A natural history of the Ham Common, the lands sandwiched between Richmond and Windsor - two of Governor Macquarie's five towns

Unique in Australia, three Commons were set aside in the Hawkesbury River catchment for the exclusive use of the colony's free settlers to graze their stock. One of these, Ham Common, was sandwiched between the towns of Windsor and Richmond. In this paper, I provide a thumb-nail sketch of the fragmentation of this Common. The first major section to be excised was for the railway, subsequently land has been excised for a racecourse, Hawkesbury Agricultural College (HAC), the Royal Australian Air Force Richmond (RAAF) Base, and Hawkesbury Showground. Effectively all that remains as the Ham Common is a roadside corridor wedged between the RAAF Base and the railway reserve. The remaining remnant vegetation of the Ham Common is restricted to approximately 575 ha on the grounds of the University of Western Sydney (formally HAC). Even this bushland is fragmented, abutted by roadways, power-line corridors, the University's infrastructure, and open agricultural lands. The data presented in this chapter are opportunistic records of species recorded since the early 1990s. Based on these data, both taxa of protected invertebrates of the area, Cumberland Plain Land Snail Meridolum corneovirens and jewel beetles Buprestidae, are present. Of the vertebrates predicted to be present, 69.2% of reptiles, 80% frogs, and 60.1% mammals, and 94 bird species were recorded. Many of the predicted species not encountered are nocturnal, or otherwise may not be observed without targeted searches, although some species have undoubtedly become locally extinct.