20 A COLONIAL AUTOCRACY. 



that the men and non-commissioned officers might marry and 

 take with them the women who had been their companions and 

 were the mothers of their children. 



The women who were not thus assigned remained in 

 Government employment, working in a woollen factory at 

 Paramatta But even these found homes with the male con- 

 victs in the town, many leading lives as shameful as those they 

 had left behind them in the dens of London. 



Yet in spite of this promiscuous breeding, in spite of the 

 prevalence of the bar-sinister, the children of these unions were 

 of strong physique, lacked neither mental nor moral force, and 

 sought to live soberly and decently. The family affections, too, 

 were strong, and child murder or even neglect practically un- 

 known. That women tried to preserve their innocent but 

 illegitimate babies was natural enough in a country where to be 

 a mistress and not a wife was the more usual condition. 



The established forms and conventions of civilisation were 

 difficult to establish in a little penal settlement cut off by the 

 seas from the whole world. The ordinary decencies and comforts 

 of life were dispensed with as carelessly as the marriage laws. 

 Macquarie was disgusted with the rough-built houses and the 

 badly clothed, uneducated children of even prosperous settlers. 

 Mud and paling huts or two-roomed houses with a lean-to or 

 skilling at the back were the ordinary country dwellings. But 

 the climate exacted little in the way of shelter and clothing and, 

 save in time of flood or famine, convict and settler alike lived 

 better than they had been accustomed to do in England. Only 

 here and there, however, had families established themselves in 

 the country as in a permanent home. For the majority of the 

 " gentleman-settlers " it was a place to make money in, money 

 which was to be spent in re-establishing themselves in the old 

 country, and which might be easily made in the liquor traffic. 

 In the twelve years which followed Macquarie's arrival, no 

 change was more remarkable than in this feeling that New 

 South Wales was only the scene of a temporary exile. 



Rough and plain as was the life of the settler, at least the 

 fear of fierce native -raids which pressed upon the American 

 pioneer was absent. The aborigines took quietly the establish- 

 ment of the white folk upon one of their hunting grounds. 



