How colonial Australians travelled

Tom Roberts, Bailed Up.

There were plenty of coaches after the 1820s, as Friedrich Gerstäcker was aware in the 1850s. Wanting to travel across country from Sydney to Adelaide, even though he had walked in America from the Niagara to Texas, he felt he had done enough walking, and there was a drought that ruled out going by horseback, because the cost of horse feed was then so high,

…and therefore, following the advice of some gentlemen in Sydney, I went with the mail-coach to Albury, a little town on the banks of the Hume, to see if I should be able to get a canoe there, or, if not, make one myself, and try the river.
— Friedrich Gerstäcker, Narrative of a Journey Around the World, 398.

Private contractors carried people, goods and the mail, and the government cared only about the mails. The way passengers were treated, he said, was “a sin to humanity”. The journey began in a grossly overcrowded coach, which was replaced by a wagon (and rain), and then a two-wheeled cart. One passenger sat beside the coachman, the other two faced backwards, losing their hats to low branches, and in fear of being thrown off on uphill sections.

Gerstäcker mentioned that one cart was marked “licensed to carry nine persons”. He said no sober magistrate could get nine people into it, but he could explain the licence:

The mail contractors, who make an enormous profit by the business, invite the magistrate, whenever there is another wagon to be inspected, to a good breakfast, and there these worthy members of Themis sit till they are thought in a fit state for the occasion—that is, to see the wagon double—when he is perfectly right in licensing the cart for the accommodation of nine passengers, and calling the thing a “royal mail.”
— Friedrich Gerstäcker, Narrative of a Journey Around the World, 406 – 407.

From there, he headed for Albury, which had:

… a court-house, a ferry-boat, five taverns, and—a great improvement in the rising civilization of the interior of Australia—a steam-mill, set up by an enterprising English gentleman, a Mr. Heaver. There are also three stores, a white and blacksmith, carpenter, and other tradesmen in the little place.
— Friedrich Gerstäcker, Narrative of a Journey Around the World, 408.

For now, we will leave him by the river, hewing a dug-out canoe (he was the first to voyage down the Murray), until later in this chapter. Instead, let us turn now to Thomas M’Combie, who went by Cobb and Co., from Geelong to Ballarat.

As he describes it, he went to the booking office of Cobb’s line and got a ticket for the morning coach, explaining that Cobb was an American who had returned long ago to his native country, having started a service from Melbourne to Castlemaine, after the gold discoveries. Cobb had imported the best American coaches, won all the customers, then “he sold out, and retired with a moderate fortune”.

At five minutes to six the coach, drawn by six grey horses, drew up before the office of Cobb and Co., Malop Street. In a few seconds the whole fifteen seats were occupied; the clerk examined each passenger’s ticket, which apparently was satisfactory. Six o’clock, chimed, and with a loud shout to the horses from the driver, we went off at a hard canter.
—  Thomas M’Combie, Australian Sketches, 184.

The company used American ‘Concord’ coaches with leather straps instead of iron springs, giving a softer, rolling ride, though one that made some passengers sick. Pulled by eight horses, the coaches had 12 to 18 people inside, and many more outside, often totalling 40 or 50 passengers. Twenty years after the company started, Anthony Trollope thought the vehicles were comfortable enough:

Cobb’s coaches have the name of being very rough,—and more than once I have been warned against travelling by them…This journey I made and did not perish at all;—and on arriving at Rosedale had made up my mind that twenty hours on a Cobb’s coach through the bush in Australia does not inflict so severe a martyrdom as did in the old days a journey of equal duration on one of the time-famous, much-regretted old English mails.
— Anthony Trollope, Australia and New Zealand, 413-414.

With good horses on the rare good road, coaches might reach 20 km/hr, but they stopped to change horses, and for passengers to take comfort breaks. Coaches averaged about 13 km/hr. The coastal steamer was rather faster and was more comfortable, if you weren’t seasick—but that might happen in a coach, anyhow!

William Kelly said the other companies were inclined to call upon passengers to get down and walk through mud, to the extent that people thought they might as well walk, and save their money. On top of that, the coaches broke and broke down, often needing a blacksmith to fix them. Cobb’s coaches, rather than being cramped, and plated, and bolted with iron, used leather springs, well suited to corduroy roads and broken forest tracks. (William Kelly, Life in Victoria or Victoria in 1853, and Victoria in 1858, vol 1, 280 – 81.)