The prospect of an abundant maize harvest was wholly destroyed, and every
other work was suspended for a while, to prepare the ground a second
time this season for wheat. The settlement was yet too young to be able
to withstand such a succession of ill-fortune without its being felt, in
some degree, an inconvenience and expense to the mother country. Had the
settlers themselves in general been of a more industrious turn, they
would have been better prepared for such accidents; and it was much to be
lamented, that, in establishing them on the banks of the Hawkesbury, they
had not with more attention considered the manifest signs of the floods
to which the river appeared to the first discoverers to be liable, and
erected their dwellings upon the higher grounds; or that the inundations
which had lately happened had not occurred at an earlier period, when
there were but few settlers. These indeed had been such as formerly no
one had any conception of, and exceeded in horror and destruction any
thing that could have been imagined.
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