The
Australian Agricultural Company was established in 1824 by an act of the British Parliament. The aim of the legislation was to further the cultivation and improvement of what it termed "waste land" in the
colony of New South Wales. In January 1826, a company agent, Robert Dawson (1782–1866), set up camp near the shoreline at Port Stephens. He confined his settlement activities to the coast, with farms on Stroud Creek, outposts on the Manning River and stock-mustering in Gloucester Vale. According to a modern historian, despite good reports, Dawson's numerous improvements, were judged inadequate and the area around Port Stephen was seen as disappointing, with useless outskirts, the central zone rocky and steep, and the Gloucester flats water-logged, so that sheep suffered from foot-rot. The Company wanted to push beyond the hills that hemmed the settlement in, and Dawson was dismissed for mismanagement, being replaced by the Arctic explorer,
William Parry. Soon after, Dawson published a vindication, and then a glowing account of the area, together with an account of the Worimi. He described the Worimi as a "mild and harmless race", and attributed any harm they might cause to the maltreatment they received from settlers, who had been shooting them like dogs. Of the situation around Port Stephens, he wrote: There has, perhaps, been more of this done near to this settlement, and on the banks of the two rivers which empty themselves into this harbor, than in any other part of the colony; and it has arisen from the speculators in timber..The natives complained to me frequently, that 'white pellow' (white fellows) shot their relations and friends; and showed me many orphans, whose parents had fallen by the hands of white men, near this spot. The pointed out one white man, on his coming to beg some provisions for his party up the river Karuah, who, they said, had killed ten, and the wretch did not deny it, but said he would kill them whenever he could. It was well for him that he had no white man to depose to the facts, or I would have had him off to jail at once.' ==Lifestyle==