Richard Ridge - COMING IN 2024

This book adds to the stories of a largely forgotten part of Australian colonial history, the early settlers of the Hawkesbury district, near Sydney. 

In the pages of documented history we first meet Richard Ridge in 1789, literate and numerate, twenty-three years old and on the move outside London. His family of origin, yeomen farmers, appeared quite well-to-do. Travelling with his ass, he was about to be caught up in a crime. Innocently, it seems. 

‘On the move’ he remained for the rest of his life, being transported to Australia with the Third Fleet and eventually spending much of his time on horseback, serving as bailiff, an officer of the court system in New South Wales.

We’ve already met his young wife-to-be, Margaret Forrester, in ‘Sentenced to Debt: Robert Forrester, First Fleeter’, (available through BookPOD), my book about her parents, who also arrived as convicts. Almost thirty years younger than Richard, she was born in 1795 in a primitive hut beside the beautiful Hawkesbury River, on the other side of the world to Richard’s birthplace in Oxfordshire.

Her father’s original land grant of 30 acres was very flood-prone. From 1804 the Forresters lived on the family’s second farm, a 70 acre grant containing some high land where a home could be built above the flood-zone. For three years from 1806 their next-door neighbour was Richard Ridge, renting the McKellar property known as ‘Argyle Farm’, but active in his new role as bailiff.

He led a very different lifestyle to that of the other early settlers of the Hawkesbury and his strong 'protector' traits became an interesting theme of his story. The publication date of late 2023 has been postponed to 2024.