This John Rowley is my 3xgreat uncle. But he
is an interesting player in the early colony
Les Rowley
John Rowley (b 1797 Sydney Cove, m Sarah Pear 1819 St John's,
Paramatta, d 1873 Scone NSW)
John is of interest in that he was cinvolved in exploration
expeditions before marrying and becoming a farmer.
There ia a portrait of John Rowley in the
National Gallery
Manning Clark, A History of Australia Volume 1 (P300)
By the middle of 1819 prospects of expansion to the south-west were
opened up by the journey of Charles Throsby from the Cow Pastures to
Bathurst. Throsby, who was born at Leicester in England in 1771,
arrived in the colony as a surgeon in 1802, served at Newcastle,
took up land at Cabramatta in 1808, became agent to Sir John Jamison
in 1811, returned to England for a visit, and then returned to
Sydney where he spent some of his time exploring the Moss Vale, and
Sutton Forest district. In March 1818, he had set out with Meehan to
discover a land route to Jervis Bay. The immediate motive for the
journey of 1819 was not to discover more land, but rather a new
route to the rich and extensive plains of Bathurst, because the
communication with the western country was over a long and difficult
range of mountains, alike uncongenial to man and cattle because of
their parched and barren state.(28) Throsby set out on 25 April,
accompanied by John Rowley,
two servants, and two aboriginal guides, Cookoogong and Dual,
passing through the Cow Pastures. Fifteen days later, on 9 May, they
arrived at the hut of Lieutenant Lawson on the Campbell River within
a short distance of Bathurst. Throsby had found the country over
which he had passed rich, fertile, and luxuriant, abounding with
fine runs of water, and highly suitable to all the purposes of
pasturage and agriculture. Macquarie was so delighted that he
offered to Throsby a public tribute of acknowledgment, and one
thousand acres in any part of the new country, to John Rowley two hundred acres,
to the two servants, Joseph Wait and John Wild, one hundred acres
each, and to the two aborigines for their very meritorious services
a remuneration of clothing and bedding, appointing Cookoogong chief
of his tribe, together with a badge of distinction, and conferring
on Dual the badge of merit.(29) By July he detected a wider
significance in the discovery, believing the rich country between
the Cow Pastures and Bathurst Plains would be fully equal to meet
every increase in the population, that it would provide
opportunities for the speculative grazier and farmer, and that it
would increase intercourse with the mother country by furnishing
wool, hides and tallow.(30) By 1819 New South Wales promised to be a
land of opportunity for free settlers in the areas discovered by
Oxley in the hinterland of Port Macquarie, in the valley of the
Hunter River, in the land between Bathurst and the Cow Pastures, at
Illawarra, and Jervis Bay. All of those, except for Illawarra and
Jervis Bay, presented opportunities for the grazier, for the large
estates, for dispersion of settlement, for an economy and a way of
life clean different from a convict farm.
(28) Government and General Order of 31 May 1819; Sydney Gazette, 5
June 1819.
(29) Sydney Gazette, 5 June 1819.
(30) Macquarie to Bathurst, 19 July 1819, H.R.A., 1, 10, PP. 178-9.
Manning Clark, A History of Australia Volume 1 (P352)
In August 1817, with Hamilton Hume, John Rowley and Joseph Wild, Throsby had travelled
west from Sutton Forest towards the Wollondilly River. This journey
was worthy of note not because of its achievement, which was meagre,
or its promise, but because one of the immortals in the history of
land exploration, Hamilton Hume, began his career on this journey as
a servant to Throsby.
Also John was part of a group that opened up the Illawarra
region. Dr Joseph Davis has generously allowed us to include
an article he wrote on this Illawarra exploration. Link to Article This article
has been set up as a PDF file. If that poses a problem, please
contact us . If you are a Victorian
like me, you may not know where Illawarra is. I was quite
disconcerted to find it was not in the index of either of my road
atlases of Australia. Apparently it is a region just south of
Sydney, Wollongongish. .More about
Illawarra
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