Colonial Settlement

The origins of European settlement in New England are now deeply buried, both among old and scattered papers and within the landscape itself. There is no single and certain date for first arrival, as there is for settlement at Port Jackson in 1788, Swan River in 1829 and Adelaide in 1836. Use of the Tableland in a continuous way by Europeans began in the 1830s, but it is impossible to pinpoint when the first of them found here even a temporary livelihood. We can only speculate from fragments of evidence. Little Llangothlin Lagoon, for instance, is a small sheet of water lying at the highest pan of the Tableland and about eighteen kilometres north of Guyra. Sediment in its bed, more than a metre deep, hints at the impact at some stage in the 1820s, or even earlier, of the disturbing feet of cattle (see Chapter 6). A kind of recollection in the soil, in other words-a fleeting memory manifest in pollen and minerals-suggests (though it does not prove) that men with livestock had reached that point very early in the history of settlement, living for a time by the water's edge. As for documentary evidence, the record kept by Allan Cunningham of his journey of exploration in 1827 shows that in July that year his party found a timber hut near what is now Warialda, on the north-west slopes.