Chapter 5
A Nation of Second Chances
In This Chapter
Envisioning a new purpose for NSW: Governor Macquarie
Understanding Macquarie’s main areas of reform
Dealing with the consequences of the Macquarie regime
Taking a battering from outside forces
Attempting to fix it all with one Bigge inspector
Returning to England in disgrace but leaving a legacy
Within 20 years of the establishment of NSW as a colony, it had become a place of second chances — a place where people who had made a mess of their lives in Britain could wipe the slate clean and start again. For convicts, this was the reality of the colonial world that they’d been living in since 1788 — ever since the first few nightmarish starvation years — but this wasn’t what the Colonial Office, and most of the powerful people in Britain, wanted the colony to be.
The Colonial Office sent out a series of governors (such as Governor Bligh) to try to fix up the mess, but it didn’t end well for any of them — particularly Bligh, who ended up being arrested by the NSW Corps (refer to Chapter 4).
After the Bligh fiasco, the Colonial Office figured they had a troublesome colony on their hands — after all, you don’t arrest the governor unless you’re a rag-tag rebellious lot, right? So the next governor to arrive — Lachlan Macquarie, veteran of the American War of Independence and various skirmishes in India — was told to expect a colony gone wild, full of rapacious profiteers, angry and drunken ex-cons, and a place ripe for rebellion. Macquarie’s instructions were to quickly restore some order.
But something strange happened when Macquarie turned up in NSW in 1810: He liked what he saw. Then, to top it off, he went rogue. Macquarie wasn’t particularly interested in punishing convicts, or in making the place so brutal that it scared Britain’s would-be crims into behaving themselves. He embraced the fact that the colony gave convicts a second chance and made it official policy to reward people who had turned their lives around. If they succeeded and became prosperous, influential or simply useful, Macquarie wanted to know them. This was in complete opposition to what the Colonial Office believed official policy should be.
In the end a stern-faced commissioner was sent out from England to inquire into Macquarie’s rule, and it was found wanting. Macquarie returned to Britain and died a few years later, bitter and unappreciated. But in Australia the mark he left was deep. He ruled New South Wales for 11 years — from 1810 to 1821 — and when they buried him they inscribed his tombstone with the words, ‘Father of Australia’. The colony was already a nation of second chances before Macquarie arrived. But he was the first governor to try to make it official.
In this chapter, I cover the wide-ranging effects of Macarthur’s rule and the outside forces (and one Commissioner Bigge) that brought him down.
Macquarie’s Brave New World
Governors in this period of British colonial rule generally turned up at the various tin-pot little outposts they’d been assigned to, imposed His Majesty’s will as much as they reasonably could, then got out (with hopefully a promotion), and headed off to the next assignment. The list of governors who began to identify with the interests of the colonists, against the British government’s orders, is about as short as your little finger. Shorter even.
To start with, Macquarie seemed to have had no intention of varying this pattern. Having spent 30 years with the military, and seen postings that took him from New York and Charleston in the American Revolution through Jamaica to various battles and cities in India, his chief concern when being assigned to NSW was that such a distant and unimportant posting would mean he’d be overlooked for any upcoming promotions. But then, after arriving, the bizarre happened. He fell in love with the place, with the new kind of world that people were making in NSW.
Converting Macquarie
After Bligh, and because of the bad press circulating from various disgruntled evangelical Christians and people of influence (refer to Chapter 4 for more on these behind-the-scenes players), Macquarie arrived in NSW fully expecting a crime-ridden, chronically inebriated nightmare hellhole. Instead, he found a social experiment that had been bubbling along for some 20 years. Starting out with the maligned ‘dregs’ of British society, the unplanned experiment seemed to show that if you took even criminals and misfits and gave them
1. A chance to start again
2. In a new place entirely
3. With plenty of chances to get ahead
Lo and behold, people often did succeed.
Since 1788, the feckless, the jobless, the impulsive and just plain foolish, not to mention the cunning and nasty, had been extracted from their usual habitations and haunts and used to begin a new society. Remarkably quickly they filled out practically all the social and economic niches of 18th-century Britain that were available for the taking in a new world. By the time Macquarie arrived, ex-convicts were landholders, farmers, traders, tradesmen, retailers, ship owners, manufacturers and professionals such as doctors and lawyers.
One ship’s captain, reporting back to Sir Joseph Banks with some contempt on the improved situations of two ex-convict businessmen, stated: ‘I am informed they each have handsome houses at Sydney, keep their gig [carriage], with saddle horses for themselves and friends, have two sorts of Wine, and that of the best quality on their Tables at Dinner . . .’ Banks may have despised this but Macquarie thought it was wonderful.
As well as the very successful, there was everyone else — the skilled and unskilled labourers, the servants, the publicans and innkeepers, the dozens of professionals, clerks and administrators, the jailers and constables. Many of them, from top to bottom, were the classic ‘lower orders’, who in Britain had comprised the bulk of the soldiers and the criminal classes. Out here in the colony they were filling practically every social role and occupation (including, of course, the drunks and repeat offenders — but these hard cases Macquarie didn’t mention quite so often). All in all the social and economic world of Sydney and its hinterland, and soon enough in Van Diemen’s Land also, was starting to take robust shape.
Macquarie’s stroke of genius was to recognise it and seize upon it — not try to turn it back to what the original planners or current ministers in London expected, insisted or wanted it to be but, instead, fast-track it. He recognised the positive outcomes of this (accidental) social experiment, and began to champion it.
Early on in his governorship Macquarie decided that the convicts, ex-convicts and others who were making a go of it in NSW weren’t the problem — they were the purpose of the place. Rather than treat the colony as simply an outpost of Britain’s imperial will, he began to see it from the convicted criminals’ point of view. The colony was there as a land of opportunity for the people living there and it should be governed with their interests in mind. With a policy of part goodhearted benevolent patron, part authoritarian despot, he endeavoured to make sure that generations of convicts’ descendants who came afterwards would remember him warmly.
This went against express instructions from the Colonial Office and general British opinion.
Living under the Macquarie regime
Macquarie believed in giving ex-convicts ‘every equality’, which he started pushing for in his official correspondence from quite early on. He gathered successful ex-convicts around him and gave them prominent positions, making them magistrates, police superintendants, surveyors and architects — and even making one a poet laureate. They were all warmly welcomed into ‘society’, invited by the governor and his wife to receptions and dinners at Government House.
Macquarie also believed in treating newly arrived convicts as if their slate was cleaned of past behaviour. In this he was helped by the fact that, like previous governors, he had precious little information about the crime or character of those getting off the boat: A note about the sentence, a behaviour report from the hulk he or she had been transported from, and that was about it. This bureaucratic inoperativeness worked in Macquarie’s favour. The way he saw it, things started over when you arrived as a convict in Australia. Your behaviour, your diligence and (most of all) your usefulness was what counted most. The chance for convicts to start again was the priority.
Macquarie’s Main Points of Attack
Macquarie wasn’t content with just occupying the colony — he wanted to push outward past and through previously impassable geographic barriers (like, say, the Blue Mountains; see the sidebar ‘Getting through the Blue Mountains blues’).
Macquarie also wanted to put indigenous relations on a better footing. Macquarie figured that if he could act like an all-powerful chief with white colonists, he could act like a benevolent chief with the local Aborigines as well. The idea of having annual tribal gatherings, where he dispensed gifts and authority, and opening a school for Aboriginal children to be taught reading, writing and the various skills of European civilisation, appealed to him a great deal.
When it came to the convicts, while Macquarie was surprised and pleased at how successful convicts had become (see preceding section), he also wanted them to behave in a more orderly, less raucous fashion. He did his best to make this a reality too.
Pushing expansion
Macquarie was keen to get the colony of NSW moving even faster, pushing the expansion of both settlement and the economy. Declaring new townships at the drop of hat, he was also big on road construction and public buildings. This was the Macquarie vision: To not simply cut costs and keep things quiet, but to build the place up.
Expanding settlement
Macquarie encouraged expansion of settlement by establishing new peripheral settlements in the colony, such as Windsor, Wilberforce and Liverpool. But the biggest challenge to expansion was the Blue Mountains, which lay in a ring around the settlement. Various attempts had been made to penetrate the forbidding range since the first few months of the First Fleet’s arrival at Port Jackson, but so far none had been successful. The arable land available in the settlement was by now nearing exhaustion and Sydney was in danger of becoming a permanent ‘limpet port’ — a small-scale settlement that clung to the side of an unknown continent, depending solely on its maritime flow, ready for abandonment if and when the British Government decided to give up the project as a bad exercise. People didn’t even know what lay on the other side of the mountains. Desert? An inland sea? Or, as some convicts continued to believe, China?
In June 1813, three settlers — Gregory Blaxland, William Lawson and William Wentworth — and their convict servants finally found a way over the Blue Mountains, discovering enough grassland on the other side to ‘feed all the stock in the colony for thirty years’. Macquarie sent his surveyor, George Evans, to investigate and Evans returned greatly impressed with what he had found: ‘I cannot speak too much of the country. The increase of stock for some 100 years cannot overrun it’.
A new vista of what Australia might become opened up, and Macquarie set to work building a road out along the route through the mountains and proclaimed a new township — Bathurst.
Expanding the economy
Massive economic expansion went with settlement expansion, as Macquarie ordered the building of roads, public buildings and even parks to be commenced.
Shortly after arriving in the colony, Macquarie wrote to Britain, asking for more convicts to be sent out. Previous governors had asked for specific trades (for example, ‘send more carpenters!’) but Macquarie was the first to ask for more, full stop, arguing, ‘The prosperity of the Country depends on their numbers’. He also abandoned government farming (although he’d be forced to bring it back later in his administration, due to circumstances outside his control; see ‘Coping with the deluge following Waterloo’ later in this chapter), thinking economic improvement was more likely with private settlers.
Under this scheme of rapid economic expansion, the skilled manual labourers — masons, builders, blacksmiths, sawyers, splitters, fencers and carpenters — continued to be the worker ‘aristocracy’, earning exceedingly good wages. The unskilled variously became house servants, wharfies, quarry-workers, farmhands, assistants in offices and warehouses, or workers in the small manufacturing workshops that were proliferating.
Conciliating (and pursuing) Indigenous Australians
Macquarie was keen to make his mark with the Aboriginal community as well.
In October 1814, Macquarie wrote to Lord Bathurst in the Colonial Office, suggesting an Aboriginal school be established in Parramatta as part of an endeavour to win the hearts and minds of the younger Aboriginal generation, and to persuade the parents to allow their children to learn some of the European ways, of cultivation, literacy and sedentary ‘civilised’ society. On receiving Bathurst’s approval, the school was soon in place.
Macquarie’s attempt to conciliate Aborigines was also manifested a few months later, when he held the first of what would become an annual ‘gathering of tribes’ in Parramatta. Here, Macquarie played the ‘big chief’ (he fancied himself as a bit of a Scottish Highland chieftain), handing out gifts and good humour to Indigenous Australians who travelled up to three hundred kilometres to attend the gathering.
Macquarie wanted all those beneath him to prosper — both convicts and Aborigines — as long as they acknowledged they were beneath him in rank and authority. In 1816 Macquarie wasted little time mounting punitive military expeditions when some Aborigines seemed set to continue their ‘perverse’ hostility to his good intentions and the settlement at large. He declared individual Aborigines as wanted outlaws when whites and blacks clashed, and declared martial law on both Aborigines and bushrangers when needed in regions where conflict was most rife.
Re-ordering a town, re-ordering convict behaviour
Macquarie may have been impressed with the industry evident in the new colony of NSW, but he still believed things should be done in a certain (ordered and moral) way. Although not really in the way instructed by the Colonial Office, Macquarie did introduce some order to the settlement.
Introducing order to Sydney’s layout
Macquarie proved himself different to the previous governor (Governor Bligh) when he was able to refashion the town of Sydney without residents threatening him with revolution. Unlike Bligh, who called into question ordinary people’s property rights and threatened them with summary eviction (refer to Chapter 4 for more about Bligh and his autocratic ways), Macquarie was able to impose change in a way which seemed orderly rather than arbitrary.
Hello NSW: Call me Lachlan, and I’ll call everything Macquarie
Macquarie made a lasting impact on life in Australia — and on maps in Australia. He made sure he was remembered by naming things after himself, and encouraging others (explorers, surveyors, builders and designers) to do the same. Here Macquarie didn’t stint.
In Australia today you can find Macquarie
Lakes
Fields
Rivers
Passes
Lighthouses
Marshes
Harbours
Islands
Piers
Pubs
Hills
You name it — Macquarie’s name will be on it.
In October 1810, a new town plan was introduced for Sydney, which included new street names, washhouses, widened roads — and the creation of a certain Macquarie Place. A month later it was announced that a brand new hospital was to be built (for the price of a five-year rum trading monopoly to the three men who promised to build it — pragmatism in action!). A year later further plans were introduced — there would be a new animal pound and a turnpike on the Parramatta Road. These were followed by a lighthouse on South Head, a new fort, and plenty more churches — with a very large fountain in Sydney topping it all off.
Macquarie ensured that whatever came next in the colony, no-one was going to forget him in a hurry. His mark would be evident everywhere, on maps and on buildings, roads and other structures. As a result, the shanty metropolis began to show a lot more orderliness.
Introducing order to the population’s behaviour
Macquarie was keen to introduce orderliness to all aspects of colonial life, and so he encouraged the general population to settle down in their behaviour and lives.
Hundreds of men and women were living in ‘common-law marriages’, or what are known today as de facto relationships (and what shocked evangelical ministers at the time called the keeping of ‘concubines’!). Macquarie tried to get men and women to make it all official, in a church, with the registry. This was part of his plan to make the whole colony more settled, along with his building of churches and encouragement of schools.
Macquarie was also strict in his treatment of convicts. Even though he liked nothing more than helping ex-convicts attain the social prominence that their material wealth and industrious activity had (in his eyes at least) earned them, that didn’t mean he thought convicts should be allowed to do whatever they wanted.
In 1814, Macquarie declared sternly that convicts could no longer swap between masters. If a neighbouring settler offered you a better deal, more free time or more pay, tough — you had to stick with the master you’d been assigned to.
Macquarie took his control of convicts further in 1819 when, to groans from convicts all round, the Hyde Parke Barracks opened.
In a pretty clear illustration of the power dynamics in the early colony, Macquarie couldn’t just order the convicts into the new barracks. Many convicts would have preferred to continue living wherever they’d already found lodgings — staying with their mates or a nice landlady perhaps. So Macquarie threw a big feast — offering the convicts a party, with plenty of rum — and the convicts fell for it. In they went, with the big door locked behind them.
For those who Macquarie coaxed into the Hyde Parke Barracks, there was no more task work and knocking off when the job was done at about midday. Now work would continue from sunrise to sunset, with two short meal breaks. Finally, 30 years after the so-called prison colony was founded, something resembling a prison to put the convicts in was opened. Convicts were still allowed out on weekends, and they made the most of it — thefts and arrests for drunkenness rose steeply at the end of each week.
Becoming a Governor Ahead of His Time
Macquarie may have said that he only wanted to let ex-convicts be readmitted to their previous rank in society, but everyone could see it was much more than that. To Macquarie, your previous ‘rank’ in the British social hierarchy didn’t matter. If you made a great success of yourself and your operations in NSW, Macquarie welcomed you. This would cause problems for Macquarie among the ‘Exclusives’ within the new colony and, eventually, with the Colonial Office in Britain.
Stirring up trouble with the free folk
Most of those who’d arrived free in the colony mingled, cohabited and married with the convicts and ex-convicts without any real worries. But a small minority (there’s always some . . .) went out of their way to hold themselves aloof and ‘exclusive’ (which became their nickname) whenever possible.
The Exclusives were a small group of free colonists who had kept themselves separate from close social involvement with the convicts and the emancipated. They were a handful of families who, although themselves from generally humble or low-class backgrounds, had made it very rich in the colony. But while they had all had close business involvement with convicts and ex-convicts (it was impossible to get anything done otherwise), they had made sure to marry and socialise with those others who had no taint of past criminal conviction. This made for very small tea parties, and a great deal of social anxiety.
With the arrival of Macquarie, the Exclusives found themselves dealt a governor who not only insisted on appointing ex-convicts along with Exclusives to positions of responsibility — as magistrates, for example, or as fellow board members on public trusts — but also enjoyed their company so much he invited them to receptions at Government House, to pleasant Sunday dinners and christenings.
This was exciting stuff — for everyone bar the Exclusives. For these people it was frightening — the stigma of coming to a convict colony was bad enough. If word started getting back to Britain that felons and free settlers intermingled easily throughout society, just think of the disgrace! They feared social contamination. And, more than that, they thought, strongly, that if you’d committed a crime and been transported, it just wasn’t right that afterwards you’d be treated like everyone else.
Creating outrage back home
The Exclusives in NSW sent impassioned letters about the state of affairs under Macquarie to various people in power and with influence in Britain. And most people in Britain completely shared the Exclusives’ attitudes.
Although Macquarie and people in NSW might have thought it perfectly reasonable that an emancipated convict shouldn’t be forever marked, socially and legally, by their previous crime, in Britain it was shocking. There, a person convicted of any of the various larcenies, embezzlements, forgeries or assaults that those transported had committed was ejected forever from respectable society. There could be no coming back. And your legal status was forever altered too — even after serving time, a convicted felon couldn’t give evidence in court or hold property.
In NSW, the economic and legal order would simply collapse under the regimen upheld in Britain — convicts owned more than half the wealth in the colony, frequently used the courts to sue and protect their various rights, and were involved with just about every economic transaction that took place. Different realities had bred different attitudes, which Macquarie discovered and then championed.
While the Exclusives were the singular minority in the colonies, their attitudes reflected what most people thought back home. Members of the British Parliament, and readers of popular periodicals, were duly outraged when they heard and read that a society made up largely of ex-criminals had so lost its sense of respectable decency that ex-thieves not only enjoyed the most luxurious mansions in Sydney town but served as magistrates and dined regularly with the governor. Had the whole colony gone completely mad?! This was a world too topsy-turvy for good sense.
Big World Changes for little NSW
Trouble was brewing for Macquarie among the Exclusives in NSW and those in power in Britain. The situation was then made worse by forces largely outside his control — in particular, the end of the Napoleonic War.
Coping with the deluge following Waterloo
If there was a moral Macquarie might have learned from his time in NSW, it might have been a rueful ‘Be careful what you wish for’. Although his request for more convicts to keep the engines of prosperity and growth turning over had been roundly ignored for the first five years of his administration, from 1816 it was answered with a deluge to make up for the scarcity of the last 25 years.
In 1815, the Duke of Wellington combined his British forces with Prussian and other forces at the Battle of Waterloo to defeat Napoleon’s French Army and end, finally, the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. These had been raging, on and off (with more on than off), for some 25 years. Just as an outbreak of peace in the early 1780s led to a rapid rise in crime from returned soldiers and sailors in Britain (refer to Chapter 3) so here, too, the defeat of Napoleon meant 400,000 soldiers found themselves demobbed (stood down from their jobs). They returned to a Britain of stagnant economic growth, with few jobs on offer. A dramatic spike in the number of convictions and transportations ensued, as ex-soldiers took to crime.
Macquarie found himself dealing with three or four times the annual number of convicts that previous administrators had received, while simultaneously being dealt an almost biblical set of ecological catastrophes: Droughts, floods and caterpillars destroyed much of the harvests after 1816. He had little choice but to put most convicts back on the public store (for work on public projects) and re-establish large-scale government farms and projects to soak up the surplus convict labour. The increased expenses charged back to Britain and reduced Macquarie’s standing with the Colonial Office even further.
Male convicts under government charge tripled between 1817 and 1819, while those in the private sector halved between 1818 and 1820.
Britain starts paying attention again (unfortunately!)
The end of the Napoleonic War meant Britain start paying attention to the penal colony again but, curiously, this wasn’t really a good thing. Scrutiny of the far-off colony of NSW started to increase — and for Macquarie, and most of the convicts and ex-convicts in NSW and Van Diemen’s Land, this scrutiny didn’t bode well.
The extended period of neglect previous to 1815 had proved to be largely benign for most colonial inhabitants. In this initial period, no-one insisted that NSW was meant to function as a place of punishment — it was just a place to get sent off to. Once here, governors were mainly concerned with keeping costs down and were quite happy to give convicts conditional freedom if they could pay their way or had a decent trade that was in demand.
With the end of the wars and the beginning of a long period of peace, Britain began to experience increased economic depression and social turmoil. Increased crime led many to begin asking questions about the current system of crime prevention and punishment. They weren’t greatly impressed by the answers.
Bringing back terror
The strange thing about NSW was that it was begun as a place of punishment, yet for many convicts who arrived in the period up to and including Macquarie’s rule, it had proved to be a place of freedom and opportunity. Macquarie’s idea of a society of second chances (building on the reality he’d found on his arrival and undoubtedly popular in a colony chiefly made up of convicts and ex-convicts) cut less mustard in Britain, where the late 1810s saw greater scrutiny and debate about the nature of life in NSW. In the House of Commons, a parliamentarian denounced the rule of Macquarie for being both expensive and chronically slack. The story of D’Arcy Wentworth, last seen leaving England after being caught as a highwayman, now the Chief of Police in Sydney, was repeated with anger.
Originally, the general impressions most people in Britain had of NSW and Van Diemen’s Land were vague, hazy ones based on the idea of a Botany Bay hellhole. NSW and, later, Van Diemen’s Land, were assumed to be places of hard labour, little food ‘and constant Superintendence’. This made the place ‘an object of peculiar Apprehension’. Now, however, the real stories were getting back — about thieves, pickpockets and highwaymen being freed on arrival and going on to achieve wealth and respectability unlike anything they’d had before.
Earl Bathurst, running the Colonial Office, decided to send out Commissioner John Thomas Bigge, ex-chief justice of Trinidad, to conduct an inquiry into what was really happening in NSW. Bathurst’s instructions outlined the problem as he saw it.
Transportation, the second worst punishment aside from execution, was now being explicitly requested by those convicted of even minor crimes. And transportation only worked as a deterrent, clearly, if people didn’t want to be sent. Something had to be done to make transportation once again ‘an Object of Real Terror to all Classes of the Community’. Bigge’s job was to work out what, and how. Bathurst warned him to avoid letting any ‘ill considered Compassion for Convicts’ lessen transportations main purpose: The all-important ‘Salutary Terror’ that would keep potential British crims in check.
Big Country? Big Ambitions? Bigge the Inspector? Big Problem!
Commissioner Bigge arrived in Australia with a remit to find out all that was necessary to change NSW back into an object of ‘Salutary Terror’ for would-be crims in Britain. As such, Bigge was always going to clash with Macquarie, who had long decided that the purpose of NSW was not as a stern deterrent against crime in Britain but as an opportunity for convicted felons to start again, in a new land with a clean slate.
The first flashpoint between Bigge and Macquarie took place over Macquarie’s promotion of ex-convict William Redfern to magistrate. Macquarie had appointed ex-convicts in previous years, but in those years no other candidates were available for the post. This time, however, there were other choices, but Macquarie ignored them to give the appointment to a man who many considered to be an old Macquarie favourite.
This, thought Bigge, was insupportable and he gave Macquarie an ominous warning: Giving Redfern the job was a move that the British Government would ‘regard as a defiance of their Authority and Commands’. And Governors who defy His Majesty’s Authority and Commands tended not to last long in their careers.
Macquarie’s response was to make a spirited defence not simply of the Redfern appointment (where he probably thought he was on shaky ground anyway), but of his entire policy. He put it to Bigge that when he first arrived in NSW he’d, naturally, had no plans or desires to start raising convicts in society. The only thing he expected to do with convicts was control them. To his surprise, however, ‘a short experience showed me . . . that some of the most meritorious men . . . who were the most capable and the most willing to exert themselves in the public service, were men who had been convicts!’ And so, he argued, he’d developed a plan to encourage men and women according to merit (and material success) rather than past criminal conviction. The future of the colony, Macquarie told Bigge, was convicts and their children. He then went further, asking Bigge to ‘avert the blow you appear to be too much inclined to inflict . . . 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 . . . what you so much admire . . . Freedom!’
A little verbose maybe, but Macquarie got his point across. More basically: This country belongs to them; don’t take it away. But more than that it was a plea to a man who had more power than any other to shape the future trajectory of the colony to not condemn the social edifice which he’d been creating.
Bigge’s response was as measured and terse as Macquarie’s plea was flowery and sentimental. He pointed out that he represented not only the ‘respectable’ opinion in the colony, but that of the British Government. Bigge said that he was willing to try to ‘subdue the objections which must arise in the breast of every man’ whenever they were forced to associate with convicts and ex-convicts ‘but I also think with Lord Bathurst that this feeling may be carried too far; that there is a very wide difference between indulging a compassionate consideration towards convicts and rewarding them with honours or investing them with Magisterial Trusts.’
And Bathurst, ultimately, did agree with Bigge on Redfern’s appointment, saying ex-convicts certainly couldn’t be turned into magistrates. And, when Bigge finally published his reports on the colonies of NSW and Van Diemen’s Land after he returned to England, it turned out that Bathurst agreed with Bigge on just about everything else as well. (See Chapter 6 for the effects this had on colonial Australia and the system of transportation.)
Recognising Macquarie’s Legacy
Macquarie left NSW in 1821, with large crowds lamenting his departure. He endured a cold and hostile reception on his return to Britain, just as the highly critical Bigge Report was published. He died in 1824, feeling bitter, misunderstood and misrepresented. But despite how he came to be viewed by most people in power in Britain, Macquarie created a legacy, something beyond the innumerable Macquarie Streets, Macquarie townships, Macquarie Harbours, Macquarie Rivers, fields and hills which he so delighted in naming.
For the first time in Australia’s history (and it was Macquarie who got the continent’s official name changed from New Holland to Australia; see the sidebar ‘Flinders goes investigating and finds the name Australia’ for more on this), the man in power decided that this new society was being built not for the officials, the officers or the few free settlers, nor for the British Government to use as simple dumping ground or receptacle for punishment. Australia was here for the convicts and ex-convicts themselves, their children and descendants.
In the decades that followed Macquarie’s rule, a new tone became evident in colonial debate and discussion, as the mass of colonials began loudly declaring: ‘This country belongs to us’.
Exactly why Macquarie promoted this idea is hard to say. He was no progressive, wanting to innovate and change society’s structures and mores. His actions were the product of no revolutionary new social code or progressive movement. He was a classic, gruff, 18th-century old-style Tory conservative, who believed in hierarchy, obedience, respect and order. He wanted to combine kindness with firmness.
Perhaps the chance to play benevolent patriarch and to preside, Scottish-chieftain-style, over a flourishing and vibrant new colony simply brought out a strong element in his character that had previously not had such scope to express itself. It’s not every day you get appointed autocrat over a whole colony, after all. Regardless, because of Macquarie, the sense of Australia began to shift significantly — and it’s why he’s the only governor or leader from these early years to have inscribed on his grave the epitaph, ‘Father of Australia’.