1820
A bowl with a view of Sydney
The Sydney experiment is confirmed
This bowl represents the first flourishing of the Australian experiment as Sydney turned from a prison into a town. The bowl, probably manufactured in China, also represents the firming of trade between Australia and China. The picture of a frontier society on the cusp of prosperity commemorates Lachlan Macquarie’s legacy.
When the fifth governor arrived at Port Jackson on 28 December 1809, New South Wales was in a mess, a prison farm ruled at the whim of a military junta. It was a place where the currency was alcohol and the ruling class forced convicts into slavery for its own commercial interests. The free settlers were an underclass, and depravity and corruption were the order of the day.
Macquarie was dispatched to clean up after the Rum Rebellion. The new governor’s confidential instructions were to ‘improve the Morals of the Colonists, to encourage Marriage, to provide for Education, to prohibit the Use of Spirituous Liquors, to increase the Agriculture and Stock, so as to ensure the Certainty of a full supply to the Inhabitants under all Circumstances’.
Born into a modest Scottish household in 1762, from an early age Macquarie aspired to a career in the military. With postings in Nova Scotia, America, Jamaica and India, his career had been solid but not spectacular. His ambitions for New South Wales were very modest, but once he settled in Sydney Macquarie grew into the challenge of establishing a community. His energy for the colony and his courage in championing its interests – to his own cost – transformed the place. After being sworn in on New Year’s Day 1810, his first acts were to undo the proclamations, rulings and gifts made during the two-year rule of the Rum Corps. He then embarked on a program of reform.
Macquarie was a great builder. His 265 public works included a new army barracks, a new general hospital and St James’ Church – some of the only Australian buildings of that era that have survived. He also built a network of roads on which he obliged travellers to keep to the left.
The lack of a currency was a real problem that Macquarie solved in 1813 by creating the holey dollar. This was done by taking 40 000 Spanish coins and punching the centre or ‘dump’ out of each one. A dump was worth 15 pence and a ‘holey’ dollar was valued at 5 shillings. In 1816, Macquarie established – against instructions from London – the first bank, known as the Bank of New South Wales (now Westpac). Manufacturing was encouraged, and industries of pottery, linen cloth, and a variety of clothing items such as boots, shoes and hats started. The fledgling wool industry expanded.
A supporter of expansion, Macquarie encouraged the crossing of the Blue Mountains in 1815. Then he personally followed, and established the town of Bathurst. Other towns established under his reign include Windsor, Liverpool, Richmond, Penrith, Springwood, Campbelltown, Newcastle and Port Macquarie. He also introduced town-planning codes in the new towns and in ramshackle Sydney. He shaped Sydney by creating Hyde Park, the Domain and the Botanic Gardens. On Matthew Flinders’ advice, he adopted the name ‘Australia’ for the continent.
Macquarie opened the first racetrack and reduced the number of pubs in Sydney from 75 to 20. Church attendance, marriage rates and school attendance all climbed. Macquarie was a moral man but not one given to moralising too much with others. He had an understanding of the circumstances of this peculiar place at the bottom of the world and was able, through guidance and leadership, to improve the quality of society.
Macquarie was the first governor since Arthur Phillip to show any concern for the people of the Eora nation. He established a school (the Native Institution), a village at Elizabeth Bay for the Sydney tribe, and an Aboriginal farm at Georges Head. However, the local Aboriginal population remained hostile to the invaders and still rose up.
Macquarie always viewed New South Wales as a prison colony, but recognised the emancipists were the most skilled people in the country. They included architect Francis Greenway, surgeon and magistrate William Redfern, surgeon D’Arcy Wentworth, and former highwayman Simeon Lord, who became commissioner of the police force. These ex-convicts were now shaping the community. Macquarie recognised that emancipists were the future, and promoted them in society as equals.
The ‘bunyip aristocracy’, known as ‘exclusives’, who had arrived as part of the New South Wales Corps or were their friends, envisaged a colony of vast estates worked mostly by a slave population of convicts. Free settlers and convicts who had served their sentences (that is, had been ‘emancipated’) formed a lower class and were not permitted into many of the levels of society. This class warfare had been brewing for some time – Bligh’s fate had been sealed because he took the emancipists’ side over the exclusives. Macquarie’s challenge was to find a truce in the class war.
Macquarie retired in 1820, but it was a further two years before he was replaced and could finally set sail for England. When he left the colony in 1822, it was in immeasurably better shape than when he arrived.
The National Trust of Australia has taken responsibility for the maintenance of Macquarie’s grave in Mull, Scotland. It bears the inscription: ‘The Father of Australia’.