About the middle of the month an alteration took place in the ration; two pounds of flour were taken off, and one pint of peas and one pint of oatmeal were issued in their stead; the full ration, which was first served on the 27th of August last, having been continued not quite three months.

The Supply armed tender, having completed her repairs, sailed for England on the 26th, her commander, Lieutenant Ball, purposing to make his passage round Cape Horn, for which the season of the year was favourable.  Lieutenant John Creswell of the marines went in her, charged with the governor’s dispatches.

The services of this little vessel had endeared her, and her officers and people, to this colony.  The regret which we felt at parting with them was, however, lessened by a knowledge that they were flying from a country of want to one of abundance, where we all hoped that the services they had performed would be rewarded by that attention and promotion to which they naturally looked up, and had an indisputable claim.

At this time the public live stock in the settlement consisted of one stallion aged, one mare, two young stallions, two colts, sixteen cows, two calves, one ram, fifty ewes, six lambs, one boar, fourteen sows (old and young), and twenty-two pigs.

The ground in cultivation at and about Parramatta amounted to three hundred and fifty-one acres in maize, forty-four in wheat, six in barley, one in oats, two in potatoes, four in vines, eighty-six in garden ground, and seventeen in cultivation by the New South Wales corps.  In addition to these there were one hundred and fifty acres cleared to be sown with turnips, ninety-one acres were in cultivation by settlers, twenty-eight by officers civil and military at and about Sydney; and at Parramatta one hundred and forty acres were inclosed and the timber thinned for cattle; making a total of nine hundred and twenty acres of land thinned, cleared, and cultivated.

The platform at the west point of the cove was completed during this month.  The flag-staff had been for some time erected, and the cannon placed on the platform.  A corporal’s guard was also mounted daily in the building which had been used as an observatory by Lieutenant Dawes.

The mortality during this month had been great, fifty male and four female convicts dying within the thirty days.  Five hundred sick persons received medicines at the end of the month.  That list however was decreasing.  The extreme heat of the weather during the month had not only increased the sick list, but had added one to the number of deaths.  On the 4th, a convict attending upon Mr. White, in passing from his house to his kitchen, without any covering upon his head, received a stroke from a ray of the sun which at the time deprived him of speech and motion, and, in less than four-and-twenty hours, of his life.  The thermometer on that day stood at twelve o’clock at 943/4 degrees and the wind was at NW.