What Survived the Floods

There are histories that announce themselves loudly — dates, monuments, declarations.
And then there are histories that survive quietly, passed hand to hand, flock to flock, generation to generation.

This is one of those.

Before the Wool Industry Had a Name

William Cox is often mentioned in passing — a road-builder, a magistrate, a man who “oversaw” things. But his most enduring work didn’t arrive with ceremony or immediate recognition.

It arrived slowly. On hooves.

Records held across Australian libraries and museum archives tell a clear, if understated, story: Cox’s significance in the early colony lay not in the first importation of fine-wool sheep, but in what came after.

Captain Henry Waterhouse’s original letters — preserved in the Mitchell Library — describe the 1797 purchase of Spanish sheep at the Cape of Good Hope and the brutal journey to Australia, where many animals were lost. When Waterhouse returned to England in 1800, the flock was dispersed.

William Cox acquired the majority of it.

Not as a collector.
As a steward.

Brush Farm: Custodianship, Stock, and a Working Estate

By the early nineteenth century, William Cox and his wife Rebecca were custodians of Brush Farm, a significant agricultural estate on the Parramatta River. Contemporary records and later museum research confirm that Brush Farm functioned not as a gentleman’s retreat, but as a working property, with established milling and agricultural infrastructure supporting stock, grain processing, and skilled labour.

Cox’s documented purchase of sheep from Captain Henry Waterhouse’s Cape flock in 1800 places him among the early stewards of fine-wool breeding in the colony. While the precise distribution of these sheep across his holdings cannot always be fixed to a single paddock or year, it is historically reasonable to understand that Brush Farm formed part of Cox’s broader stock and provisioning network, alongside later holdings in the Hawkesbury district — including what was then called Green Hills; Windsor, and what would later become Clarendon.

What matters here is not whether merino sheep stood on a particular rise at a particular hour, but that Cox’s estates functioned as interconnected working landscapes, moving stock, labour, and produce in response to seasonal conditions, land suitability, and risk.

Floodplain Was Not an Abstract Risk

Both the Parramatta River and the Hawkesbury-Nepean system were already known, even in the colony’s earliest decades, for their volatility. Flooding was not an unforeseen catastrophe — it was an understood, recurring reality.

Brush Farm’s river frontage meant it shared the same vulnerability experienced across the Parramatta and Hawkesbury floodplains: periodic inundation, loss of crops, disruption of milling operations, and the constant necessity of rebuilding and adaptation. Later Hawkesbury floods would prove catastrophic, but earlier events — including those of 1801 and 1806 — had already demonstrated how quickly productive land could be rendered unusable.

For estates like Cox’s, floods did not simply threaten property.
They threatened continuity.

Infrastructure as a Form of Commitment

Museum-held material documenting Cox’s milling and estate infrastructure makes one thing clear: these were not speculative holdings.

They were invested landscapes — supported by blacksmiths, farriers, mills, and skilled workers — designed to endure beyond a single season or owner. Such infrastructure only makes sense if its custodians expect loss and commit to rebuilding.

That expectation shaped everything: where stock was moved, how flocks were expanded, and why later generations carried Cox’s breeding lines inland, away from the most volatile reaches of the river system.

Why This Matters to the Story

The Rum Rebellion, the expansion of wool production, and the opening of land beyond the Blue Mountains did not emerge in isolation.

They emerged from:

• flood-prone land

• fragile food systems

• contested power

• and families who learned, repeatedly, that survival depended on adaptation rather than certainty

Brush Farm sits within that story not as a footnote, but as an early example of what stewardship actually required in New South Wales: patience, infrastructure, loss tolerance, and long memory.

Propagation Is Not Glamorous Work

History often prefers origin stories.
But industries are rarely built by first acts alone.

Cox’s role — documented through sales records, family histories, and later agricultural reports — was propagation. He kept the flock viable. Relatively pure. He bred carefully, expanded methodically, and passed the knowledge and stock to his sons, who went on to establish influential studs such as Burrundulla and Rawdon.

This is how foundations are actually laid.

Quietly.
Patiently.
With attention that doesn’t seek applause.

Sir Joseph Banks’ correspondence and official reports place this work within a wider imperial context — merino flocks managed for King George III, later intersecting with the work of Macarthur and Marsden. Cox stands alongside them not as a rival, but as a parallel line of continuity.

The wool industry didn’t just need ambition.
It needed endurance.

Loss Was Already Written Into the Land

And then came 1819.

The floods along the Hawkesbury were catastrophic. Entire families were lost. Homes erased. Futures washed downstream.

Rebecca Cox, William’s first wife, who oversaw the farm and its early flock, survived this flood but was taken ill after rendering assistance to others.

William could not save the woman he had met years earlier while training as a watchmaker within the orbit of the James Cox atelier — a world of horology, automata, and skilled craft where families such as the Uphohns were active. While historians continue to debate the precise contours of these networks, the Cox name is firmly associated with the export trade, seafaring enterprise, and the precision crafts of the period.

It is within this shared culture of making, movement, and endurance that William and Rebecca’s lives first intersected — long before militia, magistracy, or monuments.

This wasn’t an isolated tragedy. It was part of a wider reckoning that early settlers understood well: nothing you built here was guaranteed to remain.

Land could be taken.
Crops could fail.
Lives could vanish overnight.

And yet, after loss — the flocks remained.

They moved. They adapted. They were carried forward by sons, not as trophies, but as responsibility.

Inheritance, in this context, wasn’t sentimental.
It was practical.

What Endures Isn’t Always What Shines

When William Cox died in 1837, his legacy wasn’t contained to a single achievement.

It lived on in:

• bloodlines

• land management

• knowledge transferred rather than hoarded

• work continued rather than claimed

That’s not a dramatic story.
But it’s a truthful one.

And it mirrors something I keep returning to in my own work — particularly in the Unbound series.

What survives isn’t always what was loudest.
It’s what was held.

At the Table, Inheritance Looks Like This

If I were setting a symbolic table for this moment, it wouldn’t be lavish.

It would be sustaining.

Bread. Cheese. Something preserved. Something that travelled well. A drink built on structure rather than novelty — familiar, restrained, dependable.

Oh... I have the perfect pairing!

A dense semolina cake, scented with orange and soaked lightly in syrup — not delicate, not decorative. The kind of food that travels well, feeds many, and holds its shape when things begin to shift. Orange here isn’t sweetness for its own sake. It’s preservation. It’s prevention.

Beside it, a Wee Scottish Daisy (page 186) in The Cocktail Diaries: wild Scottish gin, citrus, and restraint. A drink that sharpens rather than soothes. Citrus expressed, not poured. Nothing wasted.

This is food and drink for the moment before upheaval — when bodies need to be kept upright and minds clear.

Not indulgence.
Orientation.

Because this isn’t about conquest.

It’s about continuity.

Why This Still Matters

We often mistake inheritance for entitlement.

But inheritance, at its most honest, is obligation — to care for what was passed on, even when it came to you through grief, disruption, or compromise.

William Cox didn’t invent the wool industry.
But without propagation, there is no industry at all.

And Rebecca Cox’s loss sits quietly beneath that history, reminding us that foundations are often paid for by people whose names don’t survive the headline.

This is not nostalgia.

It’s recognition.

Some legacies are measured in monuments.

Others are measured in what continues to live, long after the floodwaters recede.

And sometimes, the most radical thing a person can do — in a new land, in an unstable world — is simply to keep something alive.