Explore "Red O'Shaughnessy" by J.H.M. Abbott on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
KING'S TOWN, on the Coal River--for a little while about this period these were the names by which Newcastle and the Hunter were most popularly known, though by Macquarie's day the city's present title was the official designation of the place--was a tiny hamlet when O'Shaughnessy first saw it in 1812, containing hardly more than about 300 inhabitants, made up of laboring prisoners, their military guardians, and a few civil officers. The Commandant was all powerful, but the scope of his government had been very strictly limited and defined by the exceedingly comprehensive set of regulations furnished by Macquarie to Lieutenant Purcell, of the 73rd Regiment, when he went there in command of the settlement in October, 1810.
These regulations--no fewer than 39 in number--open with a sort of definition of what the place really was, and it may be quoted here with some advantage to the reader's understanding of early Australian history.