"Educated for the church, Cozens ran away and joined the Royal Horse Guards in 1833. He was court-martialled for threatening a superior officer and sentenced to seven years transportation in New South Wales. He describes a period on board a hulk at Woolwich, where he worked in the laundry, and gives a detailed description of the layout and conditions on the ship Woodbridge which transported him to Port Jackson. On arrival in March 1840 he was accommodated at the Hyde Park Barracks which he describes, under Superintendent Timothy Lane, as a 'perfect accumulation of vice and infamy'. Cozens was appointed to the mounted border police in the Maneroo (Monaro) district and travelled with a dray to Cooma via Parramatta, Liverpool, Berrima and Goulburn. His narrative includes descriptions of landscape, native plants, animals and birds, and his impressions of the Aborigines at Cooma, including black trackers. He discusses travelling in the bush, bivouacking and making damper, the availability of timber and the construction of a bush hut, and describes some experiences with bushrangers, recounting stories about Jack Donohue. Following a year in Cooma, Cozens returned to Sydney to become first clerk at Parramatta Gaol for two years, then clerk at Liverpool Hospital. He obtained a ticket-of-leave after he had been in the colony four years and went to Yass, where he stayed until his sentence expired, working for a period in the Yass Police Force and as a census taker in 1846. Throughout this period Cozens had maintained contact with his respectable, well-to-do family in England and they paid for his passage home" (Walsh and Hooton 40-1).
Source
Walsh, Kay and Joy Hooton. Australian Autobiographical Narratives : An Annotated Bibliography. Canberra : Australian Scholarly Editions Centre, University College, ADFA and National Library of Australia, 1993.
