Records indicate that Covington landed in Sydney in 1840, and he married Eliza Twyford who lived at Stroud, a small town in northern New South Wales, although she had been born in London in 1821.
Covington became Postmaster of Pambula in 1854, and managed an inn called the Forest Oak Inn built on the coast road above the floodplain where the first Pambula township had been repeatedly damaged by floods [REF].