Overview of Paterson history from 1822

Prior to 1822 the presence of the penal settlement at Newcastle imposed severe constraints on the use of the Paterson area by Europeans. From 1804 convicts could be sent to Newcastle if they re-offended in the Colony, and until 1822 Newcastle was a closed port. Ships required official permission to enter the harbour and widespread settlement was banned to deprive convicts of food, shelter and other support in the surrounding countryside if they ran away from Newcastle.

It was difficult for convicts to escape from Newcastle because the local Aborigines were encouraged to track and capture runaways, and there was no known overland route back to Sydney. While ever absconders had nowhere to go, the Newcastle penal settlement was reasonably secure, but that security did not last.

In 1819 John Howe discovered an overland route from Windsor to the present-day site of Singleton and in the following year made the trip again, this time following the Hunter River as far as Wallis Plains (Maitland). In 1821 John Blaxland found another overland route from Sydney to Newcastle via Wollombi.^[1] Blaxland marked the track so well that absconding convicts could easily follow it and there were many escapes along this route. Now that the security of Newcastle was breached, it was decided to move the penal settlement to Port Macquarie and open the lower Hunter Valley for wide-scale settlement.

The Hunter Valley was opened for settlement at the same time the decision was taken to allocate the majority of convicts to settlers. This followed a Commission of Inquiry into the Colony during the last years of Lachlan Macquarie's governorship which found that most of the convicts in New South Wales were working for the government at a substantial cost to the public purse. When Governor Brisbane took office at the end of 1821 he required settlers to support one convict off the government stores for every 100 acres of land granted.^[2]

Brisbane also allowed settlers to purchase livestock from the government herds at a nominal price, and so these regulations were described by some as one cow for every 100 acres and one convict for every cow. As a direct result of Brisbane's policy, the Hunter Valley was opened up and worked with labour supplied almost entirely by convicts in the 1820s and 1830s.

In early 1822 the first large-scale grants to settlers in the Paterson area were made to William Dun and James Webber. They were among the first in the Colony to experience Governor Brisbane's policy regarding convicts and they were compelled to advise him how many convicts they would support before Brisbane would grant them land. Dun and Webber were the first of a wave of immigrant settlers attracted to the fertile alluvial soils and prime river frontages of the Paterson area, with easy access to colonial markets via the nearby deep-water port of Morpeth from which vessles regularly voyaged to Sydney.

The trickle of settlers to the Paterson area in 1822 soon became a flood and within a few years most of the prime river frontages had been granted. With the influx of people to the district, the need for a township and public wharf became obvious. In 1833 the plan for the township of Paterson was approved and blocks of land put up for sale (details).