Michael Lahy was completely rehabilitated and earned his conditional pardon in 1821, two years ahead of the time he would normally have expected it. He had been assigned to work for Sir John Jameson, a landholder and prominent critic of Governor Macquarie.
He became a trusted foreman for William Cox, who built the road across the Blue Mountains to open up the Bathurst Plains to settlement, and for his son George Cox, who opened up the Mudgee district to settlement. George Cox and his brothers pushed into the Mudgee district in 1822, opening up the second major area of settlement beyond the mountains.
Lahy’s instinct for leadership – first seen in the uprising in Ireland that led to his conviction and transportation – made him a natural pioneer. His record marks him out as one of that type of individual whose optimistic attitude and ready adaptability made settlement possible. While the names of the major landholders appear in history books, the real work of coming to terms with the alien environment of New South Wales was done by pioneers such as Michael Lahy.
Most early colonists struggled to come to grips with Australia’s harsh and unpredictable personality. Their cultural traditions and beliefs about agriculture and land use were built on centuries of experience in a land where seasons are reliable, rainfall regular, and the soils rich. Centuries of agricultural practices had given the British countryside a stamp of permanence, stability and predictablity. British colonists were not prepared for Australia’s fickle rainfall, its extremes of heat and cold, and its alien native plants and trees. Their ancestors had never encountered bushfires, flash floods and drought.
Michael Lahy appears to have adapted rapidly to the natural rhythms of his new land. In a few short years he learned how to ‘read’ the landscape. This skill enabled him to play a significant role when the site of the township of Mudgee was chosen. The location chosen by the settlers was below the flood line, a danger even the surveyor was unable to see. Lahy convinced the authorities to move the town and Mudgee was sited on higher ground, spared the problems of flooding that afflicted many other inland communities. (Both the sites for the Uamby homestead and the Uamby cemetery itself are located just above the floodline, as close as is safe to the Cudgegong River.)
Lahy was noted for his leadership. His skills as a foreman saw him lead the team that drained the Burrundulla swamps.
His skills as a peacemaker saw him gain the confidence and trust of local tribes during the violent clashes of the 1824-1825 “Aboriginal wars”, after much slaughter on both sides. George Cox sent Lahy to Guntawang station to replace an overseer who had provoked trouble with the Indigenous inhabitants.
As soon as he became a free man in 1830, rather than return to his native Ireland, Michael Lahy decided to stay and applied for land to farm. His industrious nature was such that in the five years leading up to his freedom, while working for the Cox family, he had grown his own livestock holding s to 52 cattle, 10 pigs, and four horses. Lahy’s petition for a land grant was refused, despite the support of important people in the Colony, such as the Coxes, Sir John Jamison and Major Druitt.
It is a tribute to the contribution Lahy made to the opening up of the district that George Cox virtually gave him the property Uamby in 1839 for the sum of 10 shillings after Cox had paid £222 for it four years before. Lahy appears to have been defacto owner of the property from 1833 when he was first assigned convict workers and married his wife Mary Ann Thurston. His daughter Mary, born in 1834, was said to be the first white child born in the Mudgee district.
Michael Lahy became a successful pastoralist and landowner, gaining a reputation for great hospitality in the district. His transition from ex-convict to acceptance into polite society can be seen by his contribution of funds to the building of churches and by his inclusion among the 19 prominent citizens who founded the Mudgee Racing Club. Lahy not only bred race horses, it is said that he operated his own race track on Uamby.
But he was never officially recognised for his contribution to the Mudgee community, perhaps because of his background as a political rebel and the stain of his convict past. “In naming the streets of Mudgee, it would have been a fitting tribute to the man had one of them been named after him, but those were conservative days,” wrote G.H.F. Cox wrote, and ancestor of Michael Lahy’s grateful employer.
PICTURE: From the Holtermann Collection. This homestead near Gulgong is a good example of the kind of building pioneers such as Lahy erected for their families. Made of bark and saplings, they were economical and quick to erect. Other building styles popular with settlers were 'wattle and daub' (walls made of woven wattle braches and mud) and rammed earth walls.
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