The article below by Dr Ian Jack is well worth reading.
An alternative crossing: Bells Line of Road
Part 1: Alexander Bell junior by Ian Jack
Introduction
THROUGHOUT 2013 there has been a bicentennial preoccupation with the genesis of the Great Western Highway over the Blue Mountains.
The development of a viable road along the high ridges south of the Grose River to the plains beyond had powerful consequences which were gradually realised over the decades following 1813.
The recent and continuing commemorations of Blaxland, Lawson, Wentworth, Evans, Cox and Macquarie have contributed to a welcome appraisal of the events of 1813 to 1815.
It is worthwhile, however, to recall that another ridgeway to the north of the Grose gorge had also been explored by Europeans and was surveyed as a viable road in 1823.
Bells Line of Road was a real enough alternative to the Western Road, although, for a variety of reasons, it has always played second fiddle to the southern route.
But when Archibald Bell and Robert Hoddle created the alternative road in 1823, the descent from Mount York was still a challenge for the traveller on the Western Road and Thomas Mitchell had not yet arrived in the colony to make autocratic determinations about the best lines for all three main roads, north, south and west.
Mount Tomah proved to be Bell’s Mount York, but in 1823 the northern route promised much.
Whereas the southern route ran from the lower Nepean at Emu Plains, the new route started on the upper Hawkesbury adjacent to North Richmond, climbed the escarpment through Kurrajong to Kurrajong Heights with deviations over the years, then descended onto a singularly equable ridgeline until the great obstacle of Mount Tomah presented generations of road-users and road-makers with dangers and dilemmas.
Once over Mount Tomah, the road followed the only practicable ridgeline until it turned south at the Darling Causeway, where the Grose River had its source.
Halfway down the Darling Causeway it turned west again down a viable creek gully into Hartley Vale (the route still in use today as Hartley Vale Road).
Once safely down in Hartley Vale, it passed the inn that Pierce Colletts had established in 1821 and joined the Western Road (Figure 1).
Macquarie rode up to Kurrajong Heights
With the development of farming in the Hawesbury Valley from 1794 onwards and the granting of land on both sides of the river, there was a natural likelihood of furthe early exploration.The only written account to survive from these first years is by Matthew Everingham, a First-Fleet convict, who set out from his Hawkesbury farm in 1795 with two other Europeans ‘to cross the blue mountains of this country’, climbed up to Kurrajong Heights as Tench had done, though his exact route is uncertain, and then went beyond as far as the eminences of Mount Wilson/Irvine or Mount Tomah.2
In 1804 the naturalist George Caley travelled from Kurrajong Heights to Mount Tomah and Mount Banks by a very difficult route, still remembered by names such as the Devil’s Wilderness and Dismal Dingle (Figure 2).3
Because of their proximity to the Hawkesbury River, the Kurrajong hills and the North Richmond area were settled and developed quite early, including the Bell family’s Belmont in 1807.
James Meehan surveyed North Richmond in 1809 and Kurrajong in 1811.4
With the development of farming in the Hawkesbury Valley from 1794 onwards and the granting of land on both sides of the river, there was a natural likelihood of further early exploration.
The only written account to survive from these first years is by Matthew Everingham, a First-Fleet convict, who set out from his Hawkesbury farm in 1795 with two other Europeans ‘to cross the blue mountains of this country’, climbed up to Kurrajong Heights as Tench had done, though his exact route is uncertain, and then went beyond as far as the eminences of Mount Wilson/Irvine or Mount Tomah.2
In 1804 the naturalist George Caley travelled from Kurrajong Heights to Mount Tomah and Mount Banks by a very difficult route, still remembered by names such as the Devil’s Wilderness and Dismal Dingle (Figure 2).3
James Meehan surveyed North Richmond in 1809 and Kurrajong in 1811.4
This story does not imply that local Aboriginal people did not know how to cross Kurrajong Heights, but it makes it clear that they did not expect to go to the Bathurst Plains directly from Kurrajong .
The evidence of George Bowman, who lived at Berambing, near Mount Tomah,in the 1830s, is categorical:
‘The Aboriginal natives never lived in [that part of] the mountains, but there was a tribe who wandered over the neighbouring lowlands [i.e. the plateau between Kurrajong Heights and Mount Tomah] and occasionally paid me a visit.7
The evidence strongly suggests that the Darug people had some knowledge of the area as far as Mount Tomah, but that no regular Aboriginal thoroughfare from the Bathurst Plains to the Cumberland Plains existed immediately to the north of the Grose River.
Archibald Bell junior and his three expeditions in 1823 Archibald Bell junior spent almost his entire early life in the Kurrajong district.
Born in England in 1804, he had arrived in New South Wales with his parents and eight and a half siblings in 1807.
Archibald senior a member of the Rum Corps
His father, Archibald Bell senior, a member of the Rum Corps, was given 500 acres [200 hectares] on the north bank of the Hawkesbury at North Richmond by Governor Bligh, built his house of Belmont there, expanded his landholdings during the interregnum and under Paterson and, despite his complicity in the fall of Bligh, was in 1810 confirmed in his acreage by Governor Macquarie.8
Lachlan and Elizabeth Macquarie visited the Bell family at Belmont in November 1810 and took tea on the verandah.9
Belmont was already a comfortable home in 1810, and Archibald Bell senior and his wife Maria developed the property between 1826 and 1834 into the delightful house drawn by Conrad Martens in 1838 and painted by Henry Fullwood in 1892 (Figure 3) .10
Young Archibald was still living at home in 1823, a lad of nineteen. Three years before he had been stimulated by his elder brother, William, who enterprisingly followed John Howe’s newly blazed route to the Hunter Valley via Bulga Ridge but Archibald had been too young to a join William on this expedition.11
In 1823, the incident of the Aboriginal woman returning by the northern route to Kurrajong and Belmont from her abduction by a group from Wallerawang, inspired Archibald to mount an expedition of his own.
He mustered his small party at the water-mill on Little Wheeny Creek on August 1, 1823, and left with two settlers, one of them the local blacksmith, William McAlpine.
In the diary which Bell kept while on his expedition and carefully copied out on his return in a notebook which luckily survived in the family library, he makes it clear that he had ‘Native Guides’ but does not identify them.12
Sam Boughton, who knew two of Archibald’s sisters, was quite sure that the abducted Aboriginal woman went with Bell, while Alfred Smith, another local identity, claimed in 1910 that on Bell’s first or second expedition there were only ‘two blackfellows “Cocky” and “Emery”’, men who are known in other documentation and were about 27 years old in 1823.13
The first expedition reached Mount Tomah, but the horses were unable to proceed beyond because of the extreme hazards of the western exit from the mountain.
With a larger group Bell returned in September, found a viable route half-way up Mount Tomah and went on farther than Everingham or Caley had done, turned south onto the Darling Causeway and then down to Hartley Vale.14
Hoddle was to climb every ‘remarkable’ mountain
John Oxley, the surveyor-general, was impressed and at once sent his new assistant surveyor, Robert Hoddle, freshly arrived from the Cape of Good Hope, to survey Bell’s route.
Hoddle was to describe the country, estimate the amount of cultivable land, climb every ‘remarkable’ mountain and mark the direction of every creek.16
On October 6, 1823 Hoddle set out from Kurrajong accompanied by Bell, two Aborigines, five European men and three horses. The field- book which Hoddle maintained throughout the fortnight taken to reach Collett’s Inn survives, along with the more polished account that he sent to Oxley on November 4, 1823.
Hoddle compiled a workmanlike map, showing the whole length of around fifty kilometres surveyed.17
Hoddle shows that the existing road from the Hawkesbury to Kurmond followed a line very close to the modern Bells Line, but this road then went north of what is now Kurrajong village: Hoddle suggested on his map a deviation through Kurrajong, the road known today as Old Bells Line of Road through the village.
Kurrajong Heights was named ‘Bell’s View’ on Hoddle’s map and along the relatively easy road to Mount Tomah the surveyor marked, as instructed, places where there were ‘plenty of water’, ‘good soil’ and ‘fine timber’.
After the descent from the Darling Causeway, Hoddle showed two possible end-games once the road levelled out, with a preference for the more easterly route, making a beeline for Collett’s Inn .
Otherwise the road as surveyed in October 1823 represents the route established by Bell’s second expedition in the previous month.18
Archibald Bell was an able publicist for his new route. Not only the Sydney Gazette in 1823 but also the English Morning Herald of June 21, 1824 compared the old and the new roads and believed Bell’s propaganda about the new: ‘Besides considerably reducing the distance, the road will be comparatively level, and free from nearly all the obstacles which render the bleak and barren one now used so uninviting to the traveller, and ill adapted for the passage of carts and driving of cattle.19
But the advent of Thomas Mitchell as surveyor general, the continuing intransigence of Mount Tomah and the building of the railway in the 1860s ensured that Bells Line remained subsidiary to the Western Road for the rest of the nineteenth century.
(END NOTES)
1 W. Tench, Sydney’s First Four Years, ed. L.F. Fitzhardinge, Sydney, 1979, pp.234-235, 324.
2 The Everingham Letterbook, ed. V. Ross, Sydney, 1985. This contains, in addition to the text of Everingham’s letters which describe the expedition, an excellent account of various attempts in the early 1980s to reconstruct the actual route taken.
3 M. Hungerford, Bilpin the Apple Country: a Local History, Bilpin, 1995, pp.9-17. 4 State Records New South Wales [SRNSW], Surveyor’s Field-Book 70, Reel 2622, SZ 891, cover, pp.3-7, 26-29. Meehan’s survey notes on Kurrajong, although in his own list of contents, are missing from the volume. 5 Lachlan Macquarie, Governor of New South Wales: Journals of his Tours in New South Wales and Van Diemen’s Land 1810-1822, Sydney, 1979, pp.24- 25. 6 ‘Cooramill’ [S. Boughton], ed. C. McHardy, Reminiscences of Richmond: from the Forties Down, Windsor, 2010, p.107. 7 Quoted in Hungerford, Bilpin, p.35. 8 Australian Dictionary of Biography, vol.1, pp.78-79; SRNSW, Primary Applications, 10/26656/7816, items 8, 9. 9 Macquarie, Journals, p.24. 10 Three dated stones survive from old Belmont, evidence of building works in 1826, 1830 and 1834. The Martens drawings are now in the State Library of NSW, PXC 295 fos.85-88, DL PX 27 fo.72. One of the five Fullwoods is still at Belmont Park, while a colour photocopy of another is in the Small Picture File of the Mitchell Library, mis-filed under ‘Newcastle Suburbs, Belmont’.
11 A. Macqueen, Somewhat Perilous: the Journeys of Singleton, Parr, Howe, Myles & Blaxland in the Northern Blue Mountains, Wentworth Falls, 2004, p.117. 12 R. Else-Mitchell, ‘The Discovery of Bell’s Line, 1823: a Note and a Document’, Journal of Royal Australian Historical Society [JRAHS], 66, 1980-1, pp.92-3. The manuscript notebook is now in the Mitchell Library, ML MSS 1706 Add-on 1071, pp.5,,7. 13 ‘Cooramill’, ed. McHardy, Reminiscences of Richmond, p.106 ; A. Smith, Some Ups and Downs of an Old Richmondite, Emu Plains, 1991, p.27; Hungerford, Bilpin, pp.19-20. 14Hungerford, Bilpin, pp.21-23. 15 Sydney Gazette, 9 October 1823, p.2. 16 J. Jervis, ‘Robert Hoddle, first Surveyor-General of Victoria, and his Early Work in New South Wales’, JRAHS, 23, 1937, pp.42-45. 17 SRNSW, Surveyor’s Field Book 258, Reel 2626, 2/4894; Surveyor-General’s In-Letters, 4/1814 pp.109-114 (partly published in Hungerford, Bilpin, p.24); Map SZ 422. 18 SRNSW, Map SZ 422. 19 Cutting from Morning Herald, 21 June 1824, in Miscellaneous Papers collected by H.F. Garner, Mitchell Library, ML 1493, reel CY 907, p.390b.
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