Local History Walks

For the last four days we've stayed fairly close to home.  Monday evening was a fun dinner at the Ransley's, long-time family friends of the Andrews.  We've come to learn that any gathering of family and friends involves a lot of loud laughter and conversation, usually several conversations going on across the room at once.  I think I missed some pretty good stories while I was busy listening to others.  Wish I could have recorded them all.  Dave here...

Tuesday was a wash day with some quiet time reading and catching up on the latest happenings in the Tour de France.  I've got to say that the Australians take their sports seriously!  Especially football (rugby) and Cricket, particularly when playing against the British!  Just mention the latest match and you are sure to have a half hour of excited and intense debate and analysis.

Wednesday Bob dropped Becky and me at the small town of Windsor just 10 minutes from home.  We've been there before but this time we wanted to wander through the large graveyard of St. Matthew's Parish before doing some grocery shopping.  The graves tend to tell the story of the early and difficult days of the colony as it grew and people spread across the eastern coastlands.  We found three graves of "first fleeters."  These were people who arrived on the very first ships that landed in 1788 to begin what at that time was a penal colony.  Life was harsh, but these people - many of whom had been imprisoned for petty crimes simply because they were poor - took hold of the chance to make a new life and carved out a nation in the process.

Today, Thursday, Bob took us off on a foray into the bush (foothills) north along the Hawkesbury River and the Macdonald River to the little town of St. Alban's, nearly at the end of the road.  Along the way we got a look at the early development of the region as convict laborers were used to hand-build a 246 kilometer road through the wilderness to connect Sydney to the developing Hunter Valley (the region near where we will spend the next seven days).

See the photos below for more of these stories....

At the St. Matthew's Parish cemetery (surrounding the church).  As I said, it was a difficult life even for the "good" guys.

Can you calculate the ages of these three girls when they died?  There are a surprising number of children's graves here. 

Becky and I at an overlook of the Hawkesbury River near a ferry crossing (below) on our way to the town of St. Alban's.

The seasonally flooding Macdonald River creates some rich pockets of farmland in the narrow valley.

 

The beginning of one section of the 246km convict-built road connecting Sydney with the Hunter Valley to the north.

Convicts would hand drill holes (using a steel rod and sledgehammers) into which black powder would be packed and sealed with clay for blasting away the sandstone to make a buttressed roadbed and culverts carrying water away underneath them.
This is one of many, many such holes we could see.

Stones were shaped and faced for the walls and culverts.  It took about 270 strokes of a pick to face ONE stone!
Here you can see all the pick marks.

Here you see the outer wall and buttress (containing the culvert's outflow) in this steep countryside.

Hard and heavy work in rugged country.  Some of the more violent convicts did their work in chains, too.

A wallaby!  Our first sighting "in the wild" munching the grass in a farmer's field.

In the tiny town of St. Alban's ... the hotel and pub.  Originally built in 1836.

Bob says that stepping into this pub is like stepping back into a pub in 1740's England (except for the fire extinguisher).