Such divisions influence lives: one's position within the hierarchy can greatly influence one's prospects.

Maitland and its surrounds in the lower Hunter was no different.

In the early years of European settlement, Maitland had a clear class structure.

At the top were the well-born and those with money and connections.

In the lower Hunter from the 1820s they made up the 'landed gentry' whose wealth or connections with the Governor and the bureaucracy in Sydney saw them obtain large grants of land along with convicts to break in and work their estates.

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Among the holders of grants in the Maitland area were retired military officers Edward Close, Francis Allman and Val Blomfield. Other grantees were John Brown, Thomas McDougall and Standish Harris.

These and their like made up the local elite.

They guarded their positions carefully, and in effect they defined the class structure and the positions of individuals within it.

Some were magistrates who had great power over their convict employees.

This included the ability to impose harsh physical punishments on any who attempted to escape, refused to work as directed or were insolent.

They mixed socially only with their own kind and looked down on those they regarded as their inferiors (which, by definition, was everybody else).

The only people they would have recognised as worthy would have been the members of the tiny professional class in Maitland - by about 1840 this basically comprised of a few doctors, chemists, solicitors, bankers, accountants and ministers of religion.

Next came other free people like businessmen in the town (bakers, builders, publicans, cabinetmakers, retailers and others) and the small farmers like the former non-commissioned officers who between 1829 and 1836 were granted plots at Veterans Flat in recognition of their efforts in the Napoleonic wars.

From the late 1830s there were English yeoman farmers and Scottish crofters, who gradually replaced the convicts as the workforce on the estates.

'Currency' (Australian- born) lads and lasses, usually the children of convicts and working in 'urban' occupations, came next.

Having convict parentage meant that they were not respected by the gentry.

Further down the hierarchy were the emancipists, technically free but tainted by their criminal pasts.

Those who flouted their wealth, made more money than the gentry, affected 'airs and graces' and acted 'beyond their stations' (as did John 'Gentleman' Smith, one of the original convict farmers at Wallis Plains), were much denigrated by the ruling class.

Serving convicts were lower still.

According to the elite, the convicts were there to be punished and to serve their masters on the estates.

The first convict farmers of Wallis Plains were thought incapable of making proper use of their holdings.

Female convicts were considered "depraved" and "damned whores".

At the bottom of the social pile were the Aboriginal people. By the 1840s they were much diminished in number thanks largely to introduced diseases.

Their communities had been marginalised and scattered, and individuals living on the edges of European society were increasingly separated from their traditional ways of life.

Their skills and their labour, while certainly useful to the settlers, were little appreciated.

They were looked down upon by the vast majority of the Europeans whatever their own positions in the social hierarchy.