A Country To Be Reckoned With

An outline of the development of colonial (and Aboriginal) Australia throughout the 19th century, focusing on GM Pitt, son of a free settler, whose life spanned the better part of that century. A history of growing up on the Hawkesbury river in New South Wales, becoming head of the family at the age of six, developing the farm he was born on and then, as a young adult, exploring the outer regions of the colony and taking up land beyond the limits of location along with his de facto stepfather William Scott, overseer on the Hawkesbury property and the father of four illegitimate children by GM's widowed mother. The origins of the Aboriginal Pitt family in the Moree area began at the time when GM was exploring the area and it's believed they acquired their name from him.GM married the daughter of convicts and quit farming to become one of Australia's earliest stock and station agents called Pitt, Son & Badgery. Moving away from the Hawkesbury he witnessed, briefly, the growth of Manly at a time when sea-bathing was prohibited, and lastly Kirribilli on the North Shore, then considered Sydney's 'Lazarus', or poor relation, with sewage running down the middle of the street. GM became Mayor of East St Leonards and helped organise the pipes delivering mains water to the North Shore. The book also explores the history of GM's parents in law, both convicts, convicted of forgery and theft respectively, and their transition from felon to free people, tradespeople and landowners. The responsibility and the role of women in the 19th century and how Julia Johnson, GM's wife, acquired respectability overnight when she married the son of a free settler. The author has filled in gaps in the family history with occasional dramatisation and the odd invented character, all with the aim of creating a page-turner. This is a Pom's view of the extraordinary development of a colonised country from rough-and-ready penal colony to a modern land of substance and prosperity, and the ever-changing attitudes towards its indigenous population.