Wikipedia:WikiTown/Toodyaypedia/stage II worksheet/Joseph Strelley Harris

HARRIS Joseph Strelley (1811–1889) Resident Magistrate, Toodyay 1850–1861

Joseph Strelley Harris was a man of many interests and opinions about how things could be done better, especially when he was in a position of authority. In 1840 he was appointed Acting Resident Magistrate in the farming town of Williams, then Resident Magistrate in Toodyay from 1850 until early 1861 when he was transferred to Busselton. He also served at Kojonup for a time. Although known for his sociability, Harris was regarded as an ‘eccentric, tactless man, unpopular with people in authority for the unsolicited advice he offered, on subjects ranging from roadmaking to Aboriginal farm settlements, and from mail routes to commercial hunting of kangaroos.’ However as a former pastoralist and drover, Harris must have gained practical experience about some of these matters before becoming involved with government bureaucracy. He may well have chafed at the restrictions imposed on his ability to act as and when he liked.

Joseph Strelley Harris was born on 23 November 1811 to Dr Joseph Harris and Lucy (née Strelley). In 1833, he arrived with his parents at Fremantle on the Cygnet, and moved to Guildford where Dr Harris took on the role of District Medical Office and Colonial Surgeon. Dr Harris appears to have had other wider interests. With his son, they drove stock along the track from the Swan to York, suffering terrible loses due to stock poisoning, and pioneered droving sheep from Albany to the Avon and Swan districts. The latter was achieved after being contracted in 1838 to carry the mails from Albany to Perth. By 1839, Joseph Strelley Harris was a pastoralist at Williams. While based there he met with the botanist James Drummond who was on one of his collecting expeditions from his home ‘Hawthornden’ in Toodyay. The men shared an interest in the causes of stock poisoning and conducted experiments with the known poison plants in the region. Harris arrived in Toodyay in August 1850 following the death of the previous Resident Magistrate Lt. Frederick W. Slade. Slade and those before him had been retired naval or army officers who had been granted large tracks of land in lieu of a pension. Their role was to represent the law and provide annual reports about the District to the Colonial Secretary. Initially, while the population was relatively small, the workload was light and business was conducted from home. At the time the Toodyay District extended from Northam, to its boundary with the York District which had its own Resident Magistrate, and northwards into the Victoria Plains. This large area was later reduced. When Harris arrived he found there was no residence for the Magistrate so he had to stay in one of the wayside inns. This was the cause of one of his early altercations with the locals. He found these establishments lacking suitable accommodation for travellers, so on 30 December, the day licenses were renewed and when the locals came to town to celebrate the end of the year, he refused to grant the inn owners their license to trade. Not surprisingly, this resulted in an uproar with a petition circulated on New Year’s Day refuting his claims. Harris rented a cottage from James Drummond Jr of ‘Hawthornden’, and as his workload increased he engaged John Acton Wroth as his secretary and clerk in court. Wroth, who was sent to Toodyay in 1854, was an educated young ticket-of-leaver who was skilled in shorthand. Harris was the fourth Resident Magistrate appointed to Toodyay and it was during his residency the Toodyay Convict Hiring Depot was established. In June 1850 the first transport of convicts to the Swan River Colony arrived on the Scindian. With increasing numbers of arrivals putting pressure on the government to accommodate them, convicts were despatched to the rural settlements of York, Toodyay and Bunbury where temporary hiring depots were set up.

In Toodyay a temporary depot was located at what is now known as West Toodyay, with straw huts constructed for the Pensioner Guards whose duties were to oversee the convicts. A gaol was also built with convict labour. Those convicts who were not hired out as labour to farmers, worked on building roads.

Harris was charged with finding a suitable place for the permanent Convict Hiring Depot and in 1852 a site was selected two miles (xx kms) upstream from the town. Apart from the depot buildings including the store, quarters, blacksmith shop and infirmary, cottages for the pensioner guards and their families were constructed. As Harris settled in to his role and was able to assess local conditions he reported back to the Colonial Government with suggestions for improvements. This included the need for a better route to Toodyay to avoid the steep descent at Jimperding. A new route was eventually surveyed which passed through the Depot site before heading to the Toodyay settlement. Called New Road, it was later renamed Stirling Terrace after the new town of Newcastle, gazetted in 1860, was established around the Convict Depot. The old Toodyay townsite had been subject to recurrent flooding. Some of Harris’s proposals to the government related to bushfire control. This was a necessity given the destructive fires that regularly occurred during the hot dry summer season, and that continue to this day. A practice was already in place where settlers made an annual allocation of provisions and blankets to the Aboriginals as encouragement not to burn the bush, their fire-stick method of farming, until after the harvest. This applied to those who had tribal lands where the settlers had established their farms. After a particularly destructive bushfire in November 1850, Harris wanted an Act of Council that required settlers to create firebreaks around their properties and along the lines of roads whether public or private; and to compel a settler to provide assistance to his neighbour if there was a fire within two or three miles of his property. Failure to help would incur a heavy fine. Another initiative was the Fire Brigade, made up of ticket-of-leave holders and Aboriginals, that could be hired from the Depot. The brigade received rations and a small monthly allowance from the Government. When there were no destructive fires during the 1852–53 summer Harris was proud to report, ‘the warm and well clothed appearance of the country now, as compared to its blackened face three years back, ought to be convincing proof of the utility of the Fire Brigade.’ The following year Governor Fitzgerald ended the contribution as a cost cutting measure, and because of concern settlers in other towns might want to set up Fire Brigades requiring government support. As the government had assigned extra police to the Toodyay and Northam area, it instructed daily bushfire patrols in summer had to be added to their duties including the apprehension of anyone found deliberately lighting a fire. There were bad feelings between the police and Harris, and when a huge bushfire broke out and burnt a large swathe of countryside from Northam to Bolgart (a settlement north of Toodyay), the police made no attempt to find the culprit. After this Harris gained permission for the convicts at the Depot to be called out to fight fires. After the devastation of the 1856 Coondle bushfire that swept along the Toodyay Valley, local fire-fighting teams were organised by the leading settlers in the district.

While Resident Magistrates were expected to contribute their time to local boards and organisations, Harris was President of the Toodyay, Northam & Victoria Plains Agricultural Society, they were also required to be generous subscribers to the development of their district. Harris had limited means and found this a drain on his income. He sought a government allowance to cover these expenses citing examples such as ‘£5 to the school, £5 to the exploration fund, and £1 to the purchase of the cemetery land at ‘Nardie’. Other subscriptions were in the wings for the parsonage, the public library and the services of a doctor.In 1861 Harris was transferred to Busselton in the Vasse Region, his last posting as a Resident Magistrate. When he retired in 1888, a profile written by the Vasse Correspondent for the Western Mail indicates Harris’s personality and style of governing had not changed.

‘If his abilities as a magistrate were not exactly of a high order we ought perhaps to blame the Government which placed him in a position for which he was never fitted. His genial hospitality will however always be remembered.’

Harris was fondly remembered for planting an avenue of peppermint trees (agonis flexuosa) along the length of Queen Street, Busselton’s main thoroughfare. The following appeared in the West Australian in 1929,

…

in their matured proportions [the peppermints] are a fitting monument to his memory. They are tall, strong, wide-branching trees, thickly foliaged, and throw a deep, alluring shadow on to the street which visitors, in the warm summer days, find so comforting and restorative. The thousand townspeople are surely grateful to the old R.M. for his abiding love of, and faith in, their own indigenous tree for street adornment.

References

 This article incorporates text by Robyn Taylor available under the CC BY SA 2.5 AU licence.

• Erickson, Rica, ‘Eye of the Law – Resident Magistrates of Toodyay’. Unpublished manuscript owned by Toodyay Historical Society Inc.

notes by author

LINKS

• Bushfire control (any links?)
• James Drummond, Botanist
• Poison plants
• Pensioner Guards
• Toodyay Convict Depot (link?)
• Transportation of convicts
• James Drummond Jnr
• John Acton Wroth