Living on the Fringe: Hard times in Hoxton Park

Hoxton Park was among the boom subdivisions of the 1880s, with the land syndicate Phillips & Co subdividing much of the area in 1887. Like many other speculative subdivisions of the 1880s, it failed to attract buyers, due to poor transport infrastructure and lack of basic services.  Following the Great Depression of the 1890s, the NSW Lands Department found that most of the land in Hoxton Park remained ‘unsold and untenanted’.* Those who did move here lived a tough life.

While 371 allotments had been sold, few had been built on, and the area was occupied by at most 50 families. It was described in 1906 as as an area “of small holdings, a few occupied, the others [being] covered with think timber and sapling scrub”.**

Hoxton Park Estate, developed in 1887 by Phillips & Co, west of Cowpasture Rd

In his book An Amateur Tramp: Rambles with Pen and Camera, William Freame described the roads in Hoxton Park in 1902 as “absolutely the worst in the county”. The turn-off to Hoxton Park was “marked by a big tree” and at the end of that road stood “a school, a store, a smithy, a grey wooden convencticle [the church] on a bare patch of land, and a few scattered cottages occupied chiefly by wood carters”.***

The small allotments at Hoxton Park were surrounded by huge private estates such as Greendale, Horningsea Park, Bernera, Raby, Birling, Cecil Hills, Hinchinbrook and The Retreat, which remained in the hands of a few landowners. Small farmers leased portions of these as mixed farms for dairying, fruit growing and wood cutting. But the major industry was firewood, with some 18,000 tons of it being loaded at Liverpool Station each year for the Sydney market.****

A map from 1887 is available through the National Library of Australia’s (NLA) Digital Collections, showing the small allotments available for Hoxton Park, surrounded by large estates. The map is published here by the NLA and has been copied below:

Hoxton Park, 1887. Arnold, W. M. M. 1887. Source: National Library of Australia, MAP Folder 73, LFSP 1074

Local farmers struggled to gain a foothold selling to the Sydney market. Poor transport to the area meant that farmers paid premiums to get their produce to Sydney for a reasonable price – one complained it cost less to send six tons of hay from Bathurst to Sydney in a rail truck than it did to send 2 tons from Hoxton Park to Liverpool Station. Likewise the local mill, turning out quality timber from the local spotted gum, ironbark and blue gum forests, couldn’t compete with Sydney prices.

Men had to take on casual work – often ‘splitting and fencing’ – only returning home on weekends, while their wives and children stayed at home, often in poorly serviced and temporary housing.

By 1904, nearly half the original purchasers of Hoxton Park had cleared out. Where allotments at Hoxton Park had been selling for some 25 pounds an acre during the boom times of the 1880s, by 1904 they were worth only 7 pound an acre. Many blamed the lack of appropriate transport for the failed development of the area, while others argued it was the failed development at Hoxton Park that dissuaded the Government from investing in rail.

Whatever the case, the local businessmen and hoteliers were happy. According to Maurice Kensell, a farmer from Hoxton Park, local businessmen had lobbied hard against a railway – it made at least some people in the area more dependent on them.*****

Read more about the area’s agricultural economy here.

The image featured here shows the Ancient Order of Foresters at Liverpool in the 1920s. As featured in Politics in the Periphery 1900-13.

*Parliamentary Standing Committee on Public Works, Report on Proposed Railway from Liverpool to Mulgoa, NSWLA PP, 1904, Second Session, vol 3. part 2. Cited in Politics on the Periphery 1900-13, p.125.

**John Byrnes, Reconnaissance Map of the Neighbourhood of Liverpool Camp, 1906 (ML MSS Map). In Politics on the Periphery 1900-13, p.125.

*** Freame, W. An Amateur Tramp: Ramples with Pen and Camera (Cumberland Argus, Parramatta, 1928), pp. 11-12. Cited in Politics on the Periphery 1900-13, p.125.

****Parliamentary Standing Committee on Public Works, 1904, p.7.

***** From Politics on the Periphery 1900-13, p. 127.