200 Cheers

2010 marks the two hundredth anniversary of the awarding of significant grants of Crown land at Manly. The grants were made to Gilbert Baker and Richard Cheers. In 1789, Cheers, a transported convict, had behaved with such exemplary bravery when the ship he was transported on, The Guardian, was wrecked, that he received a conditional pardon. He may have been the first butcher in the Colony. Certainly he was a butcher in Sydney when he received his land grant, and it is thought that he used his 100 acres of prime central Manly land to accommodate his livestock. Baker was granted 30 acres. In 1811, Cheers placed an advert in the Sydney Gazette warning those who were rustling his cattle ‘at North Harbour’ that they would be prosecuted with the utmost severity of the law. In 1813 he disposed of his grant to D’Arcy Wentworth. A plaque commemorating the land grants to Baker and Cheers was unveiled in 1960 on a boulder on the Fairy Bower walkway.