This is a sample chapter from Peter MacFie’s book Dulcot: A Rural Fringe Community in Tasmania’s Coal River Valley.

Chapter 04: The Early Colonial History of Dulcot

People Born Before 1910 & Their Forebears

They had won’ful memories, all those old people…

Alf King, 1978

This book is a history of the incoming colonial residents of the Dulcot area born before 1910, and their ancestors, and of the dark and perplexing history of this beautiful island, and of the lives of small farmers, labourers, wives and children.

In a rare moment of self-analysis, the late Alf King had reflected upon those influences which had shaped his personality since his birth in 1894. Although talking of the people from his own childhood, the remarks also applied to the four years of conversation which we shared in the late 1970s as I was introduced to other residents and former residents and came to really know the district for the first time, despite me by then having been a resident for four years.

This book is the outcome of many enjoyable visits to Alf’s home, while his wife, Mavis, plied us with tea and cake. Mavis, who grew up in Hobart, was a ‘newcomer’ as she had only moved to Grass Tree Hill Road on their marriage in 1928. Their house was less than half a mile from where Alf was born at Swallowfields, and a few hundred yards from the home of his older brother, George King.

Alf shared stories of ghosts like “Jinglin’ Johnny”. Of tracker-men and women, of sheaf-turning, and hay-stack building, of ‘Hobart Town Jack’, the Grass Tree Hill Sports and the Ploughing Matches, his Grandfather who’d got into strife with the turbulent Mark Jeffrey in 1855, and Alf’s quarrelsome Aunt Johanna, who had lived in the Old Mud School building and loved animals but not her neighbours, of the Richmond coach and the Derwent River without a bridge, with Hobart – still called Hobart Town – then so far away.

Over-riding all of this was the wit, wisdom and recollections of my new friends. By using old newspapers and archival records (all this being before Trove), their memories were cross-referenced and proved remarkably accurate, especially considering the denial of folk history within Tasmania, a destructive effect of the embarrassment of having convict ancestors in those days.

Alf and I also walked over some of these once-familiar places where his forebears had lived and where he had worked.

These experiences are part of an unwritten History of Tasmania. There were no books telling how a mother of eight children milked 14 cows, fed turkeys, supervised the cultivation of vegetables, made bread, butter, sewed and darned, and loved her children and her equally hard-working husband, or how a single mother reared a child in days before social services; how a father and family coped with the death of a wife and mother; what amused people, how strong men needed to be, and how energetic their children had to be.

A picture of the colonial Richmond district emerged, with its farms and farmhands and their families. Bounded by neighbouring Sorell, Jerusalem (Colebrook), and Cambridge, and including the settlements and villages such as Dulcot, Enfield and old Campania. This is a record of the life of these small communities before 1914.

The district’s European antiquity also emerged; not only did the farming methods and property ownership reflect an earlier period, but the social relationships typified older and more rigid attitudes and class distinctions. ‘Like something out of Jane Eyre’, was how an English-born First World War war-bride found it on arriving to live near Richmond in 1920.

The social shape of the Coal River Valley

Here was a district, 14 miles from Hobart, where Richmond was once a major town of the Georgian colonial era. A rural landscape whose social and physical structure had barely changed in the 130 years since the Indigenous residents had been forcibly disinherited from their carefully managed lands that the incomers so greatly valued.

Unchanged also was the distribution of arable land, divided into large holdings on the gentle fertile slopes of the river valleys, and the small holdings on the drier, steeper, more rocky, less fertile surrounding hills.

Both types of property were prone to the market fluctuations of an economy geared to Britain’s industrial needs, and the boom-and-bust prices of the ‘mother’ of the colony. Distribution of land in the colony, based firstly on the export of grain and then wool, resulted in the granting of large estates to settlers with capital, and with an economy reliant upon virtually-free prisoner labour followed by the very poorly paid emancipists. The inheritance within families of a number of these larger grants down into the 1950s was another notable characteristic of the Richmond district.

After a boom period in the 1820s and 1830s, when the Pittwater and Coal River areas around Richmond grew enough crops to supply Sydney with wheat and potatoes, the district stagnated economically until the 1880s, with a short interlude of prosperity induced by the mainland gold rushes in the 1850s.

In the 1880s a boost to the island’s economy was given by the new ability to export chilled fruit and dairy products to Europe; apricots, apples, pears and small fruits were planted by big and small landowners but they had a high labour requirement and prisoners were no longer available for hire.

A Place to Live

The early land grant system in all phases severely discriminated against those without capital. In particular, the allocation of large land grants did not include nearby housing or small holdings for the required farm-labourers and their families. Nor did that most English of traditions, the village common, get promoted into practice or law as a protection for the small householder and the disadvantaged. Legal pathways across country were not formalised either.

The very necessary workforce had to live where they could, on farms without tenure, on small, unviable and drought-prone blocks, or in settlements such as Dulcot, Risdon, Grass Tree Hill (Shelstone), Cambridge, Enfield, Beaumont and later Campania village. These few planned villages were set along small creeks which only ran for part of the year, so accessible water was a big limitation in this drought-prone area.

Dulcot, surveyed as a settlement with small allotments adjacent to its occasional creek, is on a barren hillside when compared to the fertile flats below. The blocks were mostly of 1 acre, 60 surveyed one-acre blocks and 13 more along the creek of varying sizes, with some people acquiring more than one of the lots. All allotments in this area, whether in surveyed settlements or on the margins of the larger land grants, were located on the mudstone slopes of the Meehan Range, above the darker and more fertile soils of the Coal River valley and Pittwater.

Other smallholders became tenants on the edges of the larger estates, renting or buying a few acres of unwanted second or third-class land to build a hut and grow some food. From here, they walked or cycled to work on the host farms as their small plots could not maintain a horse. Farmhands who rented cottages while working on the same farm were especially vulnerable, as a change of job meant being left homeless. This was a common feature of the life of the farmhands in the Dulcot district.

Landless workers squatted on private land, along with itinerant and elderly homeless folk known as tracker-men and tracker-women who camped in the bush in makeshift huts (or under their cart if they had one). They were treated with suspicion by landowners big and small. One such camp at Dulcot was still known locally as ‘Tinkers Corner’ in the 1970s.

Second Generation Families

A notable exception to the above pattern in the Coal River area was the purchase of large properties post-1850 by some second-generation families, descended from the earlier small farmers. Many of these were Catholics from an upsurge in convicted Irish migration to Tasmania during the 1840s probation system, or skilled but poor free Protestant assisted migrants who included former soldiers.

The ability of some second-generation descendants of the 1840s arrivals to purchase properties was mainly due to changes in fortune, hard work and communal support for families in times of hardship. Good fortune through inheritance or inter-marriage also played an essential part.

The Influence of Religion

Unlike the wealthier early Anglican landholders, the small farmers in the Catholic and non-conformist communities were generally reluctant to go into debt to purchase farms, relying on accumulated savings and good seasons, or good luck.

Such was apparently the case with Richard Hanslow I and James Hanslow I who acquired Summer Hill and Greenfields respectively in the 1850s when land prices slumped with the Victorian gold rush, and the Mannings, who purchased land at Dulcot in the 1880s. (Rumours abounded that the Hanslows were more successful in their own foray to the Victorian goldfields than they ever admitted!)

The many Catholic families gave a contrasting character to the district, with an apparently much more egalitarian and caring attitude for the less well-off in the district, especially for those of the same flock. They have had a long-term impact on the valley as the surviving descendants of 19th century farmers give the district much of its more recent character.

A characteristic of the district outside the Catholic or small farmer communities (with some notable exceptions) was a paternalism which cared, if at all, with condescension. A dependency was observable between worker and landlord. One landowner near Richmond proudly told of their ‘generosity’ in turning a ‘blind-eye’ to the occasional missing sheep during hard times, and of permitting locals to shoot game on their farm, despite the game animals often being in plague proportions and in need of active control measures.

Some of the early speculators in estates, such as the two Lord families and the Birches and Reads, and partners James Stynes and Richard Troy, left the district. Other early grantees stayed, along with many of the farmhands, fringe farmers, and the residents of Richmond, both farmhands and tradesmen. They inter-married generally to keep a rigid and structured social pattern that was not necessarily visible to outsiders. However, most of their children were forced to leave the district permanently, or to seek seasonal or mining work elsewhere which sometimes later allowed them to ‘come home’ but to a more affluent lifestyle.

The commercial stagnation resulted in time standing still in other aspects.

Socially, the district was little changed; architecturally, no threat was offered to the Georgian buildings by new developments. Farming methods, class relationships and community life remained dormant, and the region remained a model of an earlier European society.

Archival records reveal that the great majority of small-holders and labourers were from emancipist families, while most of the large land grants were inherited from families of the free settlers who had arrived with letters of introduction and capital in their pockets. Exceptions were those early emancipists who were fortunate in receiving worthwhile grants prior to the elitism introduced by Lieutenant Governor Arthur after his arrival in 1824.

Although “lost” in the Victorian era’s repression of the “hated stain” of convict ancestry, these varied inheritances established social networks. The most significant of these were the marriage patterns of emancipists and their descendants, who inter-married almost exclusively, with exceptions being, as would be expected, poor but free immigrants. These patterns appear to have continued in the Richmond district until the 1950s, when changing work, travel and leisure routines weakened these earlier traditions.

Fringe farmers

The fringe farmers, working small holdings amongst the hills, were based on a cash economy, labouring as skilled farmhands on the larger properties while maintaining their own acreages in any ‘spare’ time. As Saturday mornings were still worked, this meant the remainder of the weekend, and evenings, with wives, sons and daughters assisting to try to achieve self-sufficiency for the family.

These small holdings were too small to warrant mechanisation, and as the large properties adopted new techniques, the old machinery and tools were sold or given to the fringe farmers, and on their small allotments the technology of an earlier era survived.

Religious Communities

Religion played a major part in the district’s personality. Many of the fringe farmers were Catholic. The other main denominations in the Richmond area were the Congregationals and Anglicans. Significantly, there was no attempt by the Wesleyan Methodists to establish in this area.

Catholic Community

A large part of the district’s character was imparted and kept together by their Catholicism based around the Catholic Church and convent school at Richmond. The sense of social welfare as a responsibility of the Church under Bishop Willson led to the initiation by the Rev. McKernan of the secular Mud School at Dulcot and then the Cambridge school, both of which were founded before the 1885 Education Act.

A small Catholic Sunday School was run for a time at Dulcot by Mrs Blackburn for those young Catholic children who could not be expected to walk the nearly 5 miles each way to the Richmond Convent School and most were enrolled at the Mud School when it opened.

On the special occasions when small Catholic children did walk in from Dulcot to St John’s Church at Richmond, they stayed over-night with friends closer in. For the Blackburn children, this meant going “top and toe” in the same bed with children of the family at the Long House at Duckhole Rivulet, then walking the remaining 2 miles to Mass at St John’s on Sunday morning. They had the rest of Sunday to walk back home to Dulcot.

The major effect of Catholicism appears to have been in keeping a sense of values over and above the changing fortunes of the individual. The Church community offered security and support; young people were given a sense of responsibility toward one another and assured of a workplace, even if not well paid, on one of the few larger farms owned by Catholic families.

Congregational Community

The Non-Conformists, including the Murdochs and McKays, were drawn together into the Congregational chapels, one at Cambridge and the other at Richmond. There were also families from other denominations such as the Presbyterians who apparently joined the Congregational community as a ‘lesser evil’.

Both churches are now without a following.

Anglican Community

The Anglican community was based around St Luke’s Church, Richmond. One of the main differences between the Established Church and Catholic was that while the Anglicans accepted the social division caused by differences of wealth and fortune, the Catholics expected an equality and displayed an egalitarianism which differed completely in character and emphasis.

Secular Community

In the early days of European settlement, there was a pub near where the Richmond Road crossed Belbins Creek and met the Bridle Trail from over the Meehan Range which went on to Pittwater. This locality and small community near to the later-surveyed Dulcot was generally referred to as Risdon Creek as a place name rather than the waterway, and the old inn was referred to as either Risdon Inn or Risdon Creek Inn.

This inn and its successor, the Wheatsheaf Inn, for a short time became a social meeting place for all classes of society in the valley but it did not become a permanent feature of Dulcot.