William Oldrey
Captain William Oldrey (1787—1851) was an officer in the Royal Navy and later a colonial settler of New South Wales, Australia.
[1][2][3] While a Lieutenant aboard Undaunted, and in command of a boat from that frigate, on 3 May 1813, he boarded and took a French brig, while under cannonade from the batteries of Marsaille.
[1] He had his naval pension and some savings, and emigrated to New South Wales, leaving Plymouth aboard Andromache, on 8 October 1838.
[8] He arrived at a time, when the colonial economy was booming, largely as a result of the wool and whaling industries, and a supply of cheap labour in the form of transported convicts.
His land almost surrounded the town, except that in the north (including modern-day Mossy Point) was a large block owned by the Sydney merchants Hughes & Hosking.
[17] Broulee, at the time, was a new, very remote settlement, in which the rule of colonial law was barely established, which lay near the southern boundary of the Nineteen Counties.
[22][23] When Larmer had surveyed the new settlement, he had stated that Broulee "appears not to possess .. any favourable feature for the formation of a town".
[27] As the earliest settlement in the region, Broulee became the administrative center with a court house, store and post office.
Sheridan doggedly persisted in seeking justice, and Hawdon was eventually tried and found guilty, by a jury, in the Supreme Court, nearly a year later.
The settlers, at and around Broulee, were not the original inhabitants; the area lay on the traditional lands Walbanga people, a group of the Yuin.
The breastplates, among other inscriptions in English, carried the works "Bale me jarrad" (I'm not afraid) and an engraved illustration of a sailing vessel.
[37] As the local magistrate, Oldrey had responsibility for the annual distribution of blankets to the surviving Yuin, and complained that the government supplied these in insufficient numbers.
[39] Prospective buyers of land could visit Jervis Bay and Broulee aboard a steamer, Sophia Jane, in October 1841.
All that is known for certain is that the road was have followed part of a cart route blazed by Charles Nicholson, from Broulee to the Monaro, in 1841; Nicholson had shifted half a ton of tobacco from Broulee to the Monaro, in fourteen days, over his crudely made cart route, and was planning to return, carrying six bales of wool.
[42] The apparent failure of the Wool Road, with its port of South Huskisson, provided Olrey with a window of opportunity to make Broulee the seaport for the Southern Tablelands and the Monaro.
[41] Although the road was never built, from around 1842, Broulee had become a port at which coastal ships called regularly to carry cargoes and passengers.
Grand plans, such as Oldrey had for Broulee and roads to the inland, became too risky to contemplate and finance dried up.
A number of prominent citizens found themselves insolvent, including Oldrey, who was made bankrupt in January 1844.
Oldrey lived for the last years of his life at Port Macquarie, on the Mid North Coast of New South Wales.
In his later years he was described as, "the same warm hearted old fellow", but it was also said about him, "Good nature, shortsightedness as to his men and long credit ruined him".
[61][62] With continuing high recent rates of population growth, the seaside village of Broulee is at last extending its urban footprint, over part of the land that Captain Oldrey hoped to sell for profit in the 1840s.
