This Windsor walk explores an early and confronting moment in frontier history. Centered on First Fleeter Robert Forrester and the 1795 murder charge over the killing of an Aboriginal boy, the course invites participants to consider the pressures, assumptions and imperatives shaping both settler and First Nations lives on the Hawkesbury.

Through place-based discussion, the walk examines conflict, law, settlement and survival in a formative colonial landscape. Flag: the uploaded spreadsheet’s longer website description for this row reads only “longer description coming”, so this revision is based mainly on the title and short description.

Please ensure your mobile phone number is up-to-date with WEA before enrolling and ensure that you have it with you on the day in case the tutor needs to contact you. Meet on Windsor Station at 9:55am. Train arrives at Windsor at 9:55 am, leaves from Central at 8:45 am. The return journey leaves at 2:31pm, arriving Central at 3:43 pm.

DELIVERY MODE

Face to face

COURSE OUTLINE

• Train-friendly walk of 4.5 hours
• Walk at the Macquarie town of Windsor
• Visit St. Matthew’s Anglican church and its cemetery where some First Fleeters are interred
• The lives of: Robert Forrester and his descendants, Andrew Thompson, Richard Fitzgerald, William Cox, John Brabyn, Henry Kable and wife Susannah
• St. Matthews - redemption of the forger turned architect Francis Greenway
• Walk to river to understand feast and flood
• Story of 1795: frontier conflict, British justice
• Fitzgerald’s “Macquarie Inn”, and other historic buildings

LEARNING OUTCOMES

• Walking supports a healthy lifestyle
• Understand the difficult moral choices of the penal settlement
• Bring alive the history and geography of Dyarubbin/ the Hawkesbury River
• Learn some Darug words
• Understand conflict at the frontier
• Apply these understandings to present day

COURSE RESOURCES

• Cochrane, Peter. The Making of Martin Sparrow. Melbourne: Viking, 2018.
• Forrester, Robert. Sentenced to Debt. [Publication details unknown].
• Gapps, Stephen. The Sydney Wars: Conflict in the Early Colony, 1788–1817. Sydney: NewSouth Publishing, 2018.
• Karskens, Grace. The Colony: A History of Early Sydney. Crows Nest, NSW: Allen & Unwin, 2009.
• Karskens, Grace. People of the River: Lost Worlds of Early Australia. Crows Nest, NSW: Allen & Unwin, 2020.
• Stewart, Lyn. Blood Revenge: Murder on the Hawkesbury, 1799. Dural, NSW: Rosenberg Publishing, 2015.