ROAD builder Lieutenant William Cox’s telescope is back home in Bathurst for tonight’s celebration of the bicentenary of the completion of Cox’s Road.
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Lt Cox’s great-great-great- grandson Tim Cox said the telescope, which has been handed down through generations of the family, had spent the past four years on display at the National Museum in Canberra.
It will be welcomed home at tonight’s launch of Retrace the Steps – Cox’s Road Dreaming from 7pm at the Flannery Centre.
Noted historian Professor Grace Karskens will speak tonight about Cox’s famous road across the Blue Mountains.
Lieutenant Cox is best known for the construction of the first inland European road from the Nepean River to the Bathurst Plains in six months in 1814/1815. He worked with a team of 50.
Governor Lachlan Macquarie named the track that descended precipitously from Mount York into the Hartley Valley below “Cox’s Pass”. The road to Bathurst eventually became known as Cox’s Road.
Mr Cox said when he was younger he was a bit blase about what his ancestor had achieved, but now he realises what a critical role Cox played in the nation’s history.
“His was the first road over the sandstone curtain,” Mr Cox said.
“The colony was starting to run out of food and Macquarie knew he needed to get a road across those mountains so provisions could be brought in.”
The tools that Cox’s men used were simple hand-held instruments such as shovels, crowbars, pick-axes, grub axes and crosscut saws, with block and tackle, ropes, chains and explosives for clearing.
Mr Cox said in colonial times the hand-held brass collapsible telescope was the equivalent of contemporary field glasses, but not as powerful and with inferior optics.
Mr Cox said while the telescope was playing an important part in an exhibition in Canberra, he wanted it back in Bathurst for the bicentenary.
He said he had approached the Australian Fossil and Mineral Museum because he would like to see it displayed there throughout the city’s bicentenary.
Tonight’s event will serve as the launch of Cox’s Road Dreaming, a one-off opportunity to walk Cox’s Road from Mount York to the flag staff at Bathurst. It will be a journey of seven days (including one rest day).
The walk will begin on April 26 and will be limited to 100 people divided into four groups.
