I’ve just finished watching an episode of Who Do You Think You Are which was about the ancestry of Jason Donovan.
It’s a much better show than I was expecting. It combines the kind of history which is about how people lived rather than about battles and great leaders, with a bit of celebrity interest and genealogy.
This episode in part focused on William Cox, a captain who oversaw convicts transported to Australia. He settled there, became an important land owner, and was commissioned to build a road from Sydney over the Blue Mountains. At the time this was important because there were droughts and promise of fertile lands over the mountains. William Cox hand-picked a team of 30 convicts and constructed the 100 mile road in six months. This is made all the more amazing by the cliffs that had to be cut away at a time before the invention of dynamite.
During the programme, a historian reads from William Cox’s memoirs, in which he recounts the day to day building of the road, a tatty old red book of the sort that would take weeks to find in the library system. Fortunately, there is Project Gutenburg Australia. Living in an information rich world is great.
