By Brent Richards (descendant).

August 2025 marks 200 years since the arrival in the convict colony of Sydney, New South Wales, of George 'Dusty Bob' Smith who later became a much-loved character of Dubbo and the Western Plains in early colonial times.

Dusty, as he liked to be called, was born in 1808 into a London Cockney family of costermongers (a pony-and-cart travelling green-grocer). This was a trade he plied – and which would later serve him well – until found guilty of stealing a watch in 1824. At the age of only 16, Dusty was sentenced to death by hanging. Awaiting the gallows in London’s infamous Newgate Prison, the punishment was commuted to a life sentence in Australia. No stranger to trouble, in the months’ long voyage out, he was whipped a total of 12 times for fighting!

In 1826, he was then sent to the pitiless “inland Norfolk Island” – namely, the Wellington Valley convict stockade – where he acquired experience in farming. Then, for the next 15 years or so, Dusty worked for the Lowe family throughout the region, mainly as a drover, stockman, and superintendent of their cattle stations. As he could not read, he had to take his mail to the neighbouring cattle station to have the contents read aloud; a joke on poor old Dusty Bob that never abated. Life on the frontier was no joke though: one time on the Castlereagh River he was robbed by bushrangers who were later hanged for the cold-blooded murder of his neighbour.

However in 1843, 18 years after his arrival, Dusty received a “conditional” pardon, meaning that he was free, but must never return to England. With an admirable spirit of enterprise, he wasted no time in getting ahead, and soon ran a total of five cattle stations in the Marthaguy-Bundemar district, fattening cows for the Sydney market and breeding hundreds of stock-horses on the vast western summer grass plains rich in the minerals of the volcanic soils beneath. Dusty was one of the spearheads of a “western” pastoral culture that pre-dates the famed American west. Six feet tall (183cm) in his socks he was, atop his 17-hands high stock horse, an imposing figure when he and his fellow stockmen drafted cattle in such a daring hell-for-leather manner that would make a modern rider blush.

Dusty saw the potential in the droving crossroads that would become known as the village of Dubbo. He established the first commercial venture in the town: fittingly, a kind of 19th century "motel" for weary travellers and stockmen near to the corner of Macquarie and Bultje Streets. This business and his residence overlooked the surrounding land, and became known as Dusty Bob's Paddock. It was here that he was approached by the incoming and ambitious settlers, Jean Emile Serisier and Nicholas Hyeronimus, in the late 1840s; Serisier established the town’s first general store in 1848, and Hyeronimus was a famous early inn owner.

Part 2 of this story will continue and conclude in next week's Dubbo Photo News.