"...A Wild and Barren Country..."
DID YOU KNOW ?
…that Jeanetta Sadler Smith made three journeys between Sydney and Bathurst before she was married?
The first was as an infant in the arms of her mother, Jane Smith, when she was brought to Sydney about 1847, the second when she was taken out to Bathurst from the Female Orphan School in Parramatta to be a maid in the household of the commandant of the Mounted Police, Captain Edward Battye and the third was in 1861 when she returned to Sydney as a young woman of 18 years of age.
Everything we know about her journeys comes from family anecdotes which tell us that the journey took place by coach and took 4 days. The diagram below shows the route that we assume she took. It is closely followed by today’s Great Western Highway with two notable exceptions; between Mt Lambie and Hartley today’s highway does not follow the road built in 1832 by Major Thomas Mitchell but deviates to Wallerawang and the Old Bathurst Road between those towns is no longer used because in recent times it was partially flooded by a water storage dam. Secondly, between Penrith and Blaxland on the lower Blue Mountains, today’s highway deviates from the Old Bathurst Road to follow easier grades through Glenbrook. Mitchell’s route includes the Lennox Bridge, one of the oldest in Australia still in use. The road’s alignment from Mt Victoria to Penrith was laid out by George Evans and was built by William Cox in 1814.
The Journey from Bathurst to Sydney c 1840
After leaving Sydney the Bathurst Road followed an easy path, past the town of Parramatta and through the undulating grasslands that sustained the settlement in its early days. The wide Nepean River was reached after travelling 35 miles (56 km) and almost immediately after this crossing the Bathurst Road began its steep ascent over the mountains. It first climbed the Lapstone Hill to Blaxland by a new route built by Major Thomas Mitchell in 1833 which was known as ‘Mitchell’s Pass’. This necessitated Mitchell calling on engineer David Lennox to span a deep gully with a stone bridge which remains one of the oldest in Australia still in use. Altogether the Bathurst Road rose almost 3,500 feet in about 45 miles (1070 metres in 70 kms) following the southern edge of the escarpment. When it reached Mt Victoria it abruptly descended via a steep narrow path to the valley floor some 800 feet (240 metres)below.
One of the more sensational parts of the road over the mountains was the precipitous climb over Mt Victoria. Here Mitchell built a ‘bridge’ or causeway of stone across a ravine separating two bluffs. It was a bold step, somewhat like building a road linking the ‘Three Sisters’ at Echo Point near Katoomba. Happily, it was of immediate benefit because it eliminated a hair-raising decline from Mt York to the valley below which had been built further to the north by George Cox in 1814. Mitchell’s 1832 stonework has stood the test of time and is still in use today, more than 180 years later.
Major Mitchell’s Victoria Pass showing Stone Walls dating from 1832 and still in use.
Photo taken from Google maps 2016
By all reports the Bathurst Road was very roughly finished and not being sealed it was either choked with deep quagmires of mud or wide drifts of sand. We know this from a number of surviving letters written by travellers over the years. One of the earliest accounts was written by renowned explorer Charles Darwin who travelled to Bathurst on horseback in 1836 while on a world trip. He wrote in his book “A Naturalist’s Voyage around the World” that his journey to Bathurst took two days riding time with a stopover at an inn at a village called “Weatherboard” which is known today as Wentworth Falls. It is almost exactly halfway between Bathurst and Sydney.
Notices in the Bathurst Free Press to be found in Trove, that wonderful product of the National Archives, tell of a coach service from Sydney run by one Joseph Cox as early as 1832, presumably to take advantage of the new Mitchell route over the mountains. These services left Sydney at 6am, stopped at Parramatta at 8am for breakfast, stopped again at Penrith at 11.30am for half an hour and arrived at Weatherboard at 7pm. Following an overnight stay in an inn, the coach left again at 6am, and after stopping for breakfast and lunch, arrived at Bathurst at 7pm. Even the famed Cobb & Co. was hard pressed to better this timetable. This company set up its headquarters in Bathurst in 1861 and the following year, when they had the mail contract, they left Bathurst at 7 am carrying mail, passengers and the gold escort, arriving at Weatherboard at 9pm. The next day they left again at 7am and arrived at Sydney that evening.
Several accounts of journeys over the Blue mountains are contained in letters written about this time by Rachel Henning and published in 1969 by Penguin Books. She described travelling from Sydney to Bathurst in 1856, saying that on the first day she travelled by train to Parramatta and stopped for the night. The next day she travelled by public coach to Penrith and then up Lapstone Hill and over the mountains, stopping in an inn at Hartley for the second night. The coach reached Bathurst on the afternoon of the third day. It is interesting that she commented that there was a young girl in the coach who was travelling to Bathurst to go into service. This was the same year that Jeanetta made the trip from the Orphan School at Parramatta to join the Battye household. It was fairly common for people who could afford to do so to travel to Sydney in their own carriages. Often they would travel in groups of five or six for safety. An account of a journey of this nature was written as early as 1839 by a Louisa Anne Meredith. Called “A Lady’s Journey to Bathurst”, it was published in 1978 by George Mackaness as “Fourteen Journeys over the Blue Mountains”. She tells the story of travelling by a coach pulled by horses on a journey which took four days. Her party stopped at inns along the road for meals and places to sleep. The first stop was at an inn in the vicinity of Penrith, possibly “The Red Cow”, a distance of 35 miles (56 km). The next day they travelled a further 30 miles (47 km), up the mountains, intending to stop for the night at Weatherboard. However her party had to move on to Katoomba because there were no vacancies in the inn . On the third day they travelled a further 35 miles over the mountains and beyond to another inn at Mt Lambie and this left just 27 miles (41 km) before arriving at Bathurst. The journey averaged 32 miles (50 kms) per day which was half the speed of a man on horseback as demonstrated by Darwin.
Other stories of the same period tell of journeys taken from Sydney to Bathurst in heavy drays drawn by bullocks. Such trips were extremely slow and took at least twice the time of Mrs Meredith’s party. They seemed to average only about 14 miles (22 kms) each day and travelled so slowly that people often walked beside the labouring bullocks. These trips were typical of those transporting household goods and produce and people travelling this way appear to have frequently camped out in the open.
How then did Jeanetta travel? On the way out to Bathurst in 1856 she may well been a passenger on the regular mail coach from Parramatta which provided a two day 'fast' journey time with a stop at only one inn along the way, at Hartley . It appears that she returned to Sydney in the first half of 1862 when Cobb & Co began operating a two day service. On balance it is likely that she made this journey with the Battye family in their own carriage and that the journey took 4 days, stopping at three inns along the way.
Jeanetta is sure to have been excited by the prospect of living in a big bustling city such as Sydney after the ‘wild west’ life she had become familiar with in Bathurst. No doubt she shuddered in May 1861 when the Bathurst Free Press reported on violence between European and Chinese miners at Native Dog Creek near Rockley which was about 20 miles south of Bathurst. It is likely that she was more than pleased to be leaving Bathurst.
By 1862 the road was becoming quite busy and it would have been thronged with people, especially Chinese prospectors, making their way to the Bathurst goldfields. If Jeanetta had travelled two years later she would most likely have caught the train at Penrith Station for the remainder of her journey to Sydney like many other Bathurstians did then but in 1862 the construction of the new railway had not long passed Blacktown. When she had gone out to Bathurst her carriage would have been pulled by ropes across the Nepean River on a punt or barge and when she returned in 1862 she would have found the punt still in use because a newly built bridge had just been washed away by floodwaters. She must also have been aware that a new device called ‘The Electric Telegraph’ which enabled messages to be sent by wire between towns had just commenced operating between Bathurst and Sydney. Perhaps Mrs Battye used it to send word to her husband that she had arrived safely in Sydney.
