Lachlan Macquarie, the fifth Governor of NSW, played a major part in the settlement of the Maitland area. It was he who gave the orders to establish small farming settlements at Patersons Plains and Wallis Plains, in 1812 and 1818 respectively.
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This constituted a substantial reform as far as land settlement, economic development and the social order were concerned.
The opening up of the Sydney Basin for farming had been dominated by military officers and free settlers with some emancipists being given small holdings, but these first lower Hunter settlements were based primarily on serving convicts.
Macquarie sought to transform the colony from a prison to a commercially-based society, with convicts, emancipists and free settlers alike to be the agents of the change. In what became the Maitland area, Newcastle convicts got land and a degree of freedom for being "well behaved" and doing good work as timber- cutters or in other jobs.
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This, Macquarie thought, would give them redemption and a new chance at life as would marrying, having "legitimate" children, attending prayers and having some independence in their lives: all these would be civilising influences.
There was much humanity in Macquarie's approach to convict management. He was ahead of others in positions of authority in early NSW, earlier land grants in the Sydney Basin having excluded serving convicts.
Macquarie's first visit to Patersons Plains was in late 1811. During or soon after it he decreed that a small number of free men and "reliable" convicts be provided with plots of partly-cleared land on either side of the Paterson River between today's Woodville and Paterson.
Seven years later Macquarie returned, noted with satisfaction the progress that had been made in clearing and farming the land, and walked overland with Commandant James Wallis of the Newcastle penal colony to the Hunter River. There, finding further cultivable land, he ordered that the formula on which Patersons Plains had been based be repeated at Wallis Plains. This new settlement too was to be based on convicts.
The first five men to take up Patersons Plains holdings, each of 30-40 acres over which they had no title, were four convicts and a free man. Their holdings were not even surveyed, which soon caused some disputation between neighbours.
The first harvest was brought in during 1813 and its produce sent to Newcastle and Sydney: the commercial economy was taking shape.
Over the following eight years five more convicts were allowed holdings and grants were made to two additional free men and George Augustus Middleton, Newcastle's first Anglican priest. Counting the glebe granted to the Middleton, there were 12 holdings in all at Patersons Plains by 1821.
The Wallis Plains settlement, occupied in 1818 and 1819, appears to have comprised ten convicts, a colonial-born youth who was free and a former British army soldier in India. As at Patersons Plains the convicts were not granted title over the holdings they were to farm.
These settlements became Macquarie's legacy in the Maitland area.
Maitland and District Historical Society