John Oxley
Yorkshire-born naval officer, explorer and surveyor John Joseph William Molesworth Oxley (1784 – 1828) served as Surveyor General of New South Wales from 1812. He conducted two expeditions into the interior of New South Wales and explored the Tweed River and the Brisbane River in modern-day Queensland.
Oxley entered the Royal Navy as a fifteen-year-old midshipman on the Venerable in 1799 and travelled to Australia as master's mate of the Buffalo in 1802. After a five-year stay, Oxley returned briefly to England, where he was appointed first lieutenant of the sloop Porpoise, stationed in Sydney. He returned to New South Wales on the Transport Board's Speke in November 1808.
After the Rum Rebellion, the Porpoise carried the deposed Governor Bligh to Van Diemen's Land. While Oxley denied supporting the rebels, his letters showed he was close to John Macarthur. He was briefly engaged to Macarthur's daughter Elizabeth.
When he returned to England in 1810, Oxley sought an appointment as Surveyor-General in New South Wales and retired from the Navy the following year.
After Oxley returned to Sydney as Surveyor-General in 1812, Governor Macquarie appointed him to command expeditions to explore the Lachlan and Macquarie Rivers.
When Oxley's 1817 Lachlan expedition encountered a marshy country, he suggested that the extensive swamps may have been the margin of a great inland sea. The 1818 Macquarie expedition was halted under similar circumstances, convincing Oxley that the westward-flowing rivers drained into an inland sea. The return journey took Oxley across the Great Divide to the Hastings River, which the party followed to its mouth, which Oxley named Port Macquarie.
After an expedition to Shoalhaven and Jervis Bay expedition in 1819, Macquarie's replacement, Governor Brisbane, sent Oxley north in 1823 on a seaborne expedition to investigate possible sites for an alternative penal settlement for the most recalcitrant convicts.
Oxley sailed northwards in the Mermaid with instructions to investigate Port Bowen, Port Curtis and Moreton Bay, visiting the Tweed River on the Queensland/New South Wales border en route. He seems to have had an unannounced agenda: to discover the outlet to the hypothetical inland sea.
Port Bowen (modern-day Port Clinton near the Shoalwater Bay military exercise area) had been examined reasonably closely by Matthew Flinders twenty years earlier. Oxley decided it was too late in the season to investigate an area which could not have been the answer to his other quest.
He examined Port Curtis and discovered and named the Boyne River. He concluded it was not the outlet to the inland sea and, in any case, unsuitable for a penal settlement.
Turning his attention to Moreton Bay, Oxley headed south. After rounding Moreton Island, he encountered castaway timber-getters Thomas Pamphlett and John Finnegan, who pointed him towards a large river flowing into the bay.
After an initial investigation of the Brisbane River, which seemed to be a possible answer to his other quest, Oxley recommended Moreton Bay as the site for the new penal station and Redcliffe as a suitable interim location.
Returning to Moreton Bay with the party that would establish the new convict settlement, Oxley conducted a second investigation of the Brisbane River, travelling further upstream to discover the Bremer River and recommending that the convicts be moved from Redcliffe to a site on the river's lower reaches.
In the meantime, over his stay in New South Wales, Oxley had built land grants from Governor Macquarie near Camden into a substantial property, which he named Kirkham. He was also a director of the Bank of New South Wales and one of the original 1824 New South Wales Legislative Council's five members. However, he was not reappointed the following year.
The privations he experienced on his expeditions affected Oxley's health. He succumbed to illness and died at Kirkham on 25 May 1828, aged forty-four. An obituary notice appeared in the Sydney Gazette of 27 May 1828. He was survived by a daughter and two sons from his October 1821 marriage to Emma Norton (1798–1885), youngest sister of solicitor James Norton and two earlier daughters by another woman. A third illegitimate daughter predeceased him. Both of his sons were briefly elected to the division of Camden in the New South Wales Legislative Assembly.
Links to add:
Bank of New South Wales
William Bligh
Boyne River
Bremer River
Brisbane River
Camden
John Finnegan
Matthew Flinders
Lachlan River
Macquarie River
Moreton Bay
New South Wales Legislative Assembly
New South Wales Legislative Council
Thomas Pamphlett
Port Bowen
Port Clinton
Port Curtis
Redcliffe
Shoalwater Bay
Tweed River
