothers) John, Archibald (‘Alex’) and William serving in India. It is clear that ‘Sir Alex’s’ patronage of Annabella’s sons means

62 Lee, op.cit., p.41. 63 Alexander, op.cit., pp.195-200. John Campbell eventually gained ‘a ticket of occupation’ for the land at Yarramundi in 1824, but abandoned his attempt to purchase it in the year he died. 64 This was the family of William Cox, who built the first road over the Blue Mountains in 1814-15. 65 Lee, op.cit., pp.44-46.

they are placed into good positions in the army with a good salary. Apart from promising to find a rich old ‘Nabob’ for Margaret to marry if her affections are not otherwise engaged and should she venture to India, Lady Campbell tells Annabella that if she cares to send any more of her sons to India to ‘push their fortunes’ Sir Alex will take care of them so long as they deserve his favour. Within 5 years, 2 of these sons in India – Alex and William – would be dead.

At Bungarribee

In a letter to his son-in-law James Robertson in Tasmania dated July 1823, John Campbell reports that the family was at last “… safely landed at our own fireside and tho’ our accommodation is not splendid yet we are not uncomfortably lodged …”66. The family was temporarily living in a dwelling which would become incorporated into the main house as the servants’ quarters on completion of the building67.

It is possible that the table moved with the Campbells from Windsor to Bungarribee earlier in the year for Patrick wrote a letter from there to the Colonial Secretary in Sydney, Major Frederick Goulburn, in April 1823. It is clear that 17 year old Patrick is being groomed by his father (perhaps looking over Patrick’s shoulder as he wrote the letter at the table) to take up his proper station in life as a gentleman farmer and seek a land grant in his own right. Goulburn fired a letter back to Patrick telling him that he should write to the Governor instead, and that the Governor will decide on a grant once he has inspected progress and improvements at Bungarribee. Patrick replied asking for an explanation for why obtaining a land grant should depend on his father’s intended improvements at Bungarribee, which his father doesn’t discuss with him anyway68. Patrick did eventually receive land grants, as did his brothers.

When John Campbell took up his land grant on Eastern Creek at Prospect there would likely have been Darug people – survivors of the devastating smallpox plagues and conflicts with white settlers in the district – living on the land or at least moving around the area. Paintings of the time show Aboriginal groups or families in Parramatta. One, titled ‘Annual meeting of the native tribes at Parrramatta’ – an event instigated by Governor Macquarie – depicts a large gathering behind St John’s Church69. The Parramatta blanket return of 1839, a decade after the Campbells lived there, shows some Weymaly and Warrawarry people giving their place of residence as Bungarribee. There was also a substantial number of convicts living on-site at Bungarribee, a couple of dozen according to Bungarribee expert John Moore’s research. But we don’t know what relations were like between the Campbells, their free servants, the convict servants and workers, and the Indigenous people living on the property.

66 In Lee, op.cit., p.48. 67 For details of Bungarribee see http://www.environment.nsw.gov.au/heritageapp/ViewHeritageItemDetails.aspx?ID=5051257 and https://www.facebook.com/Bungarribee- -place-of-a-king-192249967461389/ 68 Letters reproduced in Alexander, op.cit., pp.228-229. 69 See Parramatta’s Indigenous Heritage published by Parramatta City Council https://www.parracity.nsw.gov.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0011/51014/ParramattasIndigenousHeritage.pdf

Bungarrabee NSW by Joseph Fowles, 1858. Mitchell Library, State Library of NSW.

John Campbell quickly rose in stature and influence in the colony and in May 1824 Governor Brisbane appointed him as a magistrate and Justice of the Peace at Parramatta. In the same year, Governor Brisbane recommended Campbell to the Colonial Secretary in London for appointment to the newly established Legislative Council (another initiative suggested by Commissioner Bigge) as one of the leading landowners and merchants in the colony. Campbell, as for many of his fellow appointees including William Cox and John Macarthur, did not take up his appointment. But in June 1825 Campbell, together with William Cordeaux and Surveyor-General John Oxley as Chief Commissioner, was appointed by Governor Brisbane as Commissioner for Apportioning the Territory, following another of Bigge’s recommendations. However, it is clear that by 1824 Campbell was being pursued through the courts for outstanding debts and was asking John Macarthur for further financial assistance. At some point, Macarthur seems to have got sick of bailing Campbell out70.

During this time John Campbell would also have met Gregory Blaxland – pastoralist, explorer and more lately agriculturalist and vigneron – who had established a vineyard at Brush Farm in what is now Eastwood. Blaxland had left the colony in March 1822 bound for London with casks of his wine for which he won a silver medal from Royal Society of Arts and Commerce in 1823. He returned in July 1824 and soon after became a member of the Agricultural Society of New South Wales and a judge at their shows at Parramatta71. Campbell and Blaxland would have met there, if not in early 1822, and would also have known each other through their involvement in the Parramatta Court as magistrates and in other affairs of the colony. Blaxland joined Campbell on the committee of the Agricultural Society in 1826. Campbell may also have sought Blaxland’s advice about grape-growing and wine-making, as Campbell seems to have developed an interest in these by 1825. Perhaps

70 Letters between Macarthur and Campbell reproduced in Alexander, op.cit., pp.200-207. 71 See Ron Buttrey (2006). A Short History of the Life of Gregory Blaxland. Eastwood NSW: Brush Farm Historical Society.

Blaxland even visited Bungarribee and Campbell Brush Farm. Eighty years later, Campbell’s great- grand-daughter, Grace Louisa Dines Campbell (1876-1942), and Blaxland’s grandson, Samuel Blaxland (1860-1925), would together produce my maternal grandfather, John Neil Campbell (1904- 1980).

The table was likely very busy during this time with Campbell working on reports and correspondence associated with his various government positions; writing memorials and letters relating to land grants and convict workers, finances and pending court cases; writing letters on behalf of and to family; and dealing with the wash-up of his financial woes in Scotland.

But the years 1824-1827 were also tumultuous for the family. In late 1824 the Campbells learnt of the death of their son, Archibald Alexander, at age 22 in the first Burmese war. Happier times came in 1825 with 13 year old son Arthur ‘Wellington’ Campbell’s arrival from Scotland in October and daughter Lorn’s marriage to George Innes at St John’s Church Parramatta in November. But more tragedy came a few weeks later in December with young Wellington drowning at Bungarribee. I imagine that this would have been devastating to Annabella in particular who seemed to have fretted constantly over her children, revealing in the letter to her daughter Margaret some years earlier that her children gave her “many anxious hours”. I can’t help but think that the loss of son Archibald and the death of her beloved uncle ‘Sir Alex’ in Madras in the same year, followed by son Wellington’s death the year after, contributed to Annabella’s death on her 52nd birthday in November 1826.

Bungarribee House was barely finished by the time of John Campbell’s death a year later in October 1827 from ‘mortification’ (probably gangrene) following a scratch to his leg. Soon before his death Campbell learnt of his son William’s death from fever earlier in the year on a ship off the Indian coast. John Campbell left a large amount of debt which forced the sale of Bungarribee in 1828. The Campbell children would have been left with nothing apart from their parents’ personal possessions and, perhaps, some treasured pieces of household furniture. The Australian adventure was over before it had barely begun. Annabella and John Campbell were buried by the Rev. Samuel Marsden in St John’s Cemetery, Parramatta. Their daughter Colina MacLeod joined them there in 1839.

Graves of John and Annabella Campbell, and daughter Colina MacLeod. St John’s Cemetery, Parramatta.

Photo courtesy of John Moore.

It is at this point in the story that the table and my line of the Campbell family part company.

Bound for Capertee

According to an unpublished document written by Annabella Boswell in 190572, following John Campbell’s death his son-in-law George Innes (Lorn’s husband and Annabella’s father) bought the table and gave it to Annabella when she was still a child. At the time of John Campbell’s death in October 1827 the Innes family was living either in Bathurst or the Capertee Valley, both some 200 km west/northwest of Sydney73. Annabella tells us in her Journal that her mother Lorn was in Parramatta for a time in 1827 caring for her seriously ill brother-in-law Archibald Innes. A newer edition of the Journal, published in 2003 as Annabella of Lake Innes Port Macquarie74, contains additional material from Annabella’s unpublished journals and other sources that shed light on where the Innes family was at this crucial time. John Campbell died on 10th October 1827 at Bungarribee. According to the St John’s Parish burials entry, signed by the Rev. Samuel Marsden, Campbell was buried on 12th October. Given the travelling time between Bathurst or the Capertee Valley and Parramatta at the time (possibly up to a week), friends like the Rankens and Campbell’s daughters Colina MacLeod (then living in Bathurst) and Lorn Innes and their families would have had to have already been at Bungarribee before John Campbell died if they were to attend the funeral. Perhaps they were, perhaps they weren’t. But we do know that Lorn Innes was in Parramatta a few weeks later.

At the Parramatta barracks on 25th October 1827, Archibald Innes underwent an operation to remove an “aneurysmal tumor” from the femoral artery in his groin. This operation and the subsequent series of life-threatening haemorrhages over the following 6 weeks is the serious illness that Annabella refers to above. Annabella tells us in a journal entry published in Annabella of Lake Innes Port Macquarie that her mother rode down from Bathurst in 1827 (it would have had to have been late October or early November) to help nurse Archibald, but that the journey was so fatiguing that she (baby Annabella) was left at ‘home’ – she doesn’t say where – in the care of her Aunt Isabella (Campbell). It was unlikely that this was at the Innes’s home, wherever that was then, for Annabella tells us that her father, George Innes, was also at his brother’s bedside in Parramatta at this time for it was feared he would not recover. He did, though it took a long time. Archibald was forever after in Lorn’s debt.

The new material in Annabella of Lake Innes Port Macquarie gives us a clearer picture of this crisis in the Innes family over a protracted period from late 1827 into early 1828. It seems that unless the table was taken to Bathurst immediately after John Campbell’s funeral on 12th October 1827 – which is highly unlikely, even assuming the Innes family was at the funeral – it was taken to the Capertee

72 Copy provided by John Boswell, Annabella Boswell’s great-grandson and current owner of the table. 73 Annabella Boswell (née Innes) tells us in her Journal that she was born at Yarrows near Bathurst in September 1826 but left there when still an infant. George Innes leased out Yarrows in late 1827 and took up Umbiella station in the Capertee Valley probably at the same time. The Innes family was certainly living at Umbiella at the time the 1828 Census. In 1829 they were living in Sydney, then spent some time with the Rankens in Bathurst before going back to the Capertee Valley where they lived on John Maclean’s property, Warrangee, in the early 1830s. They stayed at Erskine Park with Annabella’s Campbell uncles before she was sent to boarding school in Sydney in 1834. The Innes family settled at their property in the Capertee Valley, Glen Alice, around 1834 and Annabella lived there from 1835 after she returned from boarding school. All these properties are close to the current Glen Alice township, and are still in existence. 74 Gwen Griffin (ed) (2003). Annabella of Lake Innes Port Macquarie. Port Macquarie: Port Macquarie Historical Society.

Valley some time in 1828, either before or around the time of the sale of Bungarribee later in the year. We know from the 1828 Census that the Innes family was at Umbiella station in the Capertee Valley in October of that year. But whether bound for Bathurst or the Capertee Valley, the table had to make the arduous journey westwards from Bungarribee across the Blue Mountains. There are several accounts of journeys over the mountains at that time that we can draw on to reconstruct the table’s trip. We also have Annabella Boswell’s account of journeys to and from the Capertee Valley in 1839, some 10 years after the table travelled there and 2 years before it left. But before we follow the table over the Blue Mountains, let’s remind ourselves of what a barrier to the inland and the much desired new grazing and agricultural land that the mountains had been to the early colonists.

The Blue Mountains consists of a dissected sandstone plateau of ridges separated by steep gorges rising to over 1000m at its highest points. There are only 2 unbroken ridgelines running east-west allowing road access across the mountains: the current Great Western Highway from Penrith and the Bell’s Line of Road from Richmond. This mountainous barrier to the inland had been considered impassable to Europeans until 1813 when ‘the dauntless three’ – Gregory Blaxland, William Lawson and William Wentworth – and their party of 4 men, 4 horses and 5 dogs crossed the mountains along what is generally the same route as the Great Western Highway today. The following year, using convict labour, William Cox built a crude road across the mountains to the Bathurst plains in an astonishingly short 6 months. The road was completed in January 1815. Starting from Emu Ford (now Emu Plains), the road across the mountains was not ‘built’ as such but rather cut through forest, grasslands and heath on often very steep and rocky country. Vegetation was cleared and rock removed, cut or blasted away. Holes and small gullies were filled with stones and rubble or crossed by wooden bridges, and crude stone retaining walls were built. It was a very rough road. After building a precipitous descent down the western escarpment at Mount York and finding themselves on the more sparsely-treed plains, the road-building party had a much easier time of it.

In April-May 1815 it took 8 days for Governor Macquarie and his wife, Elizabeth – with their entourage of around 70 people and numerous horses, bullocks, coaches and carts – to travel from Sydney to the Bathurst Plains, where Macquarie proclaimed and laid out the town of Bathurst. Some 15 years later, at the time the table made the journey, and even with some realignments and improvements to the road, crossing the Blue Mountains was still an arduous and hazardous journey. The eastern and western escarpments presented an ongoing challenge to road builders, and here we can still see the greatest technical achievements of early colonial road and bridge building.

George Mackeness’s well known 1965 compilation, Fourteen Journeys Over the Blue Mountains of New South Wales 1813-1841 and Ken Goodlet’s Blue Mountains Journeys (2013)75 give us a good sense of what such journeys at the time entailed, even if this is barely imaginable to those of us today who can drive the 75 km or so from the eastern base of the mountains at Emu Plains to the western base near Hartley in well under 2 hours.

By the late 1820s, the road between Sydney and Bathurst over the Blue Mountains was busy with cattle and sheep being driven to market and bullock trains hauling produce such as wool and wheat to Sydney and export markets. Provisions would also have been coming back to Bathurst from

75 George Mackeness (ed) (1965). Fourteen Journeys Over the Blue Mountains of New South Wales 1813-1841. Sydney, Melbourne, London: Horwitz-Grahame. Ken Goodlet (2013). Blue Mountains Journeys. Self-published ISBN 978-0-646-59522-1.

Sydney. There are accounts and paintings of carts, drays and bullock teams simply falling off the precipice on the steep, winding descents. Several methods could be employed to slow the descent – locking the wheels with chains, felling trees and attaching them to the back of vehicles to act as a drag, or creating a pulley from a rope looped around a tree trunk and tied to the rear end of the vehicle. But still they came to grief. Travellers often remarked on or were perplexed by the accumulation of felled trees lying at the bottom of the descents until they were told of, or experienced, their utility.

Convict chain gangs housed in moveable huts were engaged in the incessant task of maintaining the road through the mountains, repairing the damage caused by heavy traffic, heavy vehicles and large bullock teams, and clearing the felled trees from the road at the bottom of the descents. Following Major Thomas Mitchell’s appointment as Surveyor-General in 1828, convicts were also engaged in major upgrading and re-routing of the road on the eastern and western escarpments.

Government reserves at the foot of the mountains at both ends provided water and feed for livestock and bullock teams. This would pretty much have to do them for several days until they got to the government reserve at the other end, for resting places with feed and water on the mountains were limited. At its highest elevations – over 1000m at the western end – and all the way to Bathurst, winter travellers and livestock could also be confronted with snow, ice and blizzards with little or no shelter along the road. No wonder, then, that accounts in the Mackeness collection are replete with observations of the many bullock carcasses lying at the side of the road over the mountains. The poor exhausted beasts were flogged by their drivers and nipped at by dogs to keep them moving or to get them up from the ground when they collapsed or refused to go on. As an earlier traveller across the mountains, Elizabeth Hawkins76, complained, the noise of whips cracking, drivers swearing, bullocks bellowing and dogs barking was terrifying and made her head ache.

Sharing the road to and from Sydney were passenger coaches and carriages, and travellers on foot or on horseback. In places coach or carriage passengers would have been jolted along bare rock platforms with high steps or ‘jumpers’ cut in to them to allow ascent or descent of steep sections of the road. At this time there were few comforts for travellers – there were perhaps only two inns on the road over the mountains where people and horses could be fed and watered and find accommodation for the night. As yet there were no permanent European settlements in the Blue Mountains though there were squatters’ huts dotted along the road. The Indigenous occupants of the Blue Mountains – the Darug and Gundungurra people – tended to avoid contact with Europeans and very few travellers along the road reported contact and sightings, though evidence of Aboriginal habitation was seen and heard77.

This, then, would have been the sights and experiences of those who brought the table over the mountains to the Capertee Valley in the late 1820s. The crossing was such an ordeal that ‘X.Y.Z.’, writing in 1827, could say “If a man could be put down here [Bathurst] in a balloon, or find a royal

76 See Hawkins in Mackenness (ed), op.cit. Note that George and Janet Ranken had crossed the Blue Mountains in the early 1820s to live at their property Kellosheil at Bathurst. 77 See Attenbrow in Eugene Stockton and John Merriman (eds) (2nd Ed. 2009). Blue Mountains Dreaming. The Aboriginal Heritage. Lawson NSW: Blue Mountains Education and Research Trust.

road to the country, without having anything to do with the Blue Mountains, he would hug himself with a constant satisfaction, and desire to know no more”78.

So let’s now follow the table from Bungarribee westwards over the Blue Mountains sometime during 1828. We do not know if the Innes family (with a now 2 year old Annabella) or just George Innes travelled with the table, or if the table was sent separately with other goods and possessions. Certainly the Innes family made this crossing several times, so let’s imagine that the table travelled with them – the family in a horse-drawn carriage, wagon or cart and the table and perhaps some other furniture from Bungarribee in a cart or wagon drawn by horses or bullocks.

From Bungarribee, travelling westwards to the Blue Mountains on what is still today the route of the Great Western Highway would have been pretty straightforward on a good, straight, flat road maintained by the ubiquitous convict gangs camped along it. On reaching the Nepean River at the foot of the Blue Mountains, our travellers may have stayed the night at the Governor Bourke Inn or another of the inns at Penrith on the eastern side of the river. Or perhaps they crossed the river and stayed the night at the Arms of Australia inn at Emu Plains. In any event, they had to cross the river by punt.

Below is a sketch of the punt across the Nepean River looking westwards from the eastern shore. The punt site is just south of Victoria Bridge where the railway and Great Western Highway still cross the river at Emu Plains, and is marked by a plaque. The Blue Mountains escarpment can be seen faintly in the background.

Emu Ferry, Great Western Road by Conrad Martens, 1835. Dixson Library, State Library of NSW.

78 ‘X.Y.Z.’ (1827) A Ride to Bathurst, 1827. Six letters. In Mackeness (ed), op.cit., p.183. The anonymous ‘X.Y.Z.’ is widely regarded as being Captain William John Dumaresq, appointed as civil engineer and at that time Inspector of Roads and Bridges. It is even possible that Dumaresq knew Patrick Campbell who at that time was working as an Assistant Surveyor of Roads and Bridges in the Hunter Valley. Interestingly, in 1830 Dumaresq became integrated into the Innes family through his marriage to Christina Macleay, sister of Margaret Innes (née Macleay), Archibald Innes’s wife. Archibald was Annabella’s paternal uncle. Dumaresq attended Annabella Bowell’s wedding in 1856.

It’s hard to see from this image, but the punt – a wooden platform built across 2 boats – and its passengers standing on it were pulled across the river (some 200m distance) by ropes. According to a report in The Sydney Gazette of 11th September 1823 announcing the commencement of the punt service, the punt could accommodate “chaise, carriage or even bullock cart” as well as carts, wagons, bullocks, horses and livestock. The writer reported having seen 3 loaded carts, 3 bullocks, 2 or 3 horses and a dozen men conveyed on the punt at the same time, though this doesn’t square with the image above. Presumably the table would have crossed the river by this punt while still loaded on a cart or wagon, though maybe it had to be unloaded and re-loaded.

Once across the river at Emu Plains, the table and its companions would then have travelled along the current route of the Old Bathurst Road where they would soon begin ascending the Blue Mountains escarpment, seen in the distant background in the image above. By this time there was a new route up the eastern escarpment, roadbuilder William Cox’s original ascent up Lapstone Hill having been superseded by a new convict-built ‘zig-zag’ road completed in 1826. This new route re- joined Cox’s original road at Blaxland. This is still a steep ascent today. From the beginning of the ascent to the top of the escarpment, the road rises some 160m over a distance of around 2 km. In 1827 it took ‘X.Y.Z’ and his companions on horseback an hour to reach the top, from where they looked back on a clear view of the Cumberland Plain towards Sydney and the sea79. This is an impossible experience today, the view to the sea obscured by the smog that sits in the Sydney basin. Ken Goodlet reports that in the early 1830s it took a whole day for a loaded dray with 16 bullocks to make the ascent up the new road, an ascent that nowadays takes less than 3 minutes in a car.

This Google satellite image of the Old Bathurst Rd with its hairpin bends shows why it was called the ‘zig-zag’.

The Zig Zag Road is listed on the State Heritage Register, its distinctive technical features largely preserved because the road was largely disused and untouched for over 100 years from 1834 when it was superseded by Mitchell’s Pass. It is only one of 2 remaining zig-zag roads built in the 1820s and features low-lying culverts and substantial dry-stone retaining walls up to 8 courses high, glimpses of which can be seen on the hairpin bends as you drive (very slowly) up the zig-zag. Interestingly, it is likely that it was William Dumaresq – our ‘X.Y.Z.’ above and at that time Inspector of Roads and Bridges – who marked out and supervised the building of this road. He subsequently anonymously

79 ‘X.Y.Z.’, op.cit., p.173.

lavished praise on his own road in his account of his journey to Bathurst over the Blue Mountains in 1827, originally published in The Australian newspaper under the moniker ‘X.Y.Z.’80.

However, despite this (possibly self-) praise, the new route on the eastern escarpment was still difficult. The zig-zag section of the road, covered with loose stones, was the site of a reported near- fatal encounter between a horse-rider and an out of control dray around about the same time that our table made the journey. A traveller reported riding up the hill when she encountered a dray coming down loaded with wood, its wheels skidding on the turn of one of the hairpin bends. The load hit her horse and it reared, its forefeet landing on the edge of the precipice sending a shower of stones over the edge81.

Having ascended the eastern escarpment, our travellers and the table would have then faced a journey of some 60 km to the point of descent of the western escarpment. Accounts of travel in the Blue Mountains at the time talk about the rough state of the road, the often filthy state of the inns, the ubiquitous bullock carcasses by the side of the road and, depending on the time of year, the inclement weather. The journey along the mountain road was certainly uncomfortable and unpleasant but not as perilous as the ascents and descents.

Finally, after several days, our travellers would have reached the western escarpment of the Blue Mountains at Mount Victoria.

View from the summit of Mount York, looking towards Bathurst Plains, convicts breaking stones, N.S. Wales by Augustus Earle, c1826. National Library of Australia.

This is the original Cox’s road, not the nearby Lawson’s Long Alley road the table would have travelled down. Note that the artist has taken some license – the top of Cox’s road shown here is actually not oriented to this westwards view.

By the time our table travelled over the mountains, the terrifying descent down the escarpment by Cox’s original road from Mount York had been replaced by the nearby Lawson’s Long Alley route. Built in 1827 by convict labourers, the new road featured “lengthy, roughly built stone retaining walls; quality dry stone walls [one of the largest surviving convict-built structures in Australia]; gutters; evidence of the use of cut and fill work to embed the road in the embankment; walls up to

80 http://www.environment.nsw.gov.au/heritageapp/ViewHeritageItemDetails.aspx?ID=1170618. However, the State Heritage Register entry reports that there is some dispute about the author of this travelogue. 81 Goodlet, op.cit., p.53.

2m high; a quarry with traces of blasting and rock splitting grooves …”82. Recreational walkers travelling down Lawson’s Long Alley today are advised to observe these features and the evidence of stone flagging and a bridge crossing a creek at the bottom. Ken Goodlet tells us that this was as steep a descent as Cox’s road but was easier, quicker, wider and had passing bays, and allowed stock to get to food and water more quickly. ‘X.Y.Z.’, on horseback, found the new descent “comparatively easy” and “perfectly safe”. But travellers in carts or coaches would have continued to alight and walk down the road, so perilous was the descent still, and of course the need for drags, wheel locking or pulleys still applied.

Once down in the valley, our travellers would have driven past (or perhaps stayed in) Collits Inn, then called the ‘Golden Fleece’83. ‘X.Y.Z.’ certainly stayed there, speaking highly of its hosts, its cleanliness and ample good food, and expressing his amazement at the presence of good furniture, glass and earthenware:

When I saw [these] I at first wondered how such fragile furniture could have been brought so safely across the mountains, but felt no surprise as soon as I heard that the lime itself of which the house was built was brought all the way from Parramatta, a distance of seventy miles; and of course when they can bring lime, they may as well bring loaf sugar84.

Our table clearly wasn’t a pioneer by this time, in this part of the country at least.

About 20 km further west of Collits Inn, at what is now Marrangaroo, the Mudgee road (now the Castlereagh Highway) turned off the Bathurst road to the right heading north-west. I am going to take this road because it is most likely that the table went straight to the Capertee Valley in 1828, first to Umbiella then Warrangee stations and finally to the Innes family’s property Glen Alice when they took up residence there around 1834. Following the Mudgee road for around 37 kms from the turnoff at Marrangaroo, our travellers would have reached Capertee town where they turned right from the highway at what is now Glen Davis Road into the Capertee Valley. After another 37 kms or so, they would have arrived at the far end of the valley and Glen Alice station, from whose name the present village of Glen Alice is derived.

In the Capertee Valley

At some 800m above sea level, the town of Capertee sits atop the Great Dividing Range, so-named because its crest demarks the watershed of rivers flowing west to the inland and east to the Pacific Ocean. The Capertee Valley – first seen by Europeans in 1821 as they sought a way north along what is now the Mudgee Road/Castlereagh Highway – is one of the largest enclosed valleys in the world. Running eastwards from Capertee town on the highway, the valley is surrounded by World Heritage- listed National Parks and rugged sandstone escarpments. Cattle and sheep graziers began settling in

82 David Goldney (2015). Cox’s Road Dreaming – Guide Book. Bathurst NSW: Land and Property Information, p.56. 83 It was more likely that the Innes family stayed with their good friend, James Walker, who lived only 20 kms or so further along the road at his property, Wallerowang. Charles Darwin also stayed at Wallerowang during his trip to Bathurst in 1836. The property was acquired for the building of the recently decommissioned Wallerawang power station and its cooling pond now covers the homestead site. 84 ‘X.Y.Z.’, op.cit., pp.179-180.

the valley from the mid-1820s and several of our travellers on the Lusitania took up early land grants there85.

Crown Ridge Looking East by Conrad Martens, 1875. Mitchell Library, State Library of NSW. This is a view into the Capertee Valley, featuring ‘Pantoneys Crown’ in the left background, from what today is Pearson’s Lookout, a few kms south of Capertee town. The route of the Castlereagh highway today is still that of the road shown in the painting.

From Capertee town the road into the valley (Glen Davis Road) drops several hundred metres to the valley floor over a distance of some 20 km, passing by steep cliffs and heavily wooded deep gullies. Once on the valley floor, the land is mostly cleared and undulating, sloping down towards the river flats at the eastern end of the valley where the elevation is around 300m. Creeks traversing the valley drain into the Capertee River which flows eastwards through the gap at Glen Davis and eventually meets the Wolgan River to form the Colo River, a tributary of the Hawkesbury River. The main economic activity in the valley today is still sheep and cattle grazing, though tourism and holiday accommodation are becoming increasingly significant. Over the past couple of decades there has been a concerted effort by bird organisations and clubs in co-operation with some landowners in the valley to replant native vegetation and restore habitat for the endangered Regent Honeyeater. The valley is renowned for its birdlife and birdwatching is now a major drawcard for tourists, visitors and holidaymakers.

85 Information about Capertee from Bruce Jefferys (n.d.). The Story of Capertee. Privately published, available from the Capertee Progress Association. George Innes’s brother James was the initial owner of Glen Alice station. John Campbell’s gardener John MacLean – who Annabella Boswell tells us laid out the garden at Glen Alice – owned Warrangee station nearby which he then sold to or was somehow acquired by his namesake brother-in-law in around 1837. Lorn’s brother Dalmahoy Campbell owned the property adjoining Warrangee. Members of the MacLeod family also owned property in the Capertee along with the Rev. Samuel Marsden.

In Annabella Boswell’s day, getting into and out of the valley by any kind of vehicle required “going round The Peak’”, as she tells us the road was then called. This is still essentially the road route today (the white line in the Google satellite image above) for most of the steepest, vegetated section of the road on the left side of the image above. Nearer the highway and Capertee town, the original road possibly diverted through part of what is now the site of the Airly underground coal mine – the cleared area above the ‘Capertee town’ label in the image above.

Capertee Valley resident Vicki Powys and I have attempted to identify the landform that Annabella Boswell refers to as ‘The Peak’. This is probably the southward-running spur of Genowlan Mountain (seen in the satellite image above) that the road passes around and which looms over the traveller below. Or it could be Pantoneys Crown (at left) which, when viewed from the old road that runs through Umbiella station near Glen Alice (from where this photo was taken), is a dominating landform and direction marker. From this point the horse and foot track – ‘The Hole’ as Annabella called it – passed to the left of Pantoneys Crown and the vehicle road, ‘The Peak’, to the right. Which landform is ‘The Peak’ is still unresolved.

Annabella Boswell tells us “Nothing could be worse than this road. We always had to sleep one or two nights in the bush, if anything more than one gig and one or two horsemen were of the party, as it took three men to help and encourage one good horse up and down these hills”86. The ‘hills’ she refers to ended (when coming in to the valley) or started (when going out) at the dreaded ‘First Pinch’, the location of which we haven’t been able to identify. The route at this steep hill section has

86 Annabella Boswell (1987). Annabella Boswell’s Journal. North Ryde NSW and London: Angus & Robertson, p.20.

been superseded by today’s Glen Davis Road, but would have ended or started around about where the vegetated area along the current road stops, in the middle section of the satellite image above. Today’s road, from where it crosses Coco Creek to almost all the way to Glen Alice, in the main takes a different route to that of the original road. From Coco Creek to Glen Alice the original road runs southwards from Glen Davis Road along Crown Station Road – the first section of which now runs through private property – then turns northwards and meets and crosses Glen Davis Road. From there the road probably ran closely along Crown Creek to its junction with Coco Creek which the road then followed till it met the Capertee River on or near Umbiella station. You can see Coco Creek travelling north-east roughly in line with the current road until it meets the Capertee River in the mid-right of the image above. At a point nearby the old road would have crossed the river and continued on until it met the current Glen Alice Road (white line in the top right of the image above), which is possibly still the original route to Glen Alice station. The road (or at least a road) from the old Capertee River crossing to Glen Alice Road is still marked on current maps. Flooding forced successive relocations of the Capertee River crossing.

When the journey to or from Glen Alice involved moving the contents of a household or bringing in supplies, bullock drays were employed. In Annabella’s time, the journey out of the valley by bullock dray with a driver on foot necessarily proceeded at walking pace (or slower) and could take 3 days. Today, in a car, it takes around half an hour.

Annabella Boswell gives us fairly detailed accounts of 2 accidents on the most perilous stretch of the road – between Capertee town and the ‘First Pinch’ – both occurring in 1839: one in March when the Innes family went to Port Macquarie for the winter hoping the warmer weather there would restore her father George’s health; the other in November when they returned to Glen Alice following George’s death. Although the incidents did not involve the table, Annabella’s accounts of those journeys reveal what it would have taken to transport it into and out of the valley by cart or dray.

If we reverse Annabella’s accounts and start with the family’s return to the Capertee Valley in November 1839, we can get a sense of the table’s journey into the valley some 10 years earlier. On their way back to Glen Alice from Port Macquarie following George Innes’s death, Annabella, her mother Lorn and sister Margaret detoured via Liverpool (now a suburb of south-west Sydney) to visit the grieving MacLeod family, Lorn’s sister Colina MacLeod having also recently died after giving birth to her 14th child.

Annabella describes setting out on the journey from Liverpool to Glen Alice in a “neat caravan, a sort of spring cart, with a high arched frame above, covered with canvas, Uncle Dalmahoy87 driving in it his beautiful grey horse Block, mamma sitting beside him, and we two girls and our little cousin

87 ‘Uncle Dalmahoy’ was Dalmahoy Campbell, Lorn and Patrick Campbell’s younger brother and owner of a property in the Capertee Valley next to John Maclean’s Warrangee station. By all accounts, ‘Dal’ (as he was known) was a big, strong man. In the same year (1839) he drove stock to the western district of Victoria and eventually settled there, later moving to Melbourne where he became a prominent stock and station agent and Town Councillor. Dal is mainly remembered as the driving force behind (and a participant in) the Melbourne Gymnastic Games of 1850 and 1851, and in the early development of Australian Rules football. He died in Melbourne in 1867 at age 58.

inside”88. After travelling over the Blue Mountains and resting at Wallerowang with the Walker family for some days, their groom from Glen Alice came for them, bringing a good strong horse. Dalmahoy decided that they would try and get from Wallerowang to Glen Alice – a distance of some 70 km – in one day, given the long days at that time of the year and that it was a full moon. This turned out to be a bad idea. Annabella tells us that there was an accident on the road from Wallerowang to Capertee town when a harness broke on a steep downward hill89. The horses plunged and Annabella’s mother Lorn was thrown out of the caravan and onto a horse – she was unhurt, luckily. The horses then bolted and damaged the cart and a wheel so much that it was impossible to go on. Annabella recounts that their “not very bulky luggage” was then transferred to a similar light goods cart driven by a man they knew who happened to be passing by. This cart, too, was upset on the treacherous road down into the valley on the last steep hill before reaching the valley floor at the ‘First Pinch’. The horse landed on its back under the cart but fortunately was unhurt, as were our travellers who were not in the cart but were walking down the hill. A terrified 13 year old Annabella was then given their two horses to hold while the horse and cart were righted, but the horses plunged and neighed and escaped from her. They were soon caught. Finally, around midnight, they arrived at Glen Alice, Uncle Dalmahoy much worn out by his exertions in holding back and catching the horses and remedying their mishaps on the road. Annabella believed he saved their lives.

If getting to Glen Alice was difficult enough for the table, even without such mishaps, Annabella tells us that conveying a piano there in 1838 was a “most laborious business …. scarcely worth the trouble”90. She also tells us that a large log of cedar was brought to Glen Alice from Sydney by dray while the house was being built and that it was cut, seasoned and then made into furniture by a cabinetmaker engaged from Sydney with assistance from a (convict) carpenter living at Glen Alice. The furniture made from this cedar log included a handsome sideboard, a large wardrobe and a chest of drawers. And, apparently, Annabella’s mother had a ‘davenport’ (writing table, most likely) brought to Glen Alice from Sydney at some stage. Today we marvel at what would have been quite ‘normal’ then to people of the Innes’s class in terms of the money and effort required to move people and things over such long distances and in very difficult terrain. Though, of course, in this instance it would have been the free and convict labourers doing the work.

The table resided at Glen Alice homestead from around 1834 (when the Innes family moved in) until 1841. Because her father gave her the table when she was a child, I imagine a growing Annabella Boswell sitting at it doing her school lessons, under the direction of her governess, writing her prolific correspondence (several long letters a week, she tells us), painting her wildflower studies and beginning to write her journal.

88 Boswell, Journal, p.42. The ‘little cousin’ was Colina and Archibald MacLeod’s 4 year old daughter, Lorn Edith (Lorn’s ‘name daughter’), who lived temporarily with the Innes family following Colina’s death. 89 Possibly near Blackman’s Crown, just south of the site of present day Pearson’s lookout on the Castlereagh Highway and not far from Capertee town. 90 Boswell, Journal, p.22.

Part of Glen Alice station. The oval shaped area at the bottom of the photo is the site of the original homestead, set on a rise above the Umbiella Creek floodplain (in the opposite direction to this view). A semi-circle of white cedars was planted around the homestead at some stage and these can still be seen in this photo. The current homestead is situated up the driveway amongst the trees on the other side of the road from the old site. Photo courtesy of Don Saville.

What was the Capertee Valley like in the 1830s when the Innes family and the table lived there? By the time Annabella was born at Yarrows near Bathurst in September 1826, the most intense period of violent conflict between the British settlers and Indigenous Wiradjuri people had come to an end. The ‘Bathurst War’, as this conflict came to be known, was again over land and food resources. Settlers started occupying Wiradjuri land at an increasing rate in the early 1820s following Governor Macquarie’s proclamation of Bathurst in 1815. As the settlers took up land grants, cleared and fenced, introduced grazing animals, planted crops and drove the Wiradjuri people off their lands, access to traditional food sources diminished. The Wiradjuri responded by attacking settlers and sometimes killing their convict stockmen, shepherds and livestock. Vicious reprisals on both sides followed, culminating in 1824 when Governor Brisbane proclaimed martial law west of the Blue Mountains. This gave free rein to the killing of Aboriginal people. Many settlers joined the hunt, including our old acquaintance from the Lusitania, George Ranken91, now settled at Bathurst, and James Walker from Wallerowang. Both had become district magistrates by that time. Along with other prominent settlers in the district, these two led separate co-ordinated punitive expeditions of settlers and soldiers scouring the countryside from the Bathurst area north and west up to the Hunter Valley looking for ‘natives’. These expeditions, at least, were unsuccessful. But the loss of so many of his people led Wiradjuri leader Windradyne and a group of Wiradjuri to travel to Parramatta in 1824 to meet with the governor and seek a formal end to hostilities. Windradyne, who had a price (in acreage) on his head, also sought a pardon. Both these requests were granted.

91 See Ranken, op.cit. for George Ranken’s account of this expedition in a letter to his wife, Janet Ranken.

Annabella Boswell recalls some of her interactions with and observations of the Aboriginal people of the Capertee Valley in a separate publication, Recollections of Some Australian Blacks. Of the ‘Capita Tribe’ (probably Wiradjuri, or possibly Darkinung people from the north and east), she tells us that only 7 members remained – a family group consisting of ‘old Jacky’ and his ‘gin’ Mary, their 2 sons and their wives, and a grandchild, Maria, “a pretty, intelligent child, with whom we often played” 92. Maria taught Annabella and her sister some Aboriginal language and bushcraft, including how to cross a creek even in full flood using a plank – though Annabella says they could never match Maria’s nimbleness.

In her Recollections Annabella tells us of the ‘Capita’ family group’s comings and goings from Glen Alice station, and how she and her family would always visit them when they returned. Annabella describes their language, customs and possum-skin clothing, the construction of their temporary camps on the creek flats near the Glen Alice homestead, and visits from neighbouring and distant tribes. She describes in detail a great ‘Corroberee’ that took place in 1837, a meeting and ceremony held over several days involving local Indigenous people and tribes from as far away as the Hunter River and Goulburn. The night-time ceremony took place on a grassy plain near the Glen Alice homestead, and the settlers (including an 11 year old Annabella) were invited to attend. Annabella describes the fires from the various camps around which the women sat and sang and beat time on their possum skin cloaks stretched between their knees while the men danced, the white clay markings along their bones making them look like skeletons as they emerged out of the dark towards the fires. Other men performed dances mimicking emus and kangaroos.

Don Saville of Glen Alice station kindly showed a small group of us around the site of the old homestead where Annabella and the table lived from 1834/5 to 1841. There is nothing left of the homestead but a few convict-made sandstone blocks (their tell-tale pick marks still visible) strewn near an underground cavity, now covered by a concrete top, which Don believes may have been a granary. Standing today on the rise where the old homestead stood and looking north and north- east along Umbiella Creek – the same vista Annabella would have looked out on from the verandah of the house described in her Journal – Mount Innes features prominently93. From there it is also easy to see the large, wide, grassy floodplain that was likely the site of the camps and the corroboree dance that Annabella recorded in her Recollections. From the verandah this large gathering on the flood plain would have been a spectacular sight – even if (as Annabella reports) the settlers were initially anxious about its intent. The ‘Bathurst War’ was still a recent memory.

Interacting with Aboriginal people on a daily basis (for better or for worse) was a feature of life for settler families such as Annabella’s, particularly on the frontier. At nearby Umbiella station, a 2 year old Annabella is recorded in the 1828 Census as residing there with her family, many free and convict servants and a 12 year old boy, ‘George Innes, a black lad, a native of the colony’ – a house servant, apparently94. This everyday familiarity with Indigenous people is unimaginable to us who live in contemporary urban Australia, as is the daily interaction with the convict workers who vastly outnumbered the free settlers. To get an idea of the number of convicts and other workers who

92 Annabella Boswell (1890). Recollections of Some Australian Blacks. Privately published, p.3. Copy held in Mitchell Library, State Library of NSW. 93 This was probably named after George Innes’s brother, James, who was the original owner of Glen Alice. 94 This practice of giving Aboriginal boys living with settler families (for whatever reason) the name of the station owner – in this case, George Innes – seems to have been quite common.

lived and worked on Glen Alice station, we can again look to the 1828 Census taken at nearby Umbiella station. Apart from the Innes family, there was a property overseer and 5 free settler employees – a carpenter, 2 sawyers, a fencer and a shepherd – and no less than 22 convict workers (sentences ranging from 7 years to life) including stockmen, shepherds, fencers, bullock drivers, ploughmen, a groom, labourers, a hut keeper and a milkman, carpenters, a brick maker and a blacksmith, and 2 female house servants (in addition to the ‘black lad’).

Annabella tells us that at Glen Alice they only had convict servants (English, Scottish and Irish) except for the final 2 years when they also had a Highland maid. Her discussion of some of the convicts on Glen Alice – recalled as an older woman in the Journal from the perspective of the child of the station owner – gives an insight into the relations between the settlers and their convict workers, or at least between Annabella and some of the convicts. Writing as an older woman, Annabella says they were always “well and kindly served” by the convict workers, apart from a few surly and unsuitable individuals who didn’t stay long. She recalls her ‘favourites’: an old gardener who helped with their gardens and who always presented them with a Sunday posy; the aforementioned carpenter, George Miller, who had helped build their house and make their cedar furniture, and made toys and a beautiful bedstead for Annabella and her sister’s dolls; George the groom who treated Annabella as a princess and took great pains to break in a horse for her, but which turned out to be so good it was sold; and an old shepherd, Dan Taylor, who brought them lambs to be fed and petted but which then, to the girls’ grief, were returned to the flock.

All this and more of Annabella’s everyday life was reported in her journals and letters written at the table. Letters dated 1836 to her paternal uncle Archibald Innes in Port Macquarie, to her father at a property at Cullen Bullen (near Capertee) and to her maternal aunt Annabella Campbell are reproduced in her Journal. From the journals and letters we learn that Annabella’s life at Glen Alice from the age of 8 to 13, as for her younger sister Margaret, revolved around their school lessons (reading, writing, spelling, history, geography) supervised by a governess; reading books voraciously; sketching and painting the wildflowers on the property; learning needlework, craftwork and the guitar; working with their mother in their flower, fruit and vegetable gardens; and tending to the chickens and pets. Annabella also records expeditions to the creek (Umbiella Creek, which runs through Glen Alice), exploring ravines in the “tall hills” (the escarpment seen the aerial photograph of Glen Alice station), collecting wildflowers and bringing back wildflower plants for transplanting into their garden. At Glen Alice they received visits from family and friends and they themselves periodically left Glen Alice to visit family and friends in the Bathurst district (including the Rankens) and further afield. Annabella describes social events held at these various places, including weddings and dances, and what the participants wore. Her aunt Annabella Campbell married George Ranken’s younger brother, Arthur, at Dalmahoy Campbell’s house at White Rock near Bathurst in March 1837. The newlyweds spent their honeymoon at Glen Alice while the Innes family stayed on at White Rock and then with the Rankens at Bathurst.

This idyllic existence, for Annabella and her younger sister at least, ended when the Innes family left Glen Alice in 1839 to go and stay temporarily with her father’s brother, Archibald Innes, at Port Macquarie. As noted previously, when George Innes’s health began to fail the family decided to spend the winter of 1839 at Port Macquarie in Archibald’s home, Lake Innes House. Once there, George’s health improved slightly and plans were being made for a return to Glen Alice when in August his health suddenly declined and he died. Lorn, Annabella and her sister Margaret went back

to the Capertee Valley with one of the MacLeod girls on the trip described previously. Here, without a governess, the girls “ran wild”.

The 2 years spent at Glen Alice from when they returned there in late 1839 to when they left for good in 1841 are sketched in Annabella’s Journal but, she tells us, are recorded in detail in another journal (unpublished and seemingly lost). She gives us some idea of their day-to-day activities during this time: voraciously reading novels (again!); spending much of the time outdoors amongst the fields and gardens, the birds and insects, and the ‘native blacks’ who were often there; growing and grinding their own wheat and making bread and cakes (under the direction of their Highland maid); milking cows and making butter and cheese; making jams and jellies from the fruit on their trees; and tending the chickens. During this time they also received half-yearly visits from a Presbyterian minister who held services (sometimes in Gaelic) on the verandah of the homestead for as many who could come. They also visited nearby Warrangee station and the recently arrived Maclean family – the sister and brother-in-law of the original John Maclean – from the Isle of Skye. Annabella tells us the Macleans spoke little English and relied on Annabella’s mother, Lorn, who spoke perfect Gaelic. Annabella’s maternal aunt Annabella Ranken and her young children stayed with them during the final year or so at Glen Alice. As Annabella Boswell described them – in the context of a threatened raid by drunken station workers from nearby Umbiella on Christmas Day 1839 – they were a “helpless household” of 5 women, 4 girls, and 2 little children.

The isolation and remoteness of Glen Alice ultimately proved too much and so in early 1841, when Annabella was 14 years old, the family left there for good. Dalmahoy Campbell had married the year before and was at that time living in Parramatta, which Annabella tells us was one of the reasons for the move there. Dalmahoy came to Glen Alice for them, for “one more long journey under his care”95. Annabella tells us that Glen Alice was packed up and all their possessions moved to Parramatta. All the horses and stock on the station were sold or transferred to family members. The paid workers were let go and the few remaining convict workers and servants who were almost due their ‘ticket of leave’ found employment elsewhere. Glen Alice was let out for a few years and eventually sold to the aforementioned newly arrived John Maclean, who became a prominent landholder in the Capertee Valley. Annabella never returned to Glen Alice, though her mother made a visit there in 1848.

To Parramatta …..

And so it was that in early 1841 the table made the perilous journey out of the Capertee Valley and across the Blue Mountains to Parramatta, almost retracing its journey to the Capertee Valley more than 10 years earlier. Annabella’s cousin Lorn Edith MacLeod was still living with them and therefore accompanied them to Parramatta. There is no account of this journey in Annabella Boswell’s Journal, other than that ‘uncle Dalmahoy’ accompanied them. This probably means it was uneventful, unlike the journey 2 years before which Annabella recorded in her Journal. We can refer to this account of leaving Glen Alice to go to Port Macquarie with her ailing father in March 1839 to try and imagine the table’s journey out of the valley in 1841.

95 Boswell, Journal, p.52.

Annabella describes setting out from Glen Alice on a lovely morning in the first week in March 1839 with her, her sister Margaret and their governess travelling in a large dray drawn by 5 bullocks and piled with mattresses and pillows. A bullock driver walked at one side of the dray, cracking a whip from time to time, and an assistant followed. A second dray carrying camping gear and provisions for 2 nights’ stay in the valley had set off the day before. Annabella’s mother and father travelled in a horse-drawn gig, and a friend and their groom rode horses. The travelling party spent the first night at the campground at Coco Creek, marked on the satellite image above.

The old road and campground at Coco Creek is close to the current Glen Davis Road but is on private property. Capertee Valley resident Vicki Powys negotiated access to the old road and campground with the owner, Steven Ashurst. At the time of our visit in May 2016, Coco Creek was dry (as it often is nowadays) and so we could easily walk across the pebble creek bed and stand on the old camp area. In the dry creek bed we could see the remains of the wooden piers of a low bridge over the creek, though it is doubtful a bridge was there in Annabella’s time. The shallow creek crossing is a lovely spot, perfect for a campground, the she-oaks (or swamp-oaks as Annabella called them) waving and whispering in the breeze as they did for Annabella some 175 years earlier. Annabella describes a bucolic scene at the camp, the bullocks and hobbled horses wandering down to the water holes in the creek bed while the family enjoyed a picnic; then bathing in the stream the next morning while the servants prepared breakfast. Annabella tells us she kneeled on the soft green bank to say her morning prayers and was overwhelmed by a sense of the omnipotence and omni- presence of God. She writes, “I shall never forget that morning prayer under the shade of the green swamp-oak trees in the wild bush”96. After breakfast, the camp was packed up, the horses harnessed, the bullocks yoked and they were soon on their way. Two years later our table, too, was likely to have spent the first night of its journey out of the valley at the Coco Creek camp site.

Annabella’s buoyant mood probably soured when they reached ‘The First Pinch’, the first steep hill, where they were obliged to get out of the dray and walk up the road. The dray followed, the men cracking their whips and shouting at the bullocks. She reports that it was relatively easy for a light gig with 2 horses to get up the hills, but getting a bullock dray out of the valley was another story. Reporting on what would have been the normal course of leaving the valley by bullock dray (apart from the accident that prompted her to record this story), Annabella describes the poor bullocks labouring up the hill pulling the heavy dray, and their frequent pauses in the late summer heat necessitating chocking the wheels with large stones. Annabella tells us that ‘we’ (likely she, her mother, sister and governess) walked up the hill gathering flowers and stones and anything else that took their eye, but then had to discard them when they reached the next big hill where all hands were required. Annabella was sometimes entrusted to hold or lead the horses.

Because this journey took so long uphill and down, water was of utmost importance – particularly in the late summer heat – and necessitated pushing on to the nearest waterholes. Annabella tells us that they carried a large stone jar full of water for them to drink. While this

96 Boswell, Journal, p.30.

train was laboriously making its way up and down the hills out of the valley at a creeping pace, the girls, their mother and governess walked and rested alternately. Annabella and her sister were distracted from the boredom of this section of the journey by having little drives in the gig, probably with their unwell father, overtaking their mother and governess walking up the road. But at the next steep hill the travelling party slowed down and the creeping, laborious routine of ascent would begin again. Annabella tells us that on the downhill stretches the dray wheels had to be locked by a chain or, on a longer descent, a tree felled and attached to the dray to act as a drag. This was apparently a scene as common in places like the Capertee Valley as it was on the eastern and western descents of the Blue Mountains.

Annabella reports that it was reaching sunset on the second day and they were concerned they would not reach their planned stopover for the night, Erly Flat (probably on Airly Creek, in the vicinity of the Airly coal mine, near Capertee town), and its much-needed water. This plan was thwarted when part of the dray or harness gave way forcing them to stop where they were. Worse, their stone water jar had been broken in the process and all their water lost. They managed to get to the Reedy Gully camp site half a mile further on where they spent a very thirsty night. The servants set off to find water and returned around midnight with what turned out to be ‘green slime’ in the light of day, but which they had unknowingly drank a mouthful of in the dark.

Off they set the next morning, still thirsty, the horses and bullocks anything but cheerful but picking up their pace as they approached some water holes. Here the travelling party rested for a few hours and by night had reached the road to Sydney and the place (which Annabella says was then known as the ‘Water Holes’ where there was an accommodation hut) where a carriage was waiting for them. Here they camped for the night as the weather was fine and they were still accompanied by the dray carrying the overnight camping gear and provisions. This dray was packed up and sent back to Glen Alice the following morning. It had taken them 3 whole days to get from Glen Alice to the ‘Water Holes’ with loaded bullock drays. But the mishaps hadn’t ended yet. When the travelling party reached the infamously bad vermin-infested inn at the junction of the Mudgee and Bathurst roads (now Marrangaroo), at which they were meant to stay that night, Annabella’s father and the gig had not arrived. It turned out that he had a serious accident in a section of the road being repaired and the horse had fallen over an unfenced bank, taking the gig with it and throwing her father and another man out of it. The gig was smashed to pieces, the horse hurt and her father badly bruised and shaken. Consequently, room had to be made in the close (closed) carriage for her frail father and the governess had to ride outside on the box of the carriage. It would have been a very cramped, uncomfortable and probably stifling journey of many days from there across the Blue Mountains to the punt across the Nepean River to Penrith where they stayed overnight.

Although the table’s journey out of the Capertee Valley 2 years later was not as eventful as this, Annabella’s account reveals what it took – in terms of the labour of man and beast, roads and other infrastructure (inns and provisioning places), availability of water and feed, and vehicles such as coaches and drays – to move families and their possessions around the colony.

Annabella’s description of the scene at the ‘Water Holes’ camp (at a location on the Castlereagh Highway we haven’t yet been able to identify) gives us a good idea of the road traffic to and from Sydney at the time our table made the trip back over the Blue Mountains. She talks of the great

many drays encamped near the ponds, “some taking down bales of wool, others taking back supplies from Sydney to distant stations”. Annabella continues:

It really was astonishing to see some of the large wool drays how they were packed, and often on the top of all was to be seen a woman and two or three small children. How they got up was a mystery to me, and being up, how they travelled on such roads and met with so few accidents was still more wonderful. Each dray was drawn by from eight to twelve bullocks, in charge of a driver and other man.

Annabella Boswell’s Journal, p.34

And these drays had to get over the Blue Mountains!

By the time the table travelled from the Capertee Valley to Parramatta with the Innes family in 1841, Surveyor-General Thomas Mitchell’s Victoria Pass had replaced all other roads as the main vehicular route up and down the western escarpment of the Blue Mountains. It is still the route of the Great Western Highway today. Built by convict labourers and completed in 1832, Mitchell’s new road required extensive cutting, excavating and blasting into the sandstone escarpment. Its main feature is a causeway built on a narrow saddle of land connecting 2 sandstone outcrops about halfway down the escarpment. The state heritage-listed causeway was an engineering feat at the time and consists of 2 large sandstone retaining walls either side of an earth and rubble core. The 11m high northern retaining wall, seen in the photograph at left, is buttressed. It is regarded as an exemplar of road building of the time, though the effort and treatment of the convict labourers in achieving this doesn’t bear thinking about97. Harry Phillips c.1910 photograph of convict- built masonry walls and buttresses of the This view of the sweep of the road and causeway causeway across the gully at Victoria Pass. inspired many drawings and paintings and the viewing Source: Blue Mountains City Library Local point became a kind of tourist spot, where travellers Studies Collection stopped to sit and admire the road and the view of the Hartley Valley westwards. It is still a breathtaking view today as you drive down the escarpment at that point. This spot is also the site of surveyor William Govett’s painting ‘Accident on the Road’ (c1835) which depicts a cart with a bullock attached to the shaft falling off the precipice near the causeway. The accident involved Govett’s own team as they surveyed the pass for Thomas Mitchell, and Govett witnessed the accident. Apparently, as the bullock cart rounded the blind corner (at the top of the painting and photograph) coming down the hill, it hit a rockfall across the road after the bullock was spooked by a group of Aboriginal people standing on the road at the blind corner (seen faintly in the painting below). The bullock and cart went over the edge and the bullock was killed.

97 See http://www.environment.nsw.gov.au/heritageapp/ViewHeritageItemDetails.aspx?ID=4301023

Accident on the Road from ‘William Govett’s notes and sketches taken during a surveying Expedition in N. South Wales and Blue Mountains Road’. Mitchell Library, State Library of NSW.

Confirming Annabella Boswell’s observation of the numerous wool drays at the ‘Water Holes’ camp, Ken Goodlet98 tells us that at that time wool was taking over from whaling and sealing as the largest Australian export, much of it travelling from the west. This meant more and more wool (and wheat) wagons with their bullock teams travelling to Sydney on roads less and less able to cope, particularly those across the mountains. Louisa Meredith, a newly arrived settler from England travelling from Sydney to Bathurst in 1839, remarked of the traffic then on the Blue Mountains: “it is no uncommon thing to meet a train of six or eight heavily laden drays … each drawn by eight, ten or twelve oxen; and to encounter such a caravan on the narrow mountain road is by no means a desirable incident”99. She reports a near-collision between her party and a caravan of drays and bullocks on the road, the ill-treatment of the ‘oxen’ and the many carcasses by the side of the road, the bullocks’ plight exacerbated by 2 years of drought which left neither food nor water in the mountains for them. Meredith tells us of the threat of bushrangers, hence the government’s advice for produce to travel in convoy. She deplored the terrible state of the roads (apart from the Mitchell’s Pass route up the eastern escarpment), the uncomfortable jarring trip in the coach, the generally filthy state of the inns and the terrible food. The road wouldn’t have been any better 2 years later when Annabella and her family journeyed to Parramatta. From Annabella Boswell’s account of travelling to Sydney after visiting the Rankens in Bathurst 10 years later in 1849, it seems that the road still wasn’t much improved.

After several days or more crossing the Blue Mountains, the Innes family and their possessions, including the table, would have reached the eastern escarpment of the Blue Mountains. By that time, the new Mitchell’s Pass and Lennox Bridge had replaced the Old Bathurst (‘zig-zag’) Road. Built by convict labourers and opened in 1834, Mitchell’s Pass was the main vehicular route up and down the eastern escarpment of the mountains until 1926. After being closed for a while as major repairs and renovations were done to the bridge, the route re-opened to one-way vehicular traffic in 1976.

98 Goodlet, op.cit., p.72. 99 Meredith in Mackeness (ed), op.cit., p.244.

Today, Mitchell’s Pass offers a very pleasant and scenic drive down the eastern escarpment and is popular with tourists100.

Again, blasting and cutting into the sandstone escarpment, construction of Mitchell’s Pass employed the latest roadbuilding techniques pioneered by Thomas Telford in Britain and brought to Australia by David Lennox and the aforementioned William Govett. Lennox – a newly arrived Scottish master stonemason and bridge builder – had worked with Telford in Britain. Lennox designed and supervised the building of the bridge which bears his name. Lennox Bridge is a stone arch construction on a horseshoe curve spanning some 6m across the deep gully of Lapstone Creek. At the time of its construction this heritage-listed bridge was regarded as an engineering marvel – it is the oldest stone arch bridge on the Australian mainland. Interestingly, depending on the route taken by the Campbells from Appin to Inveraray 20 years earlier, our travelling party may have descended the eastern escarpment of the Blue Mountains by a road and bridge highly influenced by Telford, who had also undertaken a major upgrading of the old military roads in Scotland that the Campbells and the table could have travelled along.

Louisa Meredith, travelling up Mitchell’s Pass in 1839, found the winding road along the side of the mountain ‘excellent’, “with high overhanging rocks on the left hand and a deep wooded ravine on the right”. The wild scenery and zigzag road reminded her of some of artist Brockedon’s ‘passes of the Alps’ drawings “save that our ravine had no foaming torrent roaring down it; and it was only by most intent observation that I could detect something like moisture tricking over the rocks, where an opening in the trees left the far-down stony bed visible”101. Needless to say, Meredith found the Australian bush and landscape lacking in comparison to England.

Lennox Bridge, Lapstone Hill, Mitchell Pass near Penrith, N.S.W. by Conrad Martens, 1835. National Library of Australia.

100 http://www.environment.nsw.gov.au/heritageapp/ViewHeritageItemDetails.aspx?ID=5045255 101 Meredith in Mackeness (ed), op.cit., p.239.

The Mitchell’s Pass route down Lapstone Hill was still a precipitous descent. Eight years after this journey from the Capertee Valley to Parramatta in 1841, Annabella recalled in Further Recollections of My Early Days in Australia her above-mentioned journey from Bathurst to Sydney in 1849, following a visit to the Rankens. She describes the road down Lapstone Hill “with a precipice on one side. If harnesses were to give way or horses hesitant in turning the coach would inevitably be hurled down with great force. There is no parapet anywhere, and the road is far from wide”102.

On arrival in Parramatta in April 1841, the Innes family initially stayed at Dalmahoy Campbell’s home until Lorn found a house on the Western Road (now Parramatta Road) where they lived until early 1842. Annabella tells us that her mother’s good friend Janet Ranken and two of her sons visited them at that house in 1841 when Janet and George hurriedly returned from a trip to Scotland on account of their 4th son’s ill health. He died on the voyage to Australia. The 7 other Ranken children stayed on in Scotland for their education. Janet Ranken’s visit to the Innes family at Parramatta was significant as she brought with her Hugh Hamilton, a young man who had come out from Ayrshire with them. Some 12 years later, Hugh would marry Lorn’s youngest daughter, Margaret (Annabella’s sister).

Early in 1842 Lorn and her newly widowed sister Isabella Ogilvie (née Campbell) took a large house on George Street, Parramatta – Treganna House103. The household grew as Lorn, her daughters Annabella and Margaret, and Isabella and her daughter were soon joined by Annabella Ranken (née Campbell , Lorn and Isabella’s sister) and her young children while her husband Arthur Ranken was away in Melbourne. The 5 surviving of the 7 Ranken children left behind in Scotland (one died in Scotland and another on the voyage back to Australia) arrived in Sydney with their governess at the end of 1842 and stayed at Treganna House for Christmas before setting off to Bathurst. The large MacLeod family, reunited after Colina’s death 3 years earlier, was now renting a house in Macquarie Street nearby. Even though a bustling household of family, friends and many children, Christmas

102 Annabella Boswell (1964, original possibly c.1911). Further Recollections of My Early Days in Australia. Port Macquarie: Hastings District Historical Society, p.55. Copy held in Mitchell Library, State Library of NSW. 103 Isabella’s husband Peter Ogilvie, a surveyor like Patrick Campbell and likely a good friend of Patrick’s, committed suicide in 1841.

1842 at Treganna House must have been a particularly difficult one with so many recent tragedies – the deaths of George Innes, Colina MacLeod, Peter Ogilvie and 3 of George and Janet Ranken’s children. The travellers on the Lusitania who were amongst those gathered at Treganna House that Christmas may have together reflected on their lives since arriving in Australia some 20 years before.

Presumably the table would have been moved from house to house in Parramatta with a now 15-16 year old Annabella sitting at it to do her studies – she tells us she was attending Madame Lubecki’s school while in Parramatta – and to write letters and her journal entries.

Annabella Boswell (née Innes) c1850. National Museum of Australia.

…. and on to Port Macquarie

After some 2 years in Parramatta, Annabella and her family moved to Port Macquarie to be close to George Innes’s brother, Archibald, who took over George’s paternal role and family responsibilities following his death.

When we left Parramatta [in January 1843] it was with the idea of settling in a house of our own in or near Port Macquarie. We took all our furniture with us, or rather it followed in a sailing vessel, and on its arrival was stored till we required it, most of it for more than eight years, as it was soon decided that we should remain for some time at Lake Innes, my uncle and aunt making us welcome in the kindest manner.

Annabella Boswell’s Journal, p.62

Annabella, her sister Margaret and mother Lorn, left Sydney on the wooden paddle steamer Maitland104 on 27th January 1843 expecting to stay only temporarily with Archibald Innes and his family at Lake Innes House. Instead, they stayed there for over 5 years. The furniture, including the table, followed by an unknown sailing ship and most of it put into storage. But not the table. In her

104 The Maitland appears to have been owned or at least chartered by Archibald Innes. See Ian Finkel (1987). Port Macquarie. The Port That Was. A Maritime History. Port Macquarie: Hastings District Historical Society, p.13

unpublished 1905 manuscript provided to me by John Boswell, Annabella tells us that the table was at Lake Innes House where it remained until 1851.

Port Macquarie by Joseph Backler, c1840. Mitchell Library, State Library of NSW.

The scene portrayed in the painting above, looking south from the north shore of Port Macquarie harbour, would have been that which greeted Annabella and her family in 1839 and again in 1843. The paddle steamer seen entering the harbour could even have been the Maitland, depending on the correct date of the painting – the plaque attached to the picture frame states 1832, the NSW State Library catalogue dates it at c1840 (the Maitland entered service in the late 1830s). The wharf where a small sailing ship is tied up is still in the same general area as today’s waterfront at Port Macquarie. St Thomas’s Church, seen on the top of the hill at the right, was the church where the Innes family worshipped on Sundays. An Aboriginal family can be seen fishing on the sand bar at the far left of the painting. The smoke seen rising in the background may have been from a bushfire or the traditional Aboriginal practice of setting fire to vegetation to create fresh growth that would attract kangaroos and other food sources. But it is more likely to have been from settlers clearing and burning vegetation to make way for farms. Annabella Boswell certainly describes this taking place on the Lake Innes estate.

Port Macquarie, on the mouth of the Hastings River, was established as a penal settlement in 1821, replacing Newcastle as the destination for re-offending convicts. At the time its isolation was absolute. But even the respectable Walter Rotton – brother of John, who we met on the Lusitania some years before, and who travelled from Hobart to Sydney with the Campbell family in 1822 – served time there. Caught and convicted of embezzling his employer in Sydney, Walter Rotton was sentenced to 7 years and arrived in Port Macquarie in December 1822. He was released in April 1824

and assigned to his brother John to work on his land grant at Singleton105. In 1830 Port Macquarie was opened up to free settlers, its function as a penal settlement being largely superseded by the new settlement at Moreton Bay. But some convicts, including invalids and chain gangs building roads, remained at the government establishment at Port Macquarie until it closed in 1847.

Following soon after the first convicts came the timber cutters. The lush rainforests growing on the region’s rich, red volcanic soil were full of valuable cedar and soon the port was busy with ships taking off large cargoes of timber. As timber cutters encroached on land further up the Hastings River, conflict with the Indigenous occupants – the Birpai people – escalated. Spearings of timber cutters (and escaped convicts) were followed by punitive expeditions and public hangings.

Captain (later Major) Archibald Innes106 was Commandant at Port Macquarie for a short period between late 1826 and early 1827. He then settled in Parramatta where, after recovering from his aforementioned life-threatening illness of late 1827 through early 1828, he was appointed as Magistrate and Superintendent of Police. In 1829 he married Margaret Macleay, a daughter of the then Colonial Secretary Alexander Macleay. Young Annabella and her baby sister, Margaret – then staying in Parramatta with their parents – would have been at the wedding. In 1830, by then out of the army and police force, Archibald Innes returned to Port Macquarie, having been one of the first free settlers to be granted land there. He selected 2560 acres by the side of a fresh-water lake known as ‘Burrawan’ by the Birpai traditional owners and promptly re-named it Lake Innes. On the eastern shore of the lake, between the dense subtropical rainforest to the west and the coastal tea- tree and casuarina swamps to the east, Archibald Innes began building what would eventually become the most lavish home in the region. Archibald and Margaret moved into the still modest Lake Innes House in 1831 where 5 Innes children were born from 1832, 2 dying in infancy. The house and grounds were further developed until, at the peak of its activity and productivity around 1839- 40, it reportedly resembled an English manorial estate comprising residential buildings and apartments, servants quarters, workshops, extensive flower, fruit and vegetable gardens, farms and vineyards, and a large stables complex including a coach house. A model of the homestead complex in its heyday, partly based on descriptions in Annabella Boswell’s journals and her sketch map of the house layout, can be found in the Port Macquarie Museum. It was indeed ‘quite a village’, as one visitor at the time described it (Mrs Henry Harding Parker, née Louisa Isabella McIntyre).

Lake Innes House featured bathrooms with running hot water, Wedgwood toilets and other luxurious appointments. Here Archibald and Margaret Innes hosted extravagant lunches, dinners and dances, and received a constant flow of visitors, house guests and dignitaries. Annabella records these events in detail in her Journal. Lake Innes House reflected the flamboyance and generous hospitality of the Inneses during the economic boom years of the 1830s into the early 1840s. Of course, the estate was kept running by convict and free labourers and servants which numbered up to 80 at its peak. Certainly, the Abstract of the 1841 Census shows that there were still 58 people at Lake Innes, 31 of them assigned convicts.

105 See John McGee (nd). Two and a Half Convicts. Privately published. Available from the Singleton Historical Society. 106 Information on Archibald and Margaret Innes and Lake Innes House comes from the Australian Dictionary of Biography and Ronald Howell (2010). Riches to Ruin. A Man, a Mansion and a Lake. Port Macquarie: Port Macquarie Historical Society.

Archibald Innes had done well in the 1830s from his various agricultural, pastoral and commercial pursuits, and from government contracts to supply food to officials, soldiers and convicts from his growing number of land holdings in the Hastings, New England and Macleay districts. Today’s town of Glen Innes is situated on one of Archibald Innes’s properties. Of course, being married into the influential Macleay family no doubt helped in the growth of Archibald’s wealth and influence. But a confluence of events and developments saw Archibald’s fortunes take a turn for the worse in the 1840s. First, his father-in-law Alexander Macleay retired as Colonial Secretary in 1837 at the same time that a devastating 2-year drought began in the colony, impacting badly on Archibald’s agricultural and pastoral enterprises. The end of the convict transportation system in 1840 created a subsequent shortage of free labour. Landholders had to reduce the number of workers and pay for their services. Finally, the catastrophic economic depression which began in the early 1840s saw many previously wealthy people become insolvent or bankrupt. Although it is unclear if Archibald Innes was one of these, he was certainly in deep financial trouble and was forced to seek government employment. After several appointments he eventually became police magistrate at Newcastle where he died in August 1857. After Archibald’s death, Margaret Innes moved back to Lake Innes House where she died in September 1858. Annabella’s mother Lorn cared for Margaret in her final months.

It was into the early days of Archibald’s and Port Macquarie’s decline that 16 year old Annabella, her mother, sister and the table came to live in January 1843. Even so, life was certainly grander at Lake Innes House than at their much more modest home at Glen Alice. Lake Innes House was still luxurious, the estate was still functioning as it had been in 1839, though with a greatly reduced workforce, and Archibald at this stage was still keeping his head above water financially. But as Annabella’s Journal progresses towards 1848, the effects of the economic depression and downturn in Archibald’s fortunes become palpable. As time goes on there are less and less visitors to Lake Innes House and Port Macquarie becomes “almost deserted” as the government establishment is closed down and friends and families move out. In 1849 – after Annabella and her family had left Lake Innes House – there were “very few” servants left, according to her cousin Eliza Innes; “no servants” at all, according to her aunt Margaret107. With the settlement in decline the regular steamship service was soon discontinued making travel to and from Port Macquarie difficult, Morpeth and Newcastle having become the main ports for shipping out wool and grain from New England. Port Macquarie had always been hindered in its ambition to be the port serving the New

107 From unpublished letters dated April 1849 to Annabella Boswell from Eliza and Margaret Innes, held at the Port Macquarie Museum.

England region by the treacherous sand bar that lay at the entry to the harbour. The bar often stopped ships entering and leaving the port, sometimes for weeks, and many came to grief on it.

But let’s start out on that bright, sparkling Sunday morning in January 1843 when all this was yet to come and Annabella and her family arrived in Port Macquarie on the Maitland. After crossing the bar and landing at the wharf, Annabella, her mother and sister were taken to Lake Innes House – an easy journey (in dry weather) of some 11 kms on a flat road – in a carriage driven by her uncle Archibald. She tells us it took an hour to get to the entrance gate of the estate. Arriving at the house she saw “the lake, calm and bright in the glad sunshine. It was a lovely scene, and often as I have looked on it since with admiration, it never seemed fairer to me than it did on that day”108. The table would have followed in a cart some time later.

Amongst the materials kept in the Port Macquarie Library relating to investigations and excavations at the Lake Innes Estate is a map dated c1840 showing a road from the town towards the Innes estate. This may be close to the route of today’s road to Wauchope: Lake Road and John Oxley Drive/Oxley Highway (the B56 in the map above, running above the lake). The road into the estate is now grown over – the heritage-listed ruins of Lake Innes House now located within a nature reserve – though another site map shows the probable road route through the estate to the house. This may approximate the Ruins Way today, which ends at a walking track leading to the ruins site. Nowadays the general public can only access the ruins by this walking track on guided tours conducted by the NSW National Parks & Wildlife Service.

Lake Innes House, Port Macquarie, 1839 oil painting. Source: Wikipedia. The lake can be seen in the background along with 2 planted Norfolk Island Pines which were imported from Norfolk Island. Norfolk Island Pines are now ubiquitous in Port Macquarie.

When Annabella Boswell and her family arrived at Lake Innes House in 1843 she found it had been added to and the grounds expanded since their last visit in 1839. The house now consisted of 22 apartments plus a separate ‘bachelor’s hall’ of 3 good bedrooms and a sitting room. A new addition had a second storey comprising a school room and other rooms, one of which was Annabella’s

108 Boswell, Journal, p.61.

bedroom. This building was surmounted by a small square room which Annabella called the “lookout” because the upper half of each side was made of glass, affording a wide view in all directions. Perhaps the “lookout” is the turret in the image above. The table may have been put in the school room – for Annabella tells us in a journal entry dated mid-1843 that she went there to finish writing some letters – or maybe it was in her bedroom. In any event, we can imagine a now maturing Annabella sitting at the table preparing her school lessons, continuing her prodigious correspondence, painting her wildflower portraits and of course making entries in her journal.

Half of Annabella Boswell’s Journal is taken up with her life in Port Macquarie. She tells us that her daily routine for the next 4 years consisted of morning school lessons in the school room with her younger sister and 3 cousins under the tutelage of her aunt Margaret109, the governess having left. As the years passed and Annabella moved into her late teens, she assisted the younger children in their lessons. Annabella would go on to become tutor for the younger children in the various households in which she lived before she married. In the afternoons Annabella’s mother Lorn took over supervising the children’s activities. These included horse-riding, walking, fishing and rowing (or being rowed) around the lake; tending the garden, pets and the poultry; making jams and preserves; sewing, reading, practicing guitar and the piano; and gathering flowers for the house. Annabella tells us that they often went to the ocean beach about 2 miles from the house (the 9 km long Lighthouse Beach) where they galloped their horses along the sand and swam. Once, Annabella, her mother and cousin Eliza nearly drowned in the treacherous surf.

These everyday activities at Lake Innes House were punctuated by visits from friends and family, visits to people in the area or further afield, dances, weddings, celebrations of birthdays, Halloween, St Andrews Day, Christmas and New Year, and dinner parties followed by after-dinner music and dancing. Apart from the near-drowning, the standout events Annabella recorded in her journal over the 5 years she spent at Lake Innes House were the appearance of the great comet of March 1843 (which was the occasion for astronomy lessons from her aunt Margaret), Margaret Innes’s father Alexander Macleay’s visit as he campaigned to become the representative for the Port Macquarie area in the New South Wales Legislative Council election of July 1843, and the visit by the governor Sir Charles Fitzroy and his wife in March 1847.

The sight of a steamer passing Lake Innes House on its way from Sydney to Port Macquarie always created expectation and excitement for it might bring a visitor but certainly brought the mail, parcels, books and the latest newspapers and magazines, and supplies for the house and its occupants. One of the letters Annabella received was from her maternal aunt Annabella Ranken (née Campbell) – then living at Glen Logan on the Lachlan River in southern New South Wales – describing the devastating flood there in October 1844. Annabella Ranken had to flee the homestead on foot with 5 boys aged under 6 as the waters rose. The family returned to the swamped homestead to find everything ruined. The significance of this event is that Annabella Boswell’s future husband, Patrick Boswell, was then staying at Glen Logan and helped in the evacuation of people and livestock to higher ground.

109 Margaret was a more than capable teacher. She was one of 6 daughters of the Colonial Secretary, Alexander Macleay (a Scot and renowned entomologist), who came to Australia with him in 1826. The Macleay sisters were, unusually for the time, highly educated and young Annabella sometimes stayed with the Macleay family while she was at school in Sydney in 1834. I believe it was the Macleay family’s influence on Annabella that led to her strong lifelong commitment to education.

The Indigenous people still living around Burrawan (Lake Innes) make fleeting appearances in Annabella Boswell’s Journal, but what do we know of them and how they lived? Then a fresh-water lake, Burrawan would have been a rich source of food for the Birpai people, teeming with fish and water birds, and attracting kangaroos and other animals seeking fresh water. From Annabella’s account, ‘natives’ were still living on the estate or passing through, and continued their traditional practice of ‘firing’ the grass to create new growth that would attract kangaroos. Annabella reports an “immense fire” on the lake when the ‘natives’ set the reeds on fire and estate workers had to hurriedly clear a space around the boathouse to save it from the conflagration. In her Recollections of Some Australian Blacks, Annabella tells us that she got to know two local Indigenous people, Murrigat and his ‘gin’ Ellen, who brought fish and occasionally wild duck and wood pigeons to the house. She describes seeing women and children on the beach digging for cockles and of coming across fishing parties at ‘Cati Creek’, and watching as Murrigat made a canoe by the side of the lake. It seems that local Aboriginal people were paid for their labour, for instance rowing travellers across the Hastings River at Blackman’s Point.

The Birpai people living on the Innes estate are most visible in Annabella’s Journal in her account of Alexander Macleay’s visit during the Legislative Council election campaign of July 1843. Annabella reports Macleay arriving in Port Macquarie on the Maitland which was festooned in pink, Macleay’s colour. Later, as Macleay’s party left Lake Innes House for town on election day, they were met at the gate by a group of ‘natives’ – profusely decorated with pink calico and streamers – who watched the similarly pink-festooned procession of the candidate and his supporters pass by. Macleay’s party returned to the house for lunch, after which everyone went out on to the lawn to find around 20 ‘natives’ dancing to the bagpipes being played by the Innes’s Scottish piper. The ‘natives’ then sat and watched as the whole party danced reels on the lawn while the piper marched up and down with his pink-decorated bagpipes. Even though this may sound like an easy accommodation between the new settlers and the original Indigenous occupants of the estate, Annabella tells us in her Recollections of Some Australian Blacks that the ‘natives’ were not encouraged around the house.

Annabella turned 21 at Lake Innes House on 16th September 1847 and marriage was probably on everyone’s minds. Certainly, we learn from Annabella that her mother Lorn had been approached by at least one suitor but nothing came of it.

Annabella Boswell’s Journal ends abruptly in late 1848 when she, her sister and mother are about to sail for Sydney to visit various family members, little knowing she would never return to Lake Innes House to live, though she visited. So where were Annabella, her mother and sister in the years following 1848? This is important for it was during this time that Annabella met her future husband, Patrick Boswell.

The table stays in Port Macquarie while Annabella wanders

Annabella Boswell’s account of the years 1848-1851 is the subject of a separate journal, Further Recollections of My Early Days in Australia. I have supplemented the information in this journal with

information from other sources, including Early Recollections and Gleanings, from an Old Journal110, Annabella’s unpublished 1905 manuscript provided to me by John Boswell, and Annabella’s unpublished journals, manuscripts and letters post-1851 held in the Port Macquarie Museum111. Annabella seems to have re-written accounts of the same events at various times in her life. The collated information enabled me to piece together a picture of Annabella and the table’s life from 1848 to 1865, when Annabella moved to Scotland with her husband and children.

We know that after they left Port Macquarie on 2nd September 1848 bound for Sydney on the schooner Mary Ann (steamships no longer calling at Port Macquarie), Annabella, her mother and sister travelled around staying with family and friends. Most important was their 7 month sojourn in 1849 at Lorn’s old friends George and Janet Ranken’s new property Saltram at Bathurst. This involved another trip over the Blue Mountains, which Annabella tells us she dreaded, but it was here that she met her future husband, Patrick Boswell.

Patrick Charles Boswell was a well-to-do Scottish immigrant from Ayrshire who arrived in Australia in 1839. Patrick was a friend of George Ranken, another Ayrshireman. It was Patrick Boswell’s kinsman, Sir Alexander Boswell of Auchinleck (a place which we will hear more of later), who had assisted George Ranken as well as Patrick to immigrate to Australia112. Patrick regularly visited the Rankens at Bathurst and seems to have become a particular friend of George Ranken’s younger brother, Arthur, who, as previously noted, had in 1837 married Annabella Campbell, sister of Lorn and Isabella. Soon after Patrick Boswell arrived in Australia, he was recorded as being on a property next to Arthur Ranken’s station Glen Logan on the Lachlan River in southern New South Wales. But Patrick did not prosper and in October 1844 was hit by the devastating flood there, as were his neighbours the Rankens. This was the flood that Annabella Ranken reported in her above-mentioned letter to her niece Annabella Boswell (then Innes) when she was at Port Macquarie. Patrick Boswell later wrote a harrowing account of the flood and evacuations which is reproduced in Annabella Boswell’s Early Recollections and Gleanings, from an Old Journal. Patrick was still living on the Lachlan River in 1849 when he visited George and Janet Ranken at Bathurst. Annabella and her sister Margaret had also just recently arrived at the Rankens’ after having stayed for 6 months with their aunt Barbara Innes at Cowpastures (Camden). Annabella notes in her journal: “23 May 1849. A day to be remembered – Mr Boswell arrived from the Lachlan this evening. He is somehow not at all like what we expected him to be”113. Patrick Boswell continued to travel between the Lachlan River and Bathurst (which is a considerable distance) over the next few months and it is clear that a courtship is developing.

At the same time it is also clear that Annabella’s sister Margaret is being courted by ‘Mr Hamilton’ – Hugh Hamilton, another Ayrshireman and friend of Patrick Boswell who, if you remember, Janet Ranken brought with her on a visit to Lorn at Parramatta in 1841 when the Rankens returned from their ill-fated trip to Scotland. Boswell and Hamilton regularly visit Saltram together. On one of the men’s return visits to Bathurst, Annabella records walking up and down the verandah with Mr

110 Annabella Boswell (c1900). Early Recollections and Gleanings from an Old Journal also known as Some Recollections of My Early Days: Written at Different Periods. Privately published. Copies in Mitchell Library, State Library of NSW. 111 Sources include Jack Giblett (1977). Letters to Patrick Boswell, Husband of Annabella Boswell. Occasional Paper No.1. Port Macquarie: Hastings District Historical Society. 112 Ranken, op.cit., pp.9-10. 113 Boswell, Further Recollections of My Early Days in Australia, p.34.

Boswell until she was tired and of finding Boswell “most amusing, and well informed, but really he and Mr Hamilton and cousin Tom are too much in the house at the same time – they never cease laughing”114. In November 1849, Lorn, Annabella and Margaret left Bathurst to go and stay with Arthur and Annabella Ranken at St Clair near Singleton in the Hunter Valley115. Soon after Christmas 1849, Annabella tells us, ‘Mr Hamilton’ turned up at St Clair and he and Margaret announced their engagement. We learn that they had already become secretly engaged the August before at Bathurst, and that Annabella was upset that neither she nor her mother had been told. After a short visit to Lake Innes House in April-June 1850 Annabella returned to St Clair to take up tutoring her young Ranken cousins, while her sister Margaret and mother Lorn stayed on at Port Macquarie. Annabella stayed some 2 years at St Clair but in late 1851 the Innes family was reunited in Sydney. From then on they were living in Parramatta. Certainly we know that in December 1853, when Annabella visited Lake Innes House for her cousin Gordina Innes’s wedding, she and her mother were still living at Parramatta.

Patrick Boswell seemed to have dropped out of the picture after meeting Annabella at Bathurst in 1849, something I didn’t understand until I learnt from one of the documents in the Port Macquarie Museum that Patrick went back to Scotland in 1850 and stayed there for 3 years. I would imagine that Annabella and Patrick were corresponding during this period. Patrick arrived back in Australia just in time to be best man at his friend Hugh Hamilton’s marriage to Annabella’s sister Margaret on 30th August 1853 at St Johns Church, Parramatta. Annabella was a bridesmaid. Patrick and Annabella probably recommenced their courtship soon after the wedding.

On returning to Australia in 1853, Boswell had no desire to return to bush life and so he joined the Bank of New South Wales. A year later he was appointed as manager of the Newcastle branch around about the same time or soon after Archibald Innes was appointed police magistrate there. In a letter to Annabella dated 29th April 1854 held at the Port Macquarie Museum, her sister Margaret Hamilton tells her that “Mr Boswell seems quite delighted at the prospect of going to Newcastle”116. Patrick, Archibald and Archibald’s family, who had joined Archibald in Newcastle, became very friendly. At some point after Margaret’s wedding in 1853, Archibald invited Lorn and Annabella to join him in Newcastle which they did soon after Christmas 1854. Almost all the members of the household at Lake Innes House were reunited after 6 years. Once in Newcastle, Annabella tells us, she saw Boswell daily and this grew into a romance.

Annabella Innes (then age 29) married Patrick Boswell (then age 40) on 17th June 1856 at Christ Church Cathedral, Newcastle. The Hamiltons attended the wedding and probably stayed with the Inneses/Boswells where Margaret gave birth to her second child soon after on 1st July.

All this time the table had remained at Lake Innes House and then at another unknown location in Port Macquarie. In her unpublished 1905 manuscript, provided to me by John Boswell, Annabella

114 Ibid, p.40. ‘Tom’ is presumably George and Janet Ranken’s son, Thomas, and is therefore not Annabella’s cousin. Since 1843, the Rankens had lost 3 more children, making 6 in all. Three, including Tom, survived. 115 Arthur Ranken, like many others through the 1840s, had been affected by the drought and economic downturn and, on top of that, the devastating 1844 Lachlan River flood. He sold Glen Logan and apparently managed St Clair for the Australian Agricultural Company until he bought a property, Lockyersleigh, near Goulburn NSW. This journey from Bathurst was the one noted previously which had prompted Annabella’s comment about the precipitous descent down Lapstone Hill in the Blue Mountains. 116 Unpublished letter held in Port Macquarie Museum archive.

tells us that the table was lost for 11 years from 1851. It had been sent from Lake Innes House to Port Macquarie to be shipped to Sydney with some furniture that had been stored there but by mistake had instead been sent to a cottage at Port Macquarie which was being furnished from the stores117. She tells us that a clergyman visiting this cottage many years later recognised the table by its “Drop Handles” and “peculiar make” and it was returned to Annabella in 1862 with her letters and drawings still in its “Drop Drawer”. The striking thing about this account is that the table was obviously of great value to Annabella for she tells us that there had been many efforts to trace it when it became lost and that her husband “had it done up, and a Drop Plate [the plaque, presumably] inserted so as to identify it in future”. Annabella probably never let the table out of her sight again.

Newcastle: the table’s final home in Australia

In an unpublished journal held at the Port Macquarie Museum, Annabella Boswell tells us that she began her married life at ‘Watt St’ – the premises of the Bank of New South Wales in Newcastle – and that she lived there very happily for the next 9 years.

Annabella records that the Watt Street house was ‘large’ and ‘handsome’:

The entrance-hall was so large that a sort of wooden porch was made inside the front door, and the rooms to the left fitted up as a Bank and private office. From the inner hall rose a handsome cedar stair-case with a good landing above, and a large drawing-room on either side; these all opened into a long, wide balcony. In the front garden two large date trees, I believe the oldest and finest in the Colony; one of them had fruit every year, but not very good though sufficiently so to attract all the children in the neighbourhood.

Left: Home of the Boswell family 1856 to 1865 (and the table from 1862) at the Bank of New South Wales building (now demolished), Watt Street, Newcastle. Photo taken 1853 at the time the Bank acquired it. Image is in item A5094(i) located in University of Newcastle Cultural Collections.

Source: Coal River Working Party https://coalriver.wordpress.co m/2014/04/08/9wattst- tattersalls/

117 This tells us that Lorn had decided to permanently settle back in Sydney or thereabouts, Lake Innes House being no longer viable. Ranken, op.cit., p.38 also tells us that 2 of George and Janet Ranken’s sons lived with Lorn in Parramatta at this time while they attended the King’s School, and 5 of Arthur and Annabella Ranken’s boys also lived there. Collectively they were known as ‘The Seven Devils’.

Newcastle in the 1850s was beginning to develop as a major port, shipping out coal from the Hunter Valley mines for the growing steamship fleet and, increasingly, the export market. As a banker, Patrick Boswell was in the thick of Newcastle’s economic development at this time. Newcastle received a major boost on 30th March 1857 with the opening of the first stage of the Great Northern Railway, between Newcastle and East Maitland. Patrick Boswell and Archibald Innes (then police magistrate in Newcastle) attended a lavish celebratory dinner in Newcastle that evening where Patrick and other civic leaders led the call for a major upgrade to the port and harbour to allow for the direct export of the Hunter Valley’s coal (Maitland Mercury and Hunter River General Advertiser Thursday 2nd April 1857, p.4). The port redevelopment began during the Boswells’ time in Newcastle. Already mortally ill at the time of the celebratory dinner, Archibald Innes died 5 months later in August 1857. I imagine that Annabella would have been at her beloved uncle Archibald’s bedside if she was not away from Newcastle at the time. Lorn could have been there too, and Archibald’s wife Margaret certainly. Remember that it was Lorn who nursed Archibald through his near-fatal illness in 1827-8 and they were very close thereafter.

The year 1857 was also eventful on the home front with Annabella giving birth in May to the first of her 4 children born in the Watt Street home. I imagine that Annabella soon comfortably settled into her new role as mother and wife of a respected civic leader. From the valedictory address given on the occasion of the Boswells’ departure from Newcastle in February 1865, it seems that Annabella immersed herself in civic duties and became a highly respected and admired community leader. Given her busy life during this period, it is perhaps not surprising that there doesn’t seem to be any journal record of her time in Newcastle118.

As we learnt previously, the table was returned to Annabella sometime in 1862. We don’t know whether this was before or after the great Newcastle fire of July 1862. The fire started in the Steam Packet Hotel (which was totally destroyed) and adjoining buildings, such as the bank, were also at risk. The Newcastle Chronicle and Hunter River District News of 16th July 1862 reported that the bank’s roof had caught fire and that the bank’s furniture was removed and carried across the street. Patrick Boswell, in a letter to the Editor of the same newspaper a few days later, confirmed that the bank had caught fire several times and thanked those who helped remove the furniture, which he reported was not much damaged. The table would have been amongst this furniture if it was back with Annabella by then.

Annabella’s recollection of the fire, recorded in an unpublished manuscript held at the Port Macquarie Museum, was far less dramatic. She tells us that she was woken up and that the heat and glare were fierce from the verandah but that their building was in no immediate danger. Indeed, she tells us that she watched the fire from the balcony until dawn, and Patrick watched the fire from outside. But this doesn’t square with the newspaper account above, indicating perhaps that

118 Note, however, that only part of the Annabella Boswell archive in the Port Macquarie Museum has been transcribed. There may be more information there that could shed light on her years in Newcastle and other places. In an unpublished journal held at the Museum, Annabella comments amusingly on her perhaps surprising new position in life: “I used to think it very ‘In fra dig’ [beneath dignity] to have anything to do with a Bank, and that there was much merit in the old song ‘A Squatters life a pleasure is, etc.’ but my husband hated a squatter’s life, and after eleven years experience of it gave it up for a life in town, and office work. It is still a mystery to me how he converted me to his views”.

Annabella’s recollection of the fire was written some time later. At the time of the fire Annabella had 3 young children, the youngest only 5 months old. I imagine it would have been a terrifying experience.

After the table and Annabella were reunited at Watt Street and it was done up and the plaque seemingly affixed at that point, I imagine Annabella would have resumed writing her correspondence at the table, if not making journal entries so assiduously. But Annabella’s writings over the period from 1862 to early 1865 would also have turned more to her civic duties and concerns. Perhaps her older children started writing at the table as she had done at their age.

Patrick Boswell inherited the family estate, Garrallan, at Old Cumnock, Ayrshire, after his older brother died, and the Boswells prepared to move to Scotland in early 1865. The Newcastle Chronicle and Hunter River District News advertised the sale by auction on 9th February 1865, at the bank’s premises, of “The whole of [Mr Boswell’s] Magnificent and Substantial Household Furniture and effects”. Of course, this did not include the table. In the middle of the preparations for the move to Scotland, on 16th January 1865 Annabella gave birth to her 4th child.

The table’s final voyage

The Newcastle Chronicle and Hunter River District News of 15th February 1865 reproduced a valedictory address presented at a function held on Saturday 11th February in honour of Patrick and Annabella Boswell. It was signed by 124 ‘most respectable’ inhabitants of Newcastle, on the occasion of the family’s imminent departure for Scotland. In the first 9 years of their married life, Patrick and Annabella had become highly respected and admired civic and community leaders.

Annabella was not present at the valedictory address in Newcastle and I did not know why until I read Annabella’s unpublished account of their voyage to London, held at the Port Macquarie Museum, which she wrote in 1905 from journal notes. In it, Annabella tells us that she and her mother Lorn had been staying with their good friends at Lugar Brae in Sydney for the 2 weeks prior to departure119. This means that Annabella was in Sydney at the time of the valedictory address in Newcastle. In Sydney, she and her mother and children were visited by friends and family, some of whom had travelled a great distance, to say ‘au revoir’ if not ‘goodbye’. These visitors included her cousin Eliza (Innes) who was now married and living in Sydney, ‘uncle Dalmahoy’ (Campbell) and his wife who had travelled from Melbourne, and her long lost maternal aunt ‘Mrs Williams’ who she tells us travelled from South Australia. ‘Mrs Williams’ was Margaret Campbell, who we met on the Lusitania and who had married James Robertson in Hobart soon after arriving there. She had since remarried to William Williams. According to Annabella, Lorn had not seen her sister Margaret for over 40 years and Annabella had never even met her120.

119 According to the Dictionary of Sydney, Lugar Brae was an estate in Bronte, Sydney, which featured a 12 room stone cottage. 120 In fact there had been a rift between Margaret and some family members over her separation from her husband James Robertson in the late 1820s. The circumstances of this separation are unknown but James Robertson took the children to Scotland soon after. After the separation, and then living in Sydney, Margaret moved in with William Williams and bore him 2 children out of wedlock. They eventually married in 1835, after James Robertson died in Scotland. So outraged was John Campbell by his sister’s liaison with Williams that, in a

It’s unclear when the table travelled from Newcastle to Sydney – but most likely on a steamship – to be loaded onto the fast wooden sailing ship Duncan Dunbar along with the Boswells’ now-meagre possessions. The table could have been sent to Sydney some time before the sale of the furniture at the Watt Street home in February as the ship had been in port since December. Annabella tells us in her account of the voyage that they paid for their first class cabin on the Duncan Dunbar to be fitted out. The table could have been put into the cabin for Annabella’s use during the voyage, but then how would it have been secured against being thrown about the room? Further, she recorded that “I sit on the locker with my writing book resting on a box of toys, which, on my knee serves as a table, and brings me near our only light”. From this, I think we can assume that the table was stored below deck with other cargo.

Clipper ship Duncan Dunbar. Source: Wikipedia.

The Boswell family, servants and ‘Mrs Innes’ left Sydney on the Duncan Dunbar121 on 21st February 1865 (Sydney Morning Herald 20th February 1865, and confirmed in Annabella’s account of the voyage). At 1447 tons the Duncan Dunbar was substantially larger than the Lusitania. When I first read this newspaper notice, before I saw Annabella’s unpublished account of the voyage, I didn’t believe that ‘Mrs Innes’ could have been Lorn Innes, Annabella’s mother. Lorn (‘Mrs George Innes’) had gone to Scotland 5 years earlier in January 1860 with her other daughter Margaret, her husband Hugh Hamilton and their children on the same ship, the Duncan Dunbar:

letter to his brother Patrick Campbell dated 1833 (in Lee op.cit., p.151), he called her “despicable and depraved” and disowned her, saying “never let me see her name mentioned again”. Margaret Williams died in Albury in 1867, some 2 years after this reunion with Lorn in Sydney. 121 The Duncan Dunbar was wrecked on a reef off the coast of Brazil later that year (October 1865) while on a voyage to Australia.

Sydney Morning Herald 13th January 1860

Lorn then appeared in the 1861 Scotland Census as ‘Georgina Lorn Moreland Innes’, ‘mother-in-law’ of the head of the household, Hugh Hamilton. At the time the Hamiltons were living at Sundrum Cottage, Coylton, Ayrshire. If Lorn was aboard the Duncan Dunbar in February 1865 with the Boswells, she would have had to return to Australia sometime between the Scotland Census of 1861 and late 1864. Until I read Annabella’s account of the 1865 voyage, which confirmed that her mother was indeed with her, I thought that the likelihood of Lorn having come back to Australia was small, given that such a long voyage was not to be taken lightly in those days. Besides which, I couldn’t find her or the Hamiltons on passenger lists back to New South Wales. So I had given up trying to identify this ‘Mrs Innes’ on the Duncan Dunbar in 1865 – it certainly wasn’t Mrs Archibald Innes for she had died in 1858. But after reading Annabella’s account of the voyage, it occurred to me to expand my search for Lorn. I found a ‘Mrs G. Innes’, age 55 (Lorn was then 58, but passenger lists are often inaccurate), listed as a passenger on the Dover Castle which arrived in Melbourne from London on 18th January 1863122. ‘Mrs G Innis’ also appears in the notice of arrival of the Dover Castle in The Age (Melbourne) 19th January 1863:

Lorn landing in Melbourne would be inexplicable but for the fact that her brother, Dalmahoy Campbell, was a very successful stock and station agent there. Perhaps Dalmahoy was already unwell from the illness that would kill him a few years later and Lorn wished to see him for that reason, though he did come to Sydney farewell her in 1865. In any event, this passenger list and newspaper notice is the only evidence I can find of Lorn’s return to Australia, and we know she did return for she was on the Duncan Dunbar (again!) with the Boswells in 1865. I think we can therefore definitively say that this ‘Mrs G. Innes’ who arrived in Melbourne in January 1863 was Lorn. At some point she would have joined her daughter Annabella in Newcastle. Unfortunately, there is no mention of Lorn’s previous voyage to England and the circumstances of her return to Australia in Annabella’s account of the 1865 voyage.

As they sailed away from Sydney aboard the Duncan Dunbar on that summer’s day in February 1865, I wonder how Annabella and Lorn felt about the prospect of never coming back to Australia, which

122 Index to Unassisted Passenger Lists to Victoria 1852-1923 (Public Record Office Victoria).

Annabella tells us she had by now accepted, and if they talked about the voyage of the Lusitania. This was Annabella’s first voyage between London and Sydney but Lorn’s fourth. And I wonder if they gave a thought to the table stored below deck, the table which had accompanied Lorn from Scotland to Australia more than 40 years earlier.

Clipper ship routes – London to Australia, Australia to London. Source: Wikipedia

With a good wind behind them, clippers were the fastest ships for long sea voyages in the early days of steamships. These were limited in range by their requirement for coal and the cargo space it took up. Annabella tells us that the voyage on the Duncan Dunbar took 91 days, or around 3 months, compared to 140 for the Lusitania. The clippers from Australia to London sailed eastwards, catching the strong westerly winds in the ‘Roaring Forties’ of the southern latitudes. The route took them even further south around Cape Horn into the Atlantic Ocean. Annabella records that they sighted the Antipodes Islands (to the southeast of New Zealand) about 10 days into the voyage, which identifies the Duncan Dunbar’s route as the southernmost out of Sydney taking it around the south of New Zealand, as shown in the map above.

Annabella tells us that she only kept a fragmentary sort of journal during the voyage because of the pressing needs of her young children, keeping the cabin tidy and looking after her mother who was ill much of the time. In her account, written from these journal notes in 1905, Annabella describes her daily routine, their cabins, and the good and ample food. We learn that the Boswells sat at the captain’s table – Annabella tells us that there were 42 first-class passengers at the captain’s table when everyone was in attendance – and that Annabella sat at the captain’s left. There seemed to be a pecking order at the captain’s table with diners vying for the captain’s attention – another ‘drawing room drama on the high seas’. Thirty days out they rounded Cape Horn. Of course, icebergs were a navigational hazard this far south and Annabella records seeing these in the days before they passed around the Horn. She didn’t report encountering the treacherous weather that is common in the Drake Passage, noting only that it was very cold. Rounding the Horn was celebrated (by the first class passengers at least) with a supper of cake and mulled claret accompanied by speeches and

toasts. A month after that they ‘crossed the line’ (equator), but Annabella didn’t record any celebration for that. A month later, on 18th May, they sighted St Agnes lighthouse on the Scilly Isles off the southwest coast of England. Annabella didn’t note the Duncan Dunbar calling in at any ports along the way. Perhaps it didn’t.

From the Scilly Isles it took 5 days to reach London Docks, the disadvantage of sail in headwinds or light winds apparent in their slow progress. From the pilot boats coming to the Duncan Dunbar regularly during this time Annabella learnt of the shooting of President Lincoln on 14th April, while they were at sea near the equator. Off Plymouth they saw “six men-o-war” steaming and under full sail conveying the body of the Imperial Prince of Russia from France to St Petersburg. Patrick Boswell went ashore at Plymouth on a pilot boat and travelled ahead to London to make arrangements for the family’s arrival. At Beachy Head the Duncan Dunbar slipped backwards in the tide and a steam tug was engaged to tow them to the Thames. Annabella describes their slow passage close to the coast, passing Hastings by day and seeing the lights of Folkestone shining out of the dark night. In the early hours of Tuesday 23rd May they finally docked in London. When our table got back to the London Docks, from where it had started out for Australia some 45 years earlier, it had circumnavigated the globe. Standing on the deck of the Duncan Dunbar, Annabella was overwhelmed by the “fresh and green” trees and “bright grass” she could see along the river banks. That afternoon Patrick Boswell, his sister Jane and the rest of the welcoming party, Lorn, the Boswell family and servants, caught a train from the docks across town and then took cabs to Brompton Square (Knightsbridge) where lodgings had been arranged. Then began a whirlwind 2 weeks in London in what we would now call a state of ‘culture shock’ and tourist fatigue as she visited its major landmarks and attractions for the first time.

This is Annabella’s list of her activities in London: going shopping and visiting dressmakers; having her hair dressed in the latest fashion (which she didn’t like); calling on and being introduced to many people, and catching up with Australian friends; going to dinners and lunches; driving around Hyde Park Gardens; going to church at Brompton; visiting the British and Kensington Museums, the Turner exhibition at the National Galley and an art exhibition at the Royal Academy with its new ‘Pre- Raphaelite’ style (which she didn’t much like); going to the Opera, where she saw ‘Mario’ sing Il Travatore, and a concert by the Russian singer Madien (who didn’t impress her); having her first taste of fruit ‘ices’ (which she didn’t like); visiting the Zoological Gardens and Kew Gardens, and the Crystal Palace which she found most impressive. She tells us that the only place she didn’t visit was the Tower.

Annabella recalled being overwhelmed by sights of London, the huge variety of things for sale and the dress of the gentry and servants. She remarks:

The vastness of London did astonish me, and still does to this day, after 40 years, its poverty and its riches, but I have seen shops that have appeared as good, houses quite as comfortable, people as pretty, horses as handsome, but here there was no end of to all this. There were many Squares and Parks and miles of streets with countless shops and handsome houses, people everywhere, in fact too much of everything. That was how it all struck me …

To Garrallan

Annabella tells us in her account of the voyage and their time in London that Sunday 4th June 1865 was the last entry in her journal and that she never resumed the habit of keeping one. And so to reconstruct an account of getting from London to Ayr, Scotland, and her first year at Garrallan she relied on notes of events that interested her and her “very vivid recollection of this particular time”. Annabella’s account of the journey to Ayr, written 40 years later, is understandably very sketchy. But she tells us that they left London on 8th June and that her husband Patrick had taken a saloon carriage for the large travelling party and that they got to Ayr in one long, hot day. This indicates that they were on a train, though she doesn’t mention this. A train service from London to Ayr was certainly operating then. Was the table in a baggage car on the train or had it been sent by ship (or even road) to Ayr, along with their meagre possessions?

We know that Lorn didn’t accompany the Boswells on this journey to Ayr for Annabella tells us that Lorn had left London earlier to go to Edinburgh to be with her seriously ill sister-in-law, Elizabeth, the wife of her brother (General) John Campbell. Lorn had almost certainly been reunited with her eldest brother, who she hadn’t seen for more than 40 years, on her previous trip to Scotland in 1861 when she was living with the Hamiltons in Colyton, a short distance east of Ayr123.

From the railway station in Ayr, the travelling party drove direct to nearby Sandgate House where it seems Patrick Boswell’s mother and another sister lived. The baby born to the Boswells at Newcastle in January was christened in a service held here. The Boswells stayed at Sandgate House until they moved into Garrallan House at Cumnock, some 25 kms east of Ayr, in July 1865. Annabella recalls being delighted with her first sight of the Ayrshire countryside and of Garrallan House. She describes the short approach from the gate to the house, with young lime trees and old ash trees either side, and the wide view from the house over fields and woods to the distant hills. The grounds disappointed her somewhat, having “no flowers, no garden, no walks or little paths. On the whole it rather pleased me as offering an opportunity for future interest and Cumnock c.1890s occupation”. Source: Cumnock History Group

123 John Campbell had recently published his Narrative of Major-general John Campbell, C.B., of his Operations in the Hill Tracts of Orissa for the Suppression of Human Sacrifice and Infanticide, printed for private circulation in 1861, and A Personal Narrative of Thirteen Years' Service among the Wild Tribes of Khondistan, for the Suppression of Human Sacrifice, by Major-general John Campbell, C.B., 1864. These books are available for free download on the internet.

Garrallan House, Cumnock, Ayrshire. Source: http://www.cumnockhistorygroup.org/p laces-country-house-and-villas.html

The account of the voyage to London and journey to Scotland written by Annabella in 1905 finishes a year after the Boswells arrived in Ayr. In that first year, we find the Boswells setting up house at Garrallan, engaging servants, receiving visitors and visiting friends, family and neighbours, and attending the local fairs, events and celebrations that would be part of their lives over the following decades. We learn at the very end of Annabella’s account that Patrick’s relative, Lady Boswell of nearby Auchinleck House, approached him with a proposal to manage the Auchinleck estate, as his deceased brother had done. Annabella tells us that this proposal was accepted, and on this basis they decided to remain permanently at Garrallan. Garrallan House and grounds were then upgraded and we know that the Boswells’ final and only Scottish-born child, (Colonel) John Douglas Boswell, the grandfather of the current owner of the table, was born at Garrallan House in 1867.

During the Boswells’ time at Garrallan House, Cumnock changed from a small market town to an industrial centre of coal mines and iron works. Robert Grierson of the Cumnock History Group informs me that Patrick Boswell – as he had done in Newcastle, New South Wales – involved himself in the economic development that coal and the industrial revolution brought to this part of Scotland. Apart from his substantial landholdings and the income he earnt from his tenant farmers, Patrick also moved quickly into the ‘new economy’ of the time, coal mining, and extracted coal from his lands. This would be why Miner’s Rows (workers’ cottages), which were built near the railway and pits, were also built at Garrallan. As in all the new coal and industrial towns, working and living conditions for the miners and their families were poor. From what I learnt from the Cumnock History Group it seems that, as civic and community leaders, Patrick and Annabella Boswell were concerned to alleviate the plight of the new industrial and rural poor growing around them. For 25 years, Patrick was Chairman of the Parochial Board, the body responsible for public provision of poor relief, running the poorhouse and employing doctors to care for the sick, amongst other things. Following the Education (Scotland) Act of 1872 – which established compulsory primary education for all children – Patrick Boswell became foundation Chairman of the Parish School Board, which Annabella also involved herself in. Many of the pupils now attending school – and Annabella particularly involved herself in the school at Garrallan – would have been the children of the new industrial working class. The Boswells would have witnessed the developing industrial unrest and the Ayrshire miner’s strike of 1880. Annabella could have sat at the table to record some of these dramatic events in manuscripts yet to be transcribed or lost. By the end of the 19th century Cumnock was

almost entirely dependent on mining for employment and this remained the dominant industry in the area until the 1980s124.

Patrick Boswell died at Garrallan House in 1892, aged 76, and Annabella at age 88 in 1914, a few months after the outbreak of World War 1. They are buried in Cumnock New Cemetery, along with their son Hamilton and Annabella’s mother, Lorn Innes. At least Annabella was near to her younger sister Margaret Hamilton when she died in Ayr in 1909.

We learn a little more about the Boswells’ life in Cumnock from the 1860s until their deaths from their obituaries, reproduced on the Cumnock History Group’s website. The obituaries read like the valedictory address given for them as they left Newcastle in 1865. It seems the Boswells continued their life as they had done in Newcastle, becoming widely respected and admired civic and community leaders. Patrick was regarded as an enlightened landlord and a fair magistrate, and Annabella was again praised for her work in the community and kindness towards others. Annabella’s particular interest in the Garrallan school was noted. Annabella’s obituary tells us that this ‘Australian Lady’ had “never lost her interest in the now great and prosperous colony. The happy memories of her youthful days were never forgotten, and her reminiscences of notable people and notable events were to her intimate and personal friends, as charming as they were interesting”.

Annabella seems to have continued to be an inveterate letter-writer to the end, and several of her later letters are reproduced in Phyl Macleod’s From Bernisdale to Bairnsdale: the story of Archibald and Colina Macleod and their descendants in Australia, 1821-1994, and more are held in the Port Macquarie Museum. Apart from letters to family and friends, I imagine that Annabella would have sat at the table to write correspondence relating to her civic duties and concerns, as she did at Newcastle.

Before we follow the table to its next home let’s finish Lorn’s story, for she had shared her life and journeyed with the table from the time she was born at Kingsburgh House on the Isle of Skye in 1804 until shortly before she died. By the time she left Australia for good, Lorn had outlived her younger brothers Arthur ‘Wellington’ (died 1825), Patrick and Moore (both dying in 1854) and Charles (died 1859). Within a few years of returning to Scotland, 3 more of Lorn’s siblings in Australia died: younger brother Dalmahoy (Annabella Boswell’s “favourite uncle”) and older sister Margaret, both in 1867, followed by younger sister Isabella in 1868. As we saw earlier, her 2 older brothers, Archibald and William, had died young in the 1820s in the service of the British East India Company.

After she left Australia, Lorn seems to have lived with both daughters on and off. It appears that she lived with the Hamiltons for most of the time and that they travelled extensively, as indicated by the birthplaces of the Hamiltons’ younger children. In fact, Annabella records in her account of her first year at Garrallan that her brother-in-law, Hugh Hamilton, came home (to Ayr) and took Lorn back to Italy with him. They were away for a year before they returned. In the 1871 Channel Islands Census, we find Lorn living with the Hamiltons but now on Jersey. According to the England and Wales National Probate Calendar 1858-1966 Lorn resided with the Boswells at Cumnock prior to living at the Hamiltons’ home in Ayr, where she died in April 1877 at age 73. She is buried in the Cumnock New Cemetery with the Boswells.

124 All information about Cumnock and the Boswells’ lives there comes from Robert Grierson of the Cumnock History Group and their website: http://www.cumnockhistorygroup.org/

Lorn’s brother General Sir John Campbell died in 1878 in Edinburgh aged 77. He outlived all 12 of his siblings but for the youngest, Annabella Ranken, who died in Australia in 1904, aged 89.

Left: Dalmahoy Campbell (1808-1867). Retrieved from Ancestry.

Below: Lorn Innes (née Campbell) (1804-1877). From Griffin (ed), op.cit., p.128.

General Sir John Campbell (1801-1878). Retrieved from Ancestry.

Google map showing Ayr and the towns of Cumnock, Auchinleck and Ochiltree, the area where the table lived from 1865 until it was taken to England by John Boswell.

With the Boswell sisters at Sandgate House

With the help of the Boswell family and Bobby Grierson of the Cumnock History Group, I have pieced together a still uncertain history of the table’s companions and whereabouts following Annabella Boswell’s death in 1914.

Annabella Boswell’s Will states: “My daughters to have ‘Prince Charlie’s Table’, while they live, & failing heirs of Mine, to be left as they shall agree.”

Remarkably, none of Annabella’s 3 daughters married. Instead they lived together in Ayr until they died. I understand that their brother, John Douglas Boswell, bought Sandgate House in Ayr for his 3 sisters. This would have been the Sandgate House in which Annabella Boswell and her family stayed when they arrived in Ayr in 1865. It was then Patrick Boswell’s mother’s home.

The original Sandgate House, on Sandgate, Ayr. Home of the table from around the time of World War 1 to World War 2. Photo taken during demolition in 1952 to make way for the present Ayr Post Office

Photo courtesy of the Cumnock History Group

Bobby Grierson of the Cumnock History Group tells me that this Sandgate House was sold to the Ayr Post Office in 1936 but, because of the War, wasn’t demolished until 1952. It seems the oldest sister, Jane, died in this house in 1939 – the probate record states ‘Sandgate House, Ayr’ as her residence. Sometime after Jane’s death, the 2 remaining sisters moved to a new home at 1 Racecourse View, Ayr, which they promptly named Sandgate House. This seems now to be Hartfield House. Georgina died there in 1951 and Margaret in 1962. Margaret was the child who had been born in Newcastle, New South Wales just before the Boswells left for England on the Duncan Dunbar in 1865. She was baptised at Sandgate House soon after arriving in Scotland.

I wonder what life was like for the table while it lived with the Boswell sisters in the two Sandgate Houses? They seemed not to have left a paper trail in the form of letters and journals as their mother had done, and seemed not to have engaged themselves in civic affairs as far as we can tell125. The Boswell family’s accounts of the 3 sisters indicate that they were somewhat eccentric; they are certainly intriguing.

It has been suggested that the table may have been bequeathed by Margaret to her nephew John Patrick Douglas Boswell, father of the current owner of the table. This has yet to be confirmed. In any event, the table was for a time at Auchinleck House, John Patrick Douglas Boswell’s home.

Auchinleck House had been bought by the 3 sisters’ brother, John Douglas Boswell, in 1920. This was the estate that his father Patrick Boswell had managed for Lady Boswell. When John Douglas Boswell died in 1948 his son John Patrick Douglas Boswell inherited the estate.

Auchinleck House

Situated near the towns of Auchinleck and Ochiltree, Ayrshire, Auchinleck House was the table’s new home for a time. Auchinleck House was itself built in 1760 by biographer James Boswell’s father, Lord Auchinleck, and was inherited by James Boswell on his father’s death. And so in one of those funny twists of history, the table on which James Boswell could well have written up Flora MacDonald’s account of ‘Bonnie Prince Charlie’s’ escape while staying at Kingsburgh House with Dr Johnson in 1773 now found itself in James Boswell’s old home some 150 years later. John Boswell tells me that he recalls seeing the table in the library at Auchinleck House where, in November 1773, Lord Auchinleck (a Whig and Presbyterian) and Dr Johnson (a Tory and Anglican) had their famous argument over politics and theology. In his Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides, James Boswell records that he and Dr Johnson stayed at Auchinleck House at the end of their tour of the Hebrides and that he witnessed this argument between Dr Johnson and his father but that discretion dictated that he publicly disclose only the general themes of the argument.

125 On the other hand, their first cousin Lillias Hamilton, born in New South Wales in 1858 to Margaret and Hugh Hamilton, had an extraordinary and distinguished life as a medical doctor and writer. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lillias_Hamilton. Perhaps the Boswell sisters corresponded with their cousin Lillias at the table.

Auchinleck House, Ochiltree/Auchinleck, Ayreshire Source: http://www.landmarktrust.org.uk/search-and-book/properties/auchinleck-house-4834

Auchinleck House is still owned by the Boswell family but is in the hands of the Landmark Trust.

The table now resides with John Boswell and his family in England from where he writes his correspondence to me. In due course, John Boswell’s eldest son will inherit the table. If the table was made in England, it has come full circle and is now the closest it has ever lived to where it started its life some 275 years ago.

And so we reach the end of the table’s “many long journeys and strange adventures”, to this point in time at least.

Postscript

We have followed the table’s “many long journeys and strange adventures” through the changing networks of people, places, events and times in which it participated as its various owners’ writing (and travelling) companion. These networks and their workings became partially visible to us through letters, reports, journals, documents, images, historical records and other accounts. Following the table has taken us to: the 18th century and the failure of the Jacobite rebellion in 1745- 6, the flight of ‘Bonnie Prince Charlie’ to Skye, Kingsburgh House and the MacDonalds, James Boswell and Dr Samuel Johnson; the beginning of the Highland clearances, its long term social and economic impacts in Scotland, and the subsequent economic lure of the British colonies. The table has also taken us to: the Campbell family in the late 18th and early 19th century, initially at Kingsburgh then Appin and Australia; the systems of patronage and inheritance amongst the Scottish nobility, landed gentry and military which reproduced privilege and made such journeys and adventures possible; colonial New South Wales from the early 1820s to the mid-1860s, its exploration, agricultural and pastoral development and expansion of European settlement across the Indigenous people’s lands; the new economic, technological and social networks of industrial development and large scale coal mining in mid-19th century Newcastle and the Hunter Valley, New South Wales, and in Cumnock, Ayrshire, Scotland. Having seen the poverty and suffering of the agricultural workforce on Skye, victims of the Highland clearances a century before, the table was now witness to the realignments of class and wealth created by the industrial revolution and the emergence of a new impoverished Scottish rural and industrial working class. And the table witnessed and participated in the new formations emerging from the industrial revolution – unions, strikes, poorhouses and compulsory universal primary schooling in Scotland – as these played out in Cumnock in the later part of the 19th century. In the 20th century the table saw out the two World Wars with Annabella Boswell’s daughters, perhaps initially at Garrallan then in Sandgate House I and II in Ayr.

We saw the table being transported through these networks in time and space on water by boats, ferries, coastal and ocean sailing ships driven by manpower or the wind, and on steamships driven by engines. We saw it transported on land in carts, wagons, drays, trains and trucks, hauled by horses and bullocks or propelled by engines. We’ve circumnavigated the globe, crossing the Atlantic, Indian, Pacific and Southern Oceans, and skirted around the Cape of Good Hope and Cape Horn. We saw some of the developments in sailing and shipbuilding, road and bridge engineering and industrial age technology – and sometimes the actual labour of humans and non-humans – that made such movement and journeys possible. And now the table travels instantaneously across the same distances in virtual form through new networks created by electronic and information technology – television, the internet, digital photographs and email.

As the table participated in or was witness to all of this, it took us along with it as we followed it on its journeys and adventures. We also saw the table participating in chronicling its own story through Annabella Boswell’s writings and those of its other writing companions. We saw the table help the Campbell, Innes and Boswell families write the letters which maintained business and social connections and filial ties half way across the world. Now, John Boswell and I partake in this practice.

As we followed the table through these networks we also became aware of connections to other networks and events across time and space that became fleetingly visible to us: the American War of

Independence, the Napoleonic wars and the military ‘coup’ in New South Wales which deposed Governor Bligh; the British East India Company and its wars in India and Burma; the Portuguese slave trade; whaling and sealing in the Southern Ocean; British colonial expansion and the dispossession of Indigenous people of their lands and its redistribution to British settlers; the traditional ways of life of the Australian Indigenous people; the convict transportation system and the convict workers on whose backs Australia’s (and particular individuals’) wealth was built; networks of colonial administration and trade, and much more.

In undertaking the research for this project I have also created a network composed of already- existing connections and new connections made in the present with disparate local and family historians, historical societies and groups. This network now extends over sometimes vast distances. Much of this network is visible in the Acknowledgements which follow.

The entity that connects all these disparate networks of people, places and events across space and time, and made this particular story possible, is the table.

And now this book itself enters into the table’s story as the chronicler of its life and future travelling companion. John Boswell tells me that a copy of this book now resides in the table.

Main References

Alexander, Campbell (2014). A Family History. Privately published. https://sites.google.com/site/camalexanderfamilyhistory/ Boswell, Annabella (1987). Annabella Boswell’s Journal. North Ryde NSW and London: Angus & Robertson. Boswell, Annabella (1964, original possibly c.1911). Further Recollections of My Early Days in Australia. Port Macquarie: Hastings District Historical Society. Copy held in Mitchell Library, State Library of NSW. Boswell, Annabella (c1900). Early Recollections and Gleanings from an Old Journal also known as Some Recollections of My Early Days: Written at Different Periods. Privately published. Copies in Mitchell Library, State Library of NSW. Boswell, Annabella (1890). Recollections of Some Australian Blacks. Privately published. Copy held in Mitchell Library, State Library of NSW. Macleod, Phyl (1994). From Bernisdale to Bairnsdale: the story of Archibald and Colina Macleod and their descendants in Australia, 1821-1994. Privately published, ISBN 0 646 20030 5. Lee, Robert (1992). My Great, Great, Grandmother Margaret Campbell. Privately published.

Ranken, A. B. (1916). The Rankens of Bathurst. Sydney: S.D. Townsend & Co.

Acknowledgements

I wish to thank and acknowledge my family history buddy, Joan Crawley, who started me on this journey and accompanied me throughout, including on mad excursions on the trail of the table; John Moore, expert on Campbell family history and Bungarribee, who guided me in my early Campbell researches and continues to generously assist me and who, most importantly, brought the table to my attention and alerted me to its appearance on the Antiques Roadshow; Campbell cousin Robert Lee, for his assistance and generosity in allowing me to reproduce material from his book My Great, Great, Grandmother Margaret Campbell; my old friends and colleagues from the University of Western Sydney and elsewhere who read and gave valuable feedback on drafts the story: Peter Bansel, Penny Rossiter, Zӧe Sofoulis and Sylvia Martin; the good people of the Capertee Valley, particularly Vicki Powys (local historian, artist and road-hunter), Don Saville (of Glen Alice at the time of writing, who took us to the site of the old homestead on the property), Dott Pike (of the Capertee Progress Association, who opened communication channels for me in the Capertee Valley), Warren and Julie Owens (of the Glen Alice Community Association, who put me in touch with Don Saville), and Steven Ashurst (who kindly allowed us on to his property to see the old road and the Coco Creek campsite); historian Andy Macqueen for his help on the Capertee Valley leg of the journey; the Port Macquarie Historical Society, particularly Clive Smith, who gave me access to the transcriptions done so far of their Annabella Boswell archive, and the family history volunteers at the Port Macquarie Library; Robert Grierson, Chair, Cumnock History Group, Scotland, who provided me with photos and information about the Boswells’ lives at Garrallan; and Neil Stuart, an old comrade in battles to save the Blue Mountains environment, who joined me late in this journey and with whom I had many unexpected and pleasurable discussions on Scottish family history. Neil was interested in my project and read the early parts of the story but sadly died before it was completed.

I particularly wish to thank the table’s current owner, John Boswell, for responding to my correspondence to him via the Antiques Roadshow and then generously providing me with whatever information he had about the history of the table, including unpublished material from his great- grandmother Annabella Boswell. Without John’s generous assistance, my story of the table would have been incomplete. I therefore also owe a great debt of gratitude to the Antiques Roadshow and particularly to William Shellard for his efforts to communicate with John Boswell on my behalf.

APPENDIX 1: Scotland

Left: The Isle of Skye and the area shown in map below.

Below: Two routes from ‘Lochend’, Port Appin, to Dalmally (lower centre right), the A828/82 through Glencoe or the A828/85 through Connel. A minor road (marked in red line) connects Dalmally to Inveraray.

APPENDIX 2: The table’s travels and residences from 1822 to 1843. Sydney to Windsor (1822-1823, orange), then to Bungarribee (1823-1828, orange), over the Blue Mountains to the Capertee Valley and back again (c.1828-1841, pink, with blue indicating new Victoria Pass route back) to Parramatta (near Bungarribee) (1841- 1843) then back to Sydney and on to Port Macquarie.

APPENDIX 3: The table’s travels and residences 1843 to 1865. The table spent nearly 20 years in Port Macquarie, 8 at Lake Innes House and 11 ‘lost’ years in a cottage somewhere in Port Macquarie. It spent 3 years in Newcastle before it was shipped back to Sydney for departure to Britain in 1865.