Port Macquarie has a rich historical background with a European history dating from 1818 when Surveyor-General Lieutenant John Oxley arrived at the mouth of the Hastings River after a difficult 120 day, 350 mile exploratory journey from the Wellington Valley in the central-west of NSW.
A penal settlement for secondary offenders was subsequently established in 1821 and the convicts were quickly made to work on basic shelters to sleep in; erect a soldiers’ barracks and most importantly – set up vegetable gardens as the settlement had to become self-sufficient as soon as possible – which nearly didn’t happen!
The more recalcitrant convicts were also made to build roads and clear land under very severe conditions – eg their legs were shackled while expected to break up and cart heavy rocks and they slept out in the open near where they worked without blankets for protection from the cold, let alone a mat to lie on.
What I find interesting about Port Macquarie’s history, is that after 200 years there is still some evidence in existence of that era. There are a number of convict built wells around the town; convict built drains have been exposed and preserved; there is a convict built Anglican church still standing with services regularly held and until recently there was a small section of road that had been left undisturbed that was built by the convicts. I say “there was” because the Hastings-Port Macquarie council recently covered it over with bitumen due to a complaint by an elderly pedestrian that it was a tripping hazard!
The interesting fact about that small section of road is that it is made from sandstone blocks. However sandstone is not a common stone found in the Port Macquarie area – there is some basalt and a lot of igneous dolomite which was used to build the north and south break walls (and the training wall) at the mouth of the Hastings River. So where did those sandstone blocks come from?
Sandstone in PMQ!
Sandstone was regularly used by ships as ballast when travelling without a cargo from Sydney to Port Macquarie to pick up cedar and other timber and before proceeding upriver to Wauchope, they dumped their ballast of Sydney sandstone near Pelican Island. Consequently after just a few years there was a huge pile of sandstone that just laid there. With so much material at their disposal, the resourceful administrators decided to use the stone to build roads and in some cases houses.
So would you like to see where a small section of the original road built by convicts using Sydney sandstone that was used as ballast? If you do, then please go to the given co-ordinates and see if you can spot it. However it is now not like what you see in the image above due to the vandalism perpetrated by the council officers, but you will see where it was by the patch of bitumen. I am sure that not many PMQ residents would have known what that patch of rocks was, or even be aware that it was there; so this is another example of Geocaching giving an insight into what is around us and mostly unknown.
The Cache.
- There is now a number painted on the bitumen patch that we have highlighted = XY.
- Use XY in this formula:
South decimals = (2 x XY) + 10 = ABC
East decimals = (30 x XY) + 7 = DEF
- Find the cache at the following location, which is camouflaged in something quite natural that you see in the bush all the time :
S31° 26. ABC
E152° 54. DEF