Castle Dangerous: The Alfred Pickmore Bussell Estate, Margaret River, Western Australia by Gil Hardwick

Book Description

Secondhand. Good condition. Minor wear to book corners and edges. Previous owner has signed inside page and redacted with black pen.

Alfred Pickmore Bussell, at 14, was the youngest boy and the youngest of nine children of a comfortably middle-class Anglican family from Hampshire, England.

They arrived in the Swan River Colony in the company of rifleman and hero of Waterloo, Captain John Molloy, who had been appointed Resident Magistrate and HM Controller of Customs fat the new administrative settlement of Augusta.

Impoverished by the colonial depression of the 1840s and ostracised for having married 'beneath his station in life', Alfred Bussell embarked on a single-minded endeavour to make his fortune.

The development of young Alfred Bussell's estate is examined in light of the experience of Scottish and Irish farming stock brought out by Governor Stirling, Thomas Peel, Henry De Burgh, the Brockman & Lefroy families, and the Western Australian Company of Bengal to manage their own estates.

The story is told of Ellensbrook homestead and his residence Wallcliffe House on the Margaret River, and the people involved with their building, domestic and farming operations against the commercial opportunities available in the whaling, cattle and timber industries; all contributing in various ways to the accumulation of Alfred's wealth and the restoration of his social position among the colonial elite. (publisher blurb)