Big Mac

WHEN Lachlan Macquarie arrived in Sydney 200 years ago, he was administered several oaths, one of which seems incongruously theological.

Governor Lachlan Macquarie (1822) by Richard Read sr

WHEN Lachlan Macquarie arrived in Sydney 200 years ago as the new governor of the colony, he was administered several oaths, one of which seems incongruously theological.

He had to swear that he did not believe in transubstantiation, the doctrine of the real transformation of the bread of the mass into the body of Christ. Superfluous as it may be to seek such assurances from a Scot, the oath reminds us that Catholics still suffered from legal disabilities that went back to the time of the Glorious Revolution; they could not hold government office or be admitted to Oxford or Cambridge until Catholic emancipation in 1829.

In Australia the situation was made more sensitive by the high proportion of Catholic convicts. Antagonism between Catholic and Protestant remained a significant theme in Australian society until recent decades. Macquarie would come to discover that his worst enemy was the redoubtable Protestant clergyman Samuel Marsden, whom he later described in official correspondence as "discontented, intriguing, vindictive". But religious and ecclesiastical matters were not the highest priorities in 1810.

The first thing to do was to restore order. The previous governor, William Bligh, had been overthrown in a mutiny by the NSW Corps, whose officers assumed they could run NSW for their own benefit. Macquarie had been sent out with a regiment of the regular army and the rank of major-general and rapidly imposed an enlightened, just and energetic rule that contrasts sadly with the incompetence and corruption of recent government in the state.

The bicentenary of his appointment is celebrated in a well-presented exhibition at the State Library of NSW that is not only a survey of the administration and its achievements but succeeds in conveying a sense of the governor himself: an attractive combination of military discipline, integrity, Enlightenment humanism and a belief in the capacity of humans to improve and redeem themselves.

We can see something of the character of the man in his portrait by Richard Read Sr, painted in 1822, just before his return to England. Although Read is far from a great artist, the portrait is an expressive one, showing signs of fatigue and recent illness, but conveying a strong impression of a humane, upright man with a sense of humour and a slightly faraway look.

Macquarie's personality is also revealed through several diary entries. The earliest, in 1793, reveals his touching delight in his new wife, expressed in literary circumlocutions that almost crack under the strain of passion and excitement. Sadly, the young woman died a few years later; he evidently never forgot her, although he did eventually make a second and happy marriage.

The last diary entry is a poignant one made a few weeks before his own death and describes waking up in the middle of the night with a severe headache and acute bowel pain; he called for the doctor, who gave him some relief. But there were no more entries after this.

Another early passage evokes his military career before coming to Australia. The young Macquarie was part of the army besieging the fortress of Seringapatam, the stronghold of Tippoo Sultan in 1799. The defensive walls were breached and an assault launched; in the end the city was taken, as Macquarie relates, within less than an hour of fighting. In Australia, the problems were different and less straightforward than subduing recalcitrant warlords. Although the colony had been founded by another enlightened governor, Arthur Phillip, the first colonists were criminals and their jailers. Some convicts were transported for relative trifles, but many were hardened thieves or worse, and most of the women prostitutes.

The men sent out to guard the convicts were not the finest specimens of humanity either and abuse of all kinds must have flourished. One result was the number of orphans and children abandoned by feckless parents. Macquarie built an orphanage for girls and one for boys to protect them from further abuse and to give them the education and training to become useful members of society.

A society, indeed, was what Macquarie had in mind from the beginning, and it was his determination to help the colony grow into something more than a penal settlement that eventually set him at odds with the Colonial Office in London.

If orphanages were vital to protect the most vulnerable children, schools were an urgent priority for the community in general, particularly when so much of the convict population was illiterate. Macquarie offered education to the Aborigines and set up the Native Institution in Parramatta in 1814.

Feeding the population was an immediate concern, and Macquarie worked hard to increase the amount of land under cultivation and the stock of domestic animals. Concerned with Aboriginal advancement, he established farms at Elizabeth Bay, George's Head and Blacktown, although the indigenous people did not take to this new way of gaining sustenance from the earth.

Adapting to agriculture was not simply a matter of mastering new tools and procedures but of making the fundamental change from one way of life to another.

Trade, business and manufacturing were in a very rudimentary state, hampered by, among other things, a lack of money in the colony. Whenever anyone got his hands on cash, which meant British coin, he would hoard it or send it back to England. To solve this problem, Macquarie took a shipment of 40,000 Spanish dollars and punched their centres out, thus depriving them of value as legal tender anywhere else. The resulting holey dollar and the centre, known as a dump, became coinage for use solely within NSW. Collectively, this coin was known as currency, as distinct from sterling, and hence children born in Australia came to be called currency lads and lasses. The implication was that they were inferior to the sterling breed, but as so often in Australia, the expression was reclaimed as an expression of pride.

The holey dollar is today the logo of the Macquarie Bank, which is named after the governor for another reason: he was the founder, in 1817, of Australia's first bank, the Bank of NSW. There was inevitably much scepticism about setting up a bank in a place such as Sydney. The authorities probably shared the sentiments so wittily expressed in Charles Lamb's essay Distant Correspondents (in Essays of Elia, 1823), in which he imagines thieving to be our national profession and concludes: "Your locksmiths, I take it, are some of your great capitalists."

The most visible legacy of Macquarie's time in Sydney is architectural. He strongly believed in improving the quality of public buildings, instinctively sought designs that were functional and elegant, and was fortunate enough to acquire a fine contemporary architect in Francis Greenway, deported to NSW for forgery.

Perhaps the best of Greenway's buildings in Sydney is St James' Church, at the north end of Hyde Park, then little more than a bare field. Nearby is the convict barracks, with its partly restored perimeter walls (the southwest corner block is missing, but its footprint is marked on the footpath) and the crenellated Government House stables building is today the Conservatorium of Music.

Greenway's buildings spread beyond Sydney following the governor's establishment of satellite towns such as Berrima, Goulburn and Bathurst. One of Macquarie's principal achievements, indeed, was in initiating expeditions to find a way across the Blue Mountains, then to explore the new land opened up beyond them.

Rivers were discovered flowing inland from the mountain watershed and raised the tantalising hope of an inland sea, but they simply petered out in swamplands, the first of many disappointments awaiting the explorers of the Australian interior.

The exhibition includes numerous documents and objects relating to the building works and to exploration. There is a telescope that may have belonged to William Lawson, who crossed the Blue Mountains with Gregory Blaxland and William Wentworth in 1813. It is accompanied, incidentally, by one of a series of annoying blue labels intended, presumably, for children. ("What do you think he said to his companions when they crossed the mountains?")

Macquarie met opposition from several quarters, including for the alleged extravagance of his building program; after his departure, an audit of all the principal buildings in the colony was commissioned by his successor, Thomas Brisbane.

The report, by the clearly hostile S. L. Harris, is open in the exhibition at the entry on Francis Greenway's St Matthew's Church at Windsor. The author declares that the building is poorly executed and that "its permanency cannot be depended upon". Two centuries later, St Matthew's is still standing and often considered Greenway's masterpiece.

What the governor's critics most objected to, however, was his policy towards emancipists, those who had served their sentence and remained in the colony as free men. Macquarie took the view that the talented and the upright among them should be accepted as fully rehabilitated members of society and, where appropriate, given encouragement and responsibilities. He went so far as to appoint emancipists to positions within the civil service and even made two of them magistrates. This enraged those who believed the convict taint could never be washed away, and that even if such men should be free to enjoy civil rights and carry on businesses, they could never really be accepted into the company of honest people.

Marsden refused to serve on a government committee with two emancipists. John Macarthur, the former officer turned farmer who was a founder of sheep breeding in Australia, argued that we should encourage the development of an aristocracy of large rural landholders such as himself, and resist the governor's dangerous encouragement of democratic attitudes.

Under pressure from the complaints of vested interests, the Colonial Office eventually sent out an inspector, John Thomas Bigge, who arrived in 1819 and conducted an extensive survey of the new colony, its administration and social structure. Macquarie resigned in 1820 and left Australia at the end of 1821.

The governor's final address to the people of Sydney is moving and impressive. It begins "Fellow citizens of Australia", and those few words alone sum up much of his character and vision for this country. The term Australia, already used by Matthew Flinders in preference to New Holland, was one that Macquarie had adopted in official correspondence; fellow suggests his democratic inclinations and his attachment to the land he had governed for more than a decade. But citizen is particularly pregnant because a citizen is not a convict, an emancipist or even a free colonist but a member of a nation.