Australia Day: Macquarie, father of the Australian Revolution
Cook and Phillip were titans in their own ways, but Governor Macquarie’s revolutionary measures created a thriving society.
Both James Cook and Arthur Phillip, titans in their different ways, share legitimate claims to the title Father of Australia. Cook’s name will forever be associated with the charting of New Holland’s eastern seaboard and its possession for the British crown, whereas Phillip’s fame rests with his success in founding and stabilising the penal colony at Port Jackson. And yet neither Cook nor Phillip had much say over the future shape, tone and tenor — the character — of Australian society. That distinction rests largely with the colony’s fifth governor, Lachlan Macquarie.
Macquarie, a Scot, was eulogised shortly after this death as the “father” of Australia. And that epitaph holds to this day. The salient question is whether he might, were he to gaze down from some conjectural afterlife, recognise much of his Australia in our Australia.
Macquarie governed the colony of NSW from 1810 to 1821, leaving behind a suite of noble sandstone and brick edifices, most of them built to the designs of his civil architect Francis Greenway — an emancipated forger. They include the lighthouse at South Head (a copy of the original), the fountain and obelisk at Macquarie Place, the castellated stables that now house the Conservatorium of Music, the Church of St James and, facing it, the splendid Hyde Park Barracks.
But the best introduction to Macquarie’s social vision is a remark that was remembered long after he left the colony in 1822, in bad odour with officials at Whitehall for his supposed leniency towards convicts. “There are but two classes of individuals in the country,” Macquarie said. “Those who have been transported. And those who ought to have been.”
Obviously uttered in anger — Macquarie definitely had some anger management issues — it gets to the essence of the man. He simply did not believe, based on the evidence before him, that the felons and former felons under his care were any less worthy of respect than the colony’s free settlers, its rum-trading soldiers, its increasingly wealth landowners, or its clergy. His instinct was not that of a leveller. He did not aim to bring all social classes down to the level of the felonry. He wanted, rather, to elevate the felons to the status of the free. He was — and I think this is the thing that Whitehall found almost impossible to comprehend — inspired by the energy and creativity of the convict class, once it had been released from its collective fetters. The tradition of the Australian “fair go” begins, in many ways, with him.
It was this passion for social elevation that prompted a Tory government in London to dispatch a commissioner, John Thomas Bigge, to inquire into Macquarie’s administration with the express aim of reinforcing the “salutary terror” of transportation. The prison at the end of the earth was getting ideas above its lowly station.
Bigge delivered on his instructions, producing a critical three-volume report that severely damaged Macquarie’s reputation. He died in 1824, still struggling to clear his name.
Australia’s global investment bank, with more than $450 billion in assets under management, takes its name from Lachlan Macquarie, who opened the colony’s first bank and introduced its first currency, the holey dollar: a stylised version of which is the Macquarie Bank logo.
In 1813 Macquarie shipped in 40,000 Spanish dollars and had the core punched out of them to double circulation: the smaller coin was worth 15 pence; the ring-like larger coin was the equivalent of five shillings.
Macquarie, as this innovation shows, was an enterprising governor, and he was a great champion of individual enterprise, even if he was, at the same time, something of an egalitarian. He was an enterprise egalitarian.
The point is nicely made in the first volume of Alan Atkinson’s The Europeans in Australia: A History when he quotes a certain Thomas O’Neil, a tailor by trade, who was given a grant of land at Mosman by Macquarie. The governor implored him: “Tommy O’Neil, here is your order (for the land grant), now let me see you get rich!”
Macquarie was not hostile to wealth — indeed, he coveted it for himself. But he was passionate about the capacity of what we would call the “little man” — or woman — to attain it. At a time of rigid class distinctions in Britain, of mass urban misery, of Luddite protests, Macquarie made upward social mobility his defining social ideal. He became known as the friend of the emancipist class — the class of former criminals who had served their time, been given a form of early parole, or earned a full pardon. In his time up to 150 convicts a year were emancipated as soon as they set foot at Sydney Cove. Macquarie seemed determined to turn transportation into a skilled migration program.
In an 1889 chronicle of early colonial Australia written by the journalist and author Charles White and titled Convict Life in New South Wales and Van Diemen’s Land, the full weight of Macquarie’s emancipist policy is seen with remarkable clarity.
“At the expiration of the ‘time’ to which the convicts had been sentenced,” wrote White, “their freedom was obtained and they were at liberty either to return to England or to settle in the colony … If the liberated convict elected to remain in the colony he received a grant of land — 40 acres (16ha) if unmarried, and if married a portion for his wife and each child. Tools and stock from the Government stores were also loaned to him, and victuals for eighteen months. How many substantial ‘inheritances’ have been built up in this way it would be difficult to say; but if the men who obtained their freedom did not succeed in making themselves comfortable and wiping out the stain of previous wrong-doing the fault was all their own, especially those of them who lived in Governor Macquarie’s time, when every assistance was afforded them to rise in the social scale.
“Governor Macquarie acted on the principle that the colony was founded for the sake of convicts … and endeavoured, therefore, to introduce the wealthier emancipists into the society of his officers, clergy and other ‘respectable’ inhabitants of the colony, even going so far as to make magistrates of some of them. And, let the truth be known, many of them were better qualified to be magistrates, better qualified to be clergy (if morals count many points in the qualification), and better entitled to the term ‘respectable’ than some of those then occupying such positions, and who turned up their eyes in holy horror at Governor Macquarie’s action.”
Macquarie, born in 1762 on the island of Ulva, off the west coast of Mull in the Scottish Inner Hebrides, was descended from the highland clan MacQuarrie. Little is known of his life on Ulva other than that it was a hard life. Cold and hard. Though of noble blood, his family was not wealthy. And yet it was proud.
Much of the Macquarie story — much of its political drama, of its true meaning — has disappeared from view. I’m not sure how to account for this particular rain shadow in our historical imagination. Perhaps it is because his story — his legacy — is political in ways that fit no established pattern. The Australian left, for example, traces its local origins to the legend of the 1880s: in the gold rush, the bushman-nomad and the mining strikes of the 1890s. The progressive tradition — a white, male tradition — is thought to emerge from a distinctively rural milieu. But the traces of Australian egalitarianism are actually to be found in an urban milieu some 70 years earlier, and they take the form of a social ideal championed by an autocratic Scottish governor and his wife Elizabeth.
Macquarie believed in the capacity of public resources to achieve public ends, and yet he was also, as I’ve shown, a believer in the individual and the power of enterprise. He fits no established pattern. He defies ideological cliches.
Earlier generations of schoolchildren learned the story of commissioner Bigge, who left for Sydney in 1819, the same year that 11 protesters at Peterloo, Manchester, were killed in an otherwise peaceful protest for democratic rights. Peterloo and the Bigge commission are entwined: they were repressive gestures aimed at keeping the lower orders down during the period of unrest following the Napoleonic Wars.
But today few school students learn about the Bigge commission. About why prime minister Liverpool felt the need to reinforce the terror of transportation. It was because Macquarie had begun to create a flourishing society from a prison; a society able to generate wealth — from agriculture and trade — and distribute it widely. Where a tailor like Tommy O’Neil might end up with land in Mosman. This is a fantastic political drama — and one with profound significance. I would go so far as to say that it deserves to be discussed as one small and isolated, yet powerful and resonant, moment in the history of the age of revolutions. The French. The American. And perhaps there was an Australian revolution, too.
Bigge’s commission was, in the words of Robert Hughes, a “political disaster” for Macquarie. Bigge was both prosecutor and judge and he went for Macquarie’s jugular. The two clashed, often bitterly.
Commissioner Bigge’s stay in Sydney was marked by one telling exchange with Macquarie. ”Avert the blow you appear to be too much inclined to inflict on these unhappy beings,” Macquarie pleaded with Bigge, “and let the souls now in being, as well as millions yet unborn, bless the day on which you landed on their shores and gave them (when they deserve it) what you so much admire — Freedom!” The mere invocation of the word freedom would have put Bigge in mind of the French Revolution. But Macquarie imagines freedom and order; wealth and stability. Prosperity.
His vision is at once progressive and conservative.
From his first public speech, in 1810, Macquarie promised to protect “the honest, sober, and industrious inhabitant, whether free settler or convict”. He established the foundations of democratic dignity by insisting on the integration of the latter into the broader economy and society. He invited emancipists to Government House. He and Elizabeth befriended them. He tried to appoint William Redfern, the colony’s chief surgeon — Redfern had been part of the Nore rebellion on the Thames and was transported for mutiny — as a magistrate. Bigge’s opposition was so vehement that Macquarie dropped the idea.
Bigge was a snob who believed, as did his English masters, that a criminal would always be tainted by their crime, even a petty thing such as stealing a pig or a bolt of cloth, or setting fire to a bale of straw. He reported back to his masters that Macquarie’s “humanism” had got the better of his reason. This was a time when humanism was the equivalent of radicalism.
What was Macquarie sin? He had favoured — or so Bigge believed — former criminals. He had used government resources to beautify and improve the town. He established schools throughout the colony, for Europeans and Aborigines, “with a view to the decent education and improvement of the rising generation”. He set aside one-eighth of colonial revenue for education at a time when Liverpool’s government invested not a shilling in public schooling.
This was a time when the bishop of London could blithely assert that it was “safest for both the government and the religion of the country to let the lower classes remain in that state of ignorance in which nature has originally placed them”.
In his Pulitzer prize-winning book The Radicalism of the American Revolution, US historian Gordon S. Wood remarks that the idea of a society based on principles other than “birth and family, and even great wealth”, had a special appeal for North American colonists and Scots on the fringes of empire. Macquarie fits nicely into this scheme.
Scotland shaped his social idealism, his social optimism — his belief in the elevation of all social classes — just as Regency England shaped J.T Bigge’s vision of society ruled in the interests of wealth and inherited privilege. Their clash was a defining moment in Australian political history.
Macquarie was not faultless. He was a humanitarian autocrat, but an autocrat nevertheless. He had his demons, and they fought with his better angels.
One of the most ambivalent aspects of his 11-year term was his race policy; or rather policies, for they were twofold.
His first, underlying default position, was one of sympathy. Macquarie offered land grants to accommodating Aborigines such as Bungaree, so-called king of the Broken Bay Tribe, and offered to set them up with the help of Government stores: Bungaree received pigs, ducks and a fishing net. Macquarie proclaimed that he would “always be willing and ready to grant small Portions of Land, in suitable and convenient Parts of the Colony, to such of them as are inclined to become regular Settlers and such occasional Assistance from Government as may enable them to cultivate their Farms”.
This is clearly an assimilationist carrot. Though he was fond of individual Aborigines, and certainly in the case of Bungaree the fondness seems to have been reciprocated, he saw the First Australians as “wild rude people”. In Parramatta he established a Native Institution to educate young Aborigines. But in some cases the pupils were coerced into school — taken from their parents. They were the precursors of the Stolen Generations. The difference was that those who didn’t escape — many squeezed beneath an encircling palisade — left at the end of their schooling.
And yet when around nine white settlers were killed in three separate incidents on the frontier in 1816, Macquarie sent out a retaliatory expedition of three detachments. This was the stick. For the most part the soldiers found smouldering campfires and recently abandoned camps. But early in the morning of April 17 one of Macquarie’s captains, James Wallis, drove his men, muskets blazing, into an occupied Aboriginal camp above the Cataract Gorge. Some were killed and others leapt to their deaths. In all 14 bodies were found.
In discussions about this issue — and it’s very much a living controversy — a few salient facts tend to be overlooked. Macquarie made it clear in his written instructions that his aim was the taking of prisoners. He orders his troops to “apprehend all the Natives you fall in with and make Prisoners of them”. The governor had a list of those who he believed were guilty of the nine settler killings; he was hunting down suspected murderers. It’s true that he does order that any Aborigines killed in the action be strung up on trees — but he does not order his men to kill for this purpose.
And then there is this. Macquarie explicitly orders his men: “You are to spare all Women and Children.”
This is not a military action directed against a people, a race, even a tribe. It’s not even an act of vengeance. It has quite specific aims: the taking of male adult prisoners, as hostages, in order to entice the killers to give themselves up. The one aspect of the Appin tragedy that does reflect poorly on Macquarie is the open-ended nature of his orders. He instructs his soldiers to fire on Aborigines if they attempt to resist or to flee.
Macquarie had fought in the American war and in India, and he knew the Aborigines well enough by 1816 to be able to anticipate exactly what occurred at Appin: that flight would be their first instinct.
And yet we need also, when judging Macquarie’s actions, to consider the complexities of leadership, its terrible demands, and the career soldier’s instinct to meet force with force.
Was the use of force at Appin excessive? Yes. Was this action — a moonlit assault on a sleeping camp resulting in the deaths of women and children, young and old — sanctioned by Macquarie’s orders? I don’t believe so.
Another way of thinking about Macquarie’s legacy is by looking back through the prism of culture. This was something of a golden age for colonial art, literature, architecture and design.
We can contrast commissioner Bigge’s jaundiced view of Macquarie’s colony with that of the French expedition of Louis de Freycinet, which arrived in the same year. Writes Jacques Arago, Freycinet’s illustrator and diarist: “I fancied myself transported into one of our handsomest cities.”
Once we begin to reclaim the narrative of the Macquarie years from its exile in our forgetting, we become re-sensitised to unseen strands in our own brief history. The Appin story should be told, its various strands teased out for discussion, not suppressed for ideological ends. So too should the tale of Macquarie’s social ideals and the concrete measures — at the end of his term he could catalogue more than 250 public works — he took to raise a civilisation from its foundations in a lonely jail.
Charles Darwin saw this clearly when he visited the colony on the Beagle less than 15 years after Macquarie’s departure. He wrote:
“On the whole, as a place of punishment the object is scarcely gained … but as a means of making men outwardly honest — of converting vagabonds, most useless in one hemisphere, into active citizens in another, and thus giving birth to a new and splendid country — a grand Centre of Civilisation — it has succeeded to a degree perhaps unparalleled in history.” This was the Australian Revolution.
Luke Slattery is the author of Mrs M (Fourth Estate $29.99), which is based on these events.
To join the conversation, please log in. Don't have an account? Register
Join the conversation, you are commenting as Logout