The roads and bridges which have been made to every part of the colony, are truly surprising, considering the short period that has elapsed since its foundation.  All these are either the work of, or have been improved by, the present governor; who has even caused a road to be constructed over the western mountains, as far as the depot at Bathurst Plains, which is upwards of 180 miles from Sydney.  The colonists, therefore, are now provided with every facility for the conveyance of their produce to market; a circumstance which cannot fail to have the most beneficial influence in the progress of agriculture.  In return for these great public accommodations, and to help to keep them in repair, the Governor has established toll-gates* in all the principal roads.  These are farmed out to the highest bidder, and were let during the year 1817, for the sum of L257.

[* For a list of tolls, see the Appendix]

The military force stationed in the colony consists ofseven companies of the forty-eighth regiment, and the Royal Veteran Company; which, form an effective body of about seven hundred firelocks.  These have to garrison the two principal settlements at Van Diemen’s Land, to provide a company for the establishment at the Coal River, and to furnish parties for the various towns and outposts of the extended territory of Port Jackson:  so that very few troops remain at head quarters.  The colony is consequently considered to be greatly in need of a further accession of military strength.  Much anxiety is felt on this subject by the generality of the inhabitants, who have not yet forgotten the insurrection which took place when the whole population was not nearly so great as the present amount of the convicts, although the military force was of equal magnitude.  That insurrection indeed was easily quelled; but the result of another, under existing circumstances, would in all probability, be very different.

An equal degree of anxiety is felt, and more particularly by the mercantile part of the community, that a sloop of war, or a king’s vessel of some description, should be stationed in the harbour, both as a protection against the easy possibility of outward assault, and to frustrate the numerous combinations which the convicts are constantly forming, and often too successfully, to carry away the colonial craft, to the certain destruction of their own and the crew’s lives, and to the ruin of the unfortunate owners Not fewer than three piratical seizures of this nature have been effected within the last three years.  On all of these occasions the vessels so seized were run ashore on the uninhabited parts of the coast, and all hands on board, the innocent crews, as well as the abandoned pirates, either perished from hunger, or were immolated by the spears and waddies of the ferocious savages.

When Governor Macquarie assumed the command in 1810, the population was only half its present number; and yet a sloop of war was stationed at Port Jackson, and the military force also was on a much more extended scale.  Why a diminution has thus been made in the means of protection and defence, when there appear to be such strong grounds for their augmentation, merely with reference to the internal state of the colony, it is no easy matter to conjecture.