Above is a photo of a scene from Govetts Leap in the Blue Mountains, demonstrating the geological formation of horizontal bands of sandstone, which I will refer to later.
This article describes the construction of Cox’s Road, the first road to cross the Blue Mountains in NSW.
The title to this article comes from P J Hartigan’s poem “Said Hanrahan”, the first line of which is “We’ll all be rooned, said Hanrahan”.
Readers would be excused for thinking that I have lost my senses. What is the connection between the poem and Cox’s Road? It is quite simple really. An overseer on the construction gang was Patrick Hanrahan and (by remarkable coincidence) he was the great great grandfather of our reader Brian Harrison!
In this article I will describe how Cox’s Road was built, and in a later article I will draw on the accounts of selected travellers who used the road. My sources of information are extracts from diaries of early explorers and travellers published in the book “Fourteen Journeys over the Blue Mountains of New South Wales” collected by the eminent historian George Mackaness.
Why build the road?
This is a portrait of William Cox (1764-1837).
In a previous article about the convict forbears of my wife’s Lenton family I explained that the Blue Mountains were, after a number of attempts by explorers, finally crossed in 1813 by Blaxland, Wentworth and Lawson. The main objective was to open up the vast country to the west of those mountains. The following year (1814) William Cox, a magistrate and private contractor (formerly an Army captain) who had previous experience of road building in the colony, was commissioned by Governor Macquarie to build a road from Emu Plains (at the foot of the Blue Mountains) to Bathurst. It was to be four metres wide and 170 kilometres long, and finally had over a dozen timber bridges.
The first 50 miles of the road rose 1000 metres through very rough terrain over the Blue Mountains, as you will see. The remaining distance westerly to Bathurst involved a mixture of high hills and undulating country dissected by rivers.
Cox, with a gang of handpicked men, completed this remarkable feat in eight months.
I had always assumed that this road was built by a mere handful of men and that it was extremely improvised. However Cox’s diary presents a quite different picture, which I will now describe to you.
The Nifty Fifty
Macquarie originally specified that the work was to be carried out by 30 men, guarded by eight soldiers. Brian Harrison has information that 13 additional men with special skills were involved, bringing the total number to about fifty. I have dubbed them “The Nifty Fifty” in memory of the film “The Dirty Dozen” where specialists were recruited for a military operation.
The men who were convicts had previously been assigned to free settlers, they were not in chains.
All of the convicts that worked on the road were granted emancipation afterwards on Cox’s recommendation to the Governor, and issued with 50 acres of land, a convict, a cow and wheat seed.
The geology on the route
Here is a photo of the Three Sisters (on the left), located at Katoomba in the Blue Mountains, showing again the sandstone layers.
There were two distinct types of geology on the route. The first part, across the Blue mountains, consisted of sedimentary sandstone in horizontal layers, as can be seen from the photo at the start of the article. Some layers comprised comparatively soft sandstone, others comprised very hard sandstone, the difference being governed by the amount of silica in the rock. In many cases there were also thin bands of extremely hard ironstone. Virtually the whole route comprised sedimentary rock overlain in some places by clay soils. There were three ascents, the first of considerable height at the start, up the Lapstone Monocline, and later two sharp climbs up Mount Twiss and Bodington Hill.
West of the Blue Mountains the rock originated from volcanic activity and comprised such rocks as basalt and granite, which came in the form of outcropping, interspersed by soils. These rocks were extremely hard.
Special skills
The additional men with special skills may have been employed previously by Cox. They included two stonemasons, a cobbler, two carpenters, sawyers, a blacksmith and possibly an assistant, a sailor who was an expert in using blocks and tackles, an explosives expert (a miner), Cox’s servant, Cox’s son Henry, and a handler to look after hunting dogs. In addition, he had some bullockies and cart drivers for his vehicles although the number is not clear because some men were employed by the Governor to take supplies from the Parramatta Depot to the work sites by horse cart and bullock waggons. Two aboriginals were taken on later, in August, to act as guides and intermediaries. They were Joe from Mulgoa and Coley from Richmond.
Although some accounts refer to a doctor being included there is no reference to such a person in Cox’s diaries.
A Military Operation
Keeping the men supplied was like a military operation, particularly for food.
With minor exceptions the food was supplied from the Parramatta Depot which operated as a distribution point for all Government operations. Typically the food was very spartan, modelled on naval stores, which were very durable. It comprised mainly of barrels of salt pork, barrels of flour, bags of biscuits and kegs of rum.
The barrels of salt pork weighed 336 pounds (the pork being cut up into 6 pound or 4 pound portions) and the same types of barrels were used for flour. This raises interesting questions of how such large items were loaded and unloaded onto carts and waggons. Presumably they were loaded by rolling them off loading ramps, and unloaded using planks. When unloaded two men could roll them along the ground.
The “biscuits” would have been similar to the notorious Royal Navy “hard tack” biscuits which were very hard.
Travelling time had to be factored into the supply operation. Although bullock waggons could carry large loads (I have heard it said that a bullock could pull its own weight), the bullocks were very slow, taking possibly three days alone to get from Parramatta to the starting point of the construction of the road at Emu Ford.
A complicating factor for bullocks was that they were not shod and had difficulty keeping their footing on steep paved sections of the new road, particularly in wet weather, requiring the help of horse teams.
Accommodation for Cox
Cox converted a horse cart to a “caravan” with a canopy, bed and lockers as his sleeping quarters.
Nutrition
Although the unrefined flour would have been very nutritious due to its high vitamin B content, on the whole the mens’ diet was quite poor, particularly considering that scurvy (from vitamin C deficiency) had been rife in the Navy from similar diets. Cox reported one case of scurvy in his work gangs, which is quite amazing considering the dietary advances that had been made previously by eminent captains like Captain Cook. It is likely that Cox had little choice because his supplies were dependent on the Government Depot.
On one particular occasion, when there was a food shortage due to delays in the supply chain (not unusual), Cox had a load of provisions sent up by his wife by cart from his farm near Windsor, comprising an immense 386 pound side of beef, 60 cabbages (which were very popular) and 12 bags of corn. He also borrowed 40 pounds of sugar from one of his overseers.
Scurvy
Here is a portrait of the famous navigator Joseph Cook.
Scurvy, the result of vitamin C deficiency, was common on sailing ships. If not treated it was painful (for instance the victim’s teeth fell out) and fatal.
It had been well known for a long time, Shakespeare used the term “scurvy knave” in his play Romeo and Juliet in the late 1500s.
In 1769, when his ship “Ëndeavour” had been fitted out for the voyage to Tahiti, Captain Cook was supplied with almost three and a half tons of sauerkraut for (according to the Admiralty) “a fair trial to be made of the efficacy of sauerkraut against the Scurvy”. This amounted to about two pounds (one kg) per person per week. The experiment proved to be successful.
Sauerkraut was made from fermented cabbage. No doubt the sour taste of this would have been mitigated by the Endeavour’s supply of 250 barrels of beer, 44 barrels of brandy and 17 barrels of rum, and for the ships’ officers and Joseph Banks’s entourage of naturalists, the milk of their goat.
To counterract the unpopularity of the sauerkraut amongst the crew Cook cleverly made a point of serving it at the officers’ table. This ensured that the crew would accept it.
Clothing
Once again the quality of clothing was governed by the Government stores. On their first day the men were issued with “slops” (shirt and trousers) and a pair of “shoes” (probably we would call them boots). Five months later they were issued with a new pair of trousers and a month later a new shirt. Despite the fact it was in the middle of winter they were issued with only one blanket.
Role of Soldiers
Contrary to what readers might expect, the role of the soldiers was to protect the workmen from attacks by aboriginals and to guard the supply depots from the depredations of aboriginals and escaped convicts.
Cox had a very matter-of-fact attitude towards the soldiers. On 26th August he nonchalantly recorded that “Ät 10 am arrived at Martins, where I found the sergeant of the party, he having died the day before. Sent to Windsor to the sergeant commanding there for a coffin and party to bury him there…Wrote to the Governor for another sergeant.”.
Tools
The tools supplied by the Government depot included crowbars, pickaxes, block and tackles, “grub hoes” (probably mattocks), sledge hammers, augers (to drill holes in rock for blasting), splitting wedges, axes, saws (including pit saws), shovels, and iron and steel for the blacksmith’s use.
The blacksmith was kept very busy keeping the tools sharp and making nails for boots, depots and bridges.
Lack of Stock Feed
Stock feed was a big problem during the construction phase across the Blue Mountains. The stony ground, poor soil and heavy scrub prevented good feed from growing. The grass that did occur was classified by Cox as being “coarse”. This particularly affected the horses, who needed better feed than the bullocks. At one stage Cox had to send his saddle horse back to his farm to recuperate.
Hunting for food
There was very little game on the Blue Mountains section, being limited to small elusive kangaroos called wallabies which were too small to be worth hunting. Further on, game was prevalent, in the form of grey kangaroos (Cox reported one kangaroo being 120 pounds), emus and fish.
Clearing for the road
The Governor’s instructions were that the road was to be 12 feet wide, and:
“The timber in forest ground to be cut down and cleared away 20 feet wide, grubbing up the stumps and filling up the holes, so that a four wheel carriage or cart may pass without difficulty or danger. In brush ground it is to be cut 20 feet wide and grubbed 12 feet wide”.
In the difficult terrain this involved a huge amount of work. Although the route was mainly through scrubby ground which needed to be cleared and levelled, there were patches of forest ground. Near Springwood Cox commented that the forest was very tall and thick: “Measured a dead tree which we felled that was 81 ft to the first branch., and a blood tree 15ft 6 inches in circumference”.
Felling such trees and digging out the stumps would have been an immense task.
The rock on the route over the Blue Mountains was mainly sandstone, but it varied in density and often had bands of very hard ironstone through it. Loose rocks could be crow-barred but bigger rocks needed to be cut with pickaxes, or winched with a block and tackle, or blasted with gunpowder (this being a last resort because gunpowder was rationed).
Further west the outcrops of rock were granite and basalt.
Drainage of the road
This photo shows a section of track near Woodford on the Blue Mountains following a sandstone rock platform, which has been levelled, with with a substantial drain cut laboriously through the rock on the right hand side”
Cross drainage
Here is a photo showing a box culvert which is of a design which was used frequently to drain water under the road on the Blue Mountains. The culvert is notable for its robust construction, particularly the heavy slab of sandstone on top.
Bridges
I mentioned earlier that over 12 bridges were built. Until I read Cox’s diary I had imagined that they would have been quite flimsy affairs, however it became obvious to me that they were designed to carry heavy bullock wagons which would have weighed (with the bullocks) as much as a modern-day truck.
The bridges were equipped with strong railings.
There are no remains of the bridges.
Bridging structure at Linden
Below is a typical retaining wall used on all sections of the road.
On two occasions Cox designed “bridges” to overcome steep terrain on the Blue Mountains. One of them spanned a steep rocky rift which ran across a very narrow ridge at Linden. It was 80 feet long, 15 foot wide at one end and 12 feet at the other end, 35 feet of it was planked and the rest was stone-filled, and it had railings. Including the addition of work needed to construct the road up a very steep adjacent ridge up Mount Twiss it took 12 men three weeks.
The narrow ridge has since been widened to take a railway and a highway, but its original condition can be gauged by Blaxland’s description of it as “a very narrow ridge not more than fifteen or twenty yards over, with a very deep rocky precipice on each side”.
Depots
Strongly built depots were constructed at strategic intervals on the Blue Mountains section. These were used to store provisions during the construction phase and later the maintenance phase. They were also used by the soldiers as living quarters.
A typical burglar-proof hut was built at Blaxland. It was 17 feet long by 12 feet wide, it had a gabled roof (meaning that the carpenters had to construct internal roof trusses), and was clad and roofed with pit sawn timber. It also had a floor and chimney, and a solid door which could be locked. An indication of the quality of the hut is that it took 8 men six days to build!
Mount York
Above is a photo of the Hartley Valley, taken from Mount York which forms the western extremity of the Blue Mountains, beyond what is now known as Mount Victoria.
It must have been a great relief to the workmen to see the open countryside to the west after spending so much time cutting through the sandstone of the Blue Mountains, and also the country held the promise of a variety of edible animals to replace the monotonous diet of mostly salt pork. But first they had to find a way down off the precipitous Mount York, which was later named Cox’s Pass.
Conclusion
In a later article I will tell you about the construction of Cox’s Pass and the road to Bathurst, plus some more information about Patrick Hanrahan.
