To conciliate these factions, to improve the morals of the colonists, to stamp out the evils of the traffic in rum, and to restore the colony to a state of tranquility, in 1809 the British government appointed Lachlan Macquarie Captain-General and Governor-in-Chief in and over the colony of New South Wales and its dependent territories. He was then forty-eight years old, a lieutenant-colonel in the British army who had served in four continents of the world, where his observations of the Buddhist, Hindu, Islamic, and Catholic civilizations had confirmed his belief in the superiority of British institutions and the Protestant religion. He was endowed by nature with great gifts of heart and mind, and above all he had the gift of making important any position to which he was appointed, as all his creations were monuments to his vanity as well as his industry. For he was born with a passionate heart and a high-mindedness that equipped him admirably to sweep the Augean stables of New South Wales.
After taking the oaths of office in January 1810, Macquarie spoke ‘with animation and peculiar energy’ of his intention to exercise strict justice and impartiality. He was hopeful that all dissensions and jealousies would terminate forever. He urged the upper classes to conduct themselves with propriety and rectitude, and the lower classes to remain sober. To all he recommended a strict observance of religious duties and a constant and regular attendance at divine service on Sundays. He urged the magistrates to prevent all forms of vice and immorality and charged all and sundry not to molest the Aborigines. The honest, sober, and industrious inhabitant, he concluded, would ever ‘find in him a friend and protector’. The crowd burst into three cheers, and then the band played ‘God Save the King’.
Within a few weeks he took his first actions to improve the morals of the people: indecent profanation of the Sabbath was to cease; all public houses were to be closed during divine service; profligacy of manners, dissipation, and idleness were to be reduced by cutting down the number of licensed houses. He published a proclamation against the scandalous and pernicious custom so generally and shamefully adopted throughout the territory of persons of different sexes living together unsanctioned by the legal ties of matrimony. He took steps to reduce the traffic in spirits and to cut down its consumption by the lower orders. To instruct the rising generation in those principles that he believed alone could render them obedient to their parents, honest, faithful and useful members of society, and good Christians, he opened more schools in Sydney and the outlying settlements.
With the same high moral purpose he began a vigorous campaign of public works. He began work on a new hospital, letting the contract to a group who promised to pay all expenses in return for the exclusive right to import spirits for three years. He put up a new barracks; he improved roads and bridges. He ordered a new town plan for Sydney, partly from a belief in beauty and grandeur, partly from a belief that orderliness and cleanliness would improve the morals of the lower classes. To bring the outward forms of civilization to the outlying settlements, he ordered that townships should be laid out in each district, each township to have a church, a school and a courthouse, to raise the area from barbarism to civilization.
To promote this reformation of manners amongst convicts and ex-convicts he took the earliest opportunity of proving to them that rectitude and long-tried good conduct would lead an emancipist back to the rank in society that he had forfeited. With great delicacy he invited four emancipists to his table at Government House. He appointed an emancipist, Andrew Thompson, a justice of the peace and a magistrate at the Hawkesbury and announced his intention to appoint Simeon Lord, the opulent emancipist merchant, a magistrate as soon as a vacancy occurred. On 31 March he announced in the Sydney Gazette the appointment of the Reverend Samuel Marsden, Simeon Lord, and Andrew Thompson as trustees and commissioners for the turnpike road from Sydney to the Hawkesbury. Marsden believed his superiors in England would not approve of such an association with ex-convicts, especially men who lived with convict concubines, as did both Thompson and Lord. In two interviews with Macquarie, Marsden firmly declined to accept the appointment. At the second encounter Macquarie lost his temper and shouted that it was just as well Marsden held a civil commission, as otherwise he would have him court-martialled for disobedience. Marsden believed that on such questions he must obey the commands of God: Macquarie believed every man in the colony should obey him. So Macquarie in the full flush of his high-mindedness revealed the weakness that would bring him to destruction.
All through 1811 and 1812 success seemed to be crowning Macquarie’s efforts. In England, press, parliament and government were reporting favourably on the improvements in the religious, moral, and educational life of the colony. A committee of the House of Commons on transportation summed up his work in this way: ‘… the colony of New South Wales … is, in their opinion, in a train entirely to answer the ends proposed by its establishment.’ In the meantime in the colony a similar optimism and enthusiasm prevailed. At a dinner in January 1813 to commemorate the anniversary of the founding of the colony as well as of his assumption of office, a bumper toast was drunk to Governor Macquarie: ‘May the anniversary of his assuming the command of the territory be commemorated and reverenced by our latest posterity!’ That was the halcyon year of his work in New South Wales.
In the same year, being convinced that new grasslands must be discovered for the ever-increasing numbers of cattle and sheep, Gregory Blaxland, William Charles Wentworth and William Lawson found a way to cross the Blue Mountains, which lay to the west of the settlement of Sydney Cove. Setting out in 1813, they kept to the ridges until they reached the peak of Mount Blaxland, where ‘a boundless champaign’ burst on their view, opening, as one of them put it, like Canaan on rapt Israel’s view. They then returned to Sydney to report on their journey. To examine the possibilities more closely Macquarie sent Evans, the surveyor, over the Blue Mountains at the end of the year; then, in the following year, he began to build a road over the mountains. In May 1815 he visited the new country himself and christened the site for a town: Bathurst, after the Secretary of State for the Colonies in London. He perceived at once that the discovery of this new country furnished an outlet for the increases of population for a century to come, for here was the opportunity for his sober, industrious men from the middling classes to take up one-hundred-acre plots, while gentlemen of the upper classes took up large grants in the fine grazing land.
To find out more about the new country, he dispatched John Oxley in 1817 on a voyage down the Lachlan River, which ended with Oxley despairing of establishing even the rudiments of civilization in such an arid and harsh land, or of ever finding the mouths of those inland rivers that the optimists hoped would flow into an inland sea and so provide wealth for future generations of sober and industrious sons of English civilization. The Lachlan seemed to end in swamps and morasses in a green year and empty riverbeds in a dry. On the way back he found promising grazing territory in the valley of the Macquarie River near Bathurst.
Oxley was off again in 1818 to trace the Macquarie to its mouth, but again the marshes or arid plains mocked his search for an inland sea. On the return journey to the coast the sight of the fertile river valley of the Hastings gladdened his heart, as did the beautiful setting of Port Macquarie, with its tropical vegetation and the deep blue of its waters at journey’s end. Between 1817 and 1819 Charles Throsby, Joseph Wild, and the young Hamilton Hume, explored the country south-west from Camden to the Murrumbidgee in the Yass-Canberra district and Jervis Bay on the coast. By 1819 there were abundant opportunities for the expansion of settlement at Bathurst, along the valley of the Hunter River to the Patrick and Wallis Plains, in the Moss Vale, Goulburn, and Canberra districts, and along the coast from Illawarra to Jervis Bay.
In the meantime Macquarie continued to devote his attention to the task of raising the settlements of New South Wales and Van Diemen’s Land from barbarism to civilization. Towards the end of 1814 and in the beginning of 1815 he devoted much time to the problem of the civilization of the Aborigines. He aimed not only to protect them against the aggression of the white man but also to teach them habits of industry and decency so that they might abandon the indolence and squalor of their own way of life and join the working classes in both settlements. He decided to open a native institution at Parramatta for boys and girls and a farm on the shores of Port Jackson for adults. The parents tried to seduce the six boys and six girls away from the school at Parramatta, as their repugnance to the ways of the civilized was as strong as ever. Each year after 1815 Macquarie attended a ceremony at the native school to commemorate its opening, when the children displayed their progress in reading and writing. There were cheers for Macquarie, much beef, potatoes, and grog for the Aborigines. The Aboriginal chiefs burst out laughing, leapt in the air, and made other wild gesticulations that the Sydney Gazette called ‘the spontaneous offerings of uncultivated nature’. By 1818 the Sydney Gazette in an almost messianic mood predicted the day would come when the Aborigine would rise above the role of kitchen boy to the white man. But the facts were against them. The numbers of the school at Parramatta never rose above twenty. In the towns the Aborigines continued to remain figures of cruel fun for schoolboys and adults. One of the great popular sports in Sydney, Parramatta, and Hobart Town was to encourage intoxicated black people to murder or mangle each other for the amusement of the white spectators. In the country districts the Aborigine exacted what revenge he could for the theft of his land, and the white man in turn continued to exact an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.
Macquarie had more success with his attempts to promote the moral well-being of the European inhabitants of New South Wales and Van Diemen’s Land. Between 1811 and 1816 he erected schoolhouses at Liverpool, Windsor, Richmond and Wilberforce to ensure that religious principles would be implanted in the minds of the rising generation. In 1815 he began to encourage the work of the British and Foreign Bible Society because he shared the conviction of its founders that the sacred teaching of the Bible corrected the most ferocious manners and promoted worldly comfort. For the same reasons he encouraged the work of the Sunday School movement. In this way, under the influence of Macquarie and with the full support of Bathurst as Secretary of State for the Colonies, the evangelicals assumed an ascendancy in the society of New South Wales. The Governor; the principal chaplain, the Reverend Samuel Marsden; the judge advocates, Ellis Bent and John Wylde; and other civil and military officers, were all good evangelicals. Under their influence, and through the talents of Francis Greenway, a convict architect who had absorbed the atmosphere of Regency Bath, churches were built at Liverpool and Windsor that breathed the very spirit of the evangelical Protestant view of the world. Their vast domes, their chastely furnished sanctuaries, and their classical external proportions moved the worshipper to contemplate the grandeur and omnipotence of God freed from all those accessories, those statues, gorgeous vestments, rich music, incense and gesture the Catholic believed to be proper aids to worship. From the pulpit, in the school, in the press, and in their ecclesiastical architecture the tone of their civilization became more firmly Protestant and evangelical.
Just as the permanent monuments to the work of Macquarie began to take shape, chance and those flaws in his being soured his last years in the colony. The more convinced he became of the righteousness of his own position the more censorious he became with the weak. Lieutenant-Colonel Thomas Davey, the Lieutenant-Governor of Van Diemen’s Land after the death of David Collins in 1810, spent much of his energy providing adequate barracks for the troops, a hospital for the rich, or coping with the depredations of bushrangers and Aborigines. But Davey was also an eccentric. ‘Mad Tom’, the locals called him. He often drank to excess with convicts at the ‘Bird in Hand’ in Argyle Street, walked the streets in his shirtsleeves, called all and sundry by their Christian names, and cohabited openly with convict women to the great pain of his long-suffering wife and the scandal of the few respectable families in Hobart Town. When Macquarie heard that Davey spent so much time in drinking and other forms of low depravity in company with the basest and meanest of the people, he recommended that he should be dismissed, and he suppressed the achievements of Davey in all correspondence with Bathurst about his future.
When people in high places in Sydney opposed Macquarie’s pro-emancipist policy, he found it impossible to concede that they might do so for reasons just as high-minded as the ones that prompted his own defence of the emancipists. More and more he saw himself as a man motivated by righteous indignation and his opponents as men motivated by baseness and infamy. He detected in himself, he said, a spirit of charity that caused him to despise their unjust and illiberal sentiments. He became morbidly aware of the faults of character in all those who opposed the emancipists and was blind to the weaknesses of character amongst his supporters. An emancipist who was a sanctimonious hypocrite and simulated religious piety shamelessly to promote his career in the colony became in Macquarie’s eyes proof of the wisdom of restoring men of tried good conduct to the rank in society that they had forfeited by their crimes. This fatal conviction of the righteousness of his own position and the wickedness or malevolence of his opponents caused him to quarrel in a most unseemly way with the senior civil and military officers in the colony.
When the judge advocate, Ellis Bent, let Macquarie know that emancipists should not be forced into office or society contrary to the feeling of the respectable, and that to appoint a man of such dubious moral character and social station as Simeon Lord degraded the office of magistrate, Macquarie interpreted his stand as base ingratitude for all the favours and courtesies he had lavished on Bent. Bent, however, drew a different conclusion. Macquarie, he said, wanted the judge advocate to act like a subaltern, or a cypher; he, on the other hand, believed the judiciary should be independent of the executive government. The officers of the regiment mocked the emancipist policy at their dinners, and one officer pinned a cartoon on the wall of the guard room showing Macquarie in a position of ignominy. The officers also declined invitations to dine at Government House. They made it plain that they gloried in refusing to associate with men who were so much their inferiors in rank and situation, and welcomed the prospect of leaving a country in no point of view congenial to military feelings. Macquarie was incensed by their insubordination rather than the arrogance and haughtiness of their social principles.
When Marsden refused to co-operate in the emancipist policy, Macquarie described him as a malevolent man clothed in the garb of humanity and hypocritical religious cant. Again Macquarie saw Marsden’s opposition as an affront to his own authority. Early in 1818 he commanded Marsden to appear at Government House, and after reminding the chaplain of his indispensable duty to support the governor’s high station and authority, and to preserve the tranquillity of the country, he commanded him never to set foot again in Government House except upon public duty.
Two years earlier those in the colony who believed they had suffered from Macquarie’s high-handed behaviour had drawn up a petition and forwarded it by the Reverend Vale to the British House of Commons. In it they had accused Macquarie of influencing the decisions of juries, of having free men flogged without the order of a magistrate, of selling pardons to convicts, of prohibiting banns of marriage, and influencing the courts of justice. Macquarie had castigated it as the work of a mischievous and mean faction; and up to a point it was. A wiser man might have let it go at that, but not Macquarie. He was so deeply wounded that the vindication of his name and honour became from that time the ruling passion of his life.
This obsession with his honour and his power began to overwhelm him just at a time when his creative talents, his exuberance, and his enthusiasm might have been more usefully employed on the problems of the colony. Between 1817 and 1819 the number of convicts transported to New South Wales increased sharply as more shipping became available after the Napoleonic wars and the British Isles were plunged into the disturbed conditions of the postwar years. In May 1818 five convict ships arrived at Sydney. Macquarie, believing the settlers did not wish to employ them, assumed that the government would have to feed and employ them. In Sydney they were set to work on a new convict barracks, on a house for the judge of the Supreme Court, and at Windsor and Liverpool on building new churches. In this way the expenses of government increased enormously. Posterity in Australia inherited the glory and the honour of the Francis Greenway churches at Windsor and Liverpool, while Macquarie’s vision had shrunk to thoughts on how the new barracks at Sydney would improve the morals of the convicts by preventing nocturnal robberies, theft, and other depredations.
At the same time economic developments in both New South Wales and Van Diemen’s Land were taking both settlements further and further away from their original purpose of extensive gaols for the punishment and reformation of British criminals. In 1817 the merchants and more opulent settlers combined to found the Bank of New South Wales. The trade of both settlements increased; wool was being exported successfully from Sydney to England; whale oil and sealskins were also successful exports; the trade in salt pork, sandalwood, and trepang was becoming more and more lucrative. In New South Wales settlers were farming in the Hunter River district, in the Bathurst district, in the area south-west from Camden towards Moss Vale, and along the coast from Illawarra to Jervis Bay. In Van Diemen’s Land settlement was spreading from Hobart Town along the valley of the Derwent, and there were plans to use the Huon pine growing in abundance at Macquarie Harbour on the south-west coast of the island. By 1819 the population of New South Wales was 26,026, with 9,986 or 38.3 per cent convicts; the population of Van Diemen’s Land in the same year was 4,270, 2,190 or 47.1 per cent being convicts. Contemporaries estimated that over three-quarters of the population in both settlements were either convicts or the children of convicts.
In January and February of 1819 the merchants of Sydney held two meetings under the chairmanship of Sir John Jamison to discuss their future and the future of the colony. They decided to draw up a petition that in effect requested the abolition of those features in the government of the colony that sprang, at least in part, from its origins as a convict settlement. They denounced the judge advocate’s court as contrary to all their habits, feelings and opinions as Englishmen. They asked for trial by jury; if Hindus, Hottentots, and Negro slaves had such a right, then they as Englishmen and the sons of Englishmen were surely worthy of it, too. For the most part they concentrated on the steps that should be taken to improve their opportunities to accumulate wealth; they wanted markets for their grain, the repeal of the statute forbidding ships of less than three hundred and fifty tons burthen to trade with the colony, and the abolition of British duties on such colonial goods as wool and whale oil. They also wanted the recognition in England that the numerous and rapidly increasing colonial generation was just as moral and sober in its habits as the people of the mother country. At the same time Macquarie himself suggested that the British government might like to take up the suggestion originally made by Flinders to call the whole continent Australia.
Observers from England noticed how the native-born were beginning to differ from the migrant both in appearance and speech. The currency lads, or native-born, were tall in person, slender of limb, and fair in complexion. They were capable of great feats of physical strength but were somewhat ungainly in their movements. By temperament they were quick to anger, though not vindictive towards those who provoked them. In speech most of them copied the flash or giddy language of their convict parents; in addition, they were developing a distinctive pronunciation of their own. Some of them believed that, since Australia was a convict colony whose wealth and civilization had been created by convict labour, it therefore belonged to the convicts and their descendants, and that settlers and immigrant free workers were all ‘bloody foreigners’. This xenophobia of the native-born was the first of a long line of claims to exclusive possession, and the forerunner of later slogans such as ‘Australia for the Australians’, or ‘Australia for the white man’. It was fed by an ardent patriotism and nurtured later by a vision of what the native-born could achieve in a country that had not inherited the Old World evils of social class, war, and poverty. It was this tradition of xenophobia amongst the descendants of the convicts that later gave some distinctive twists to secular humanism in Australia.
In the age of Macquarie, however, the tone of civilization was still set by the evangelicals. From press and pulpit came warnings that the drunkard, the philanderer, the gambler and the idler, would not gain those prizes of affluence and respectability in this world, while, as for the next, remorse would be their scourge and eternity their dread. While the native-born tended to be silent on their heritage from the British Isles, the apologists for the Protestant ascendancy tended to take inordinate pride and pleasure in being British. ‘Great and miraculous Providence!’ wrote the Sydney Gazette in praise of their being British, ‘the author of all Good! how we are indebted to your saving Power!’ While the native-born were beginning to take pride in their natural environment and to look on it with the eye of a lover rather than the eye of an alien, the apologists for the Protestant ascendancy tended to write of Australia in the early Dutch-English tradition as an exceedingly barren land. An early poet, Barron Field, the second judge of the Supreme Court, wrote of the country as a place which:
‘… emerg’d at the first sinning,
When the ground was therefore curst;
– And hence this barren wood!’
Towards the end of the age of Macquarie the voice of the other view of the world that has influenced the development of civilization in Australia began to be heard publicly in New South Wales and Van Diemen’s Land. In May 1820 two priests, J.J. Therry and P. Conolly, arrived from Ireland to minister to the Catholics in both colonies. They were not the first priests on the continent, as they had been preceded by three transported during the troubles of 1798 in Ireland. In 1817 Father O’Flynn had arrived without formal credentials from the Secretary of State and had been promptly forced to leave by Macquarie, who was piqued as much by O’Flynn’s low insolence towards the Protestant clergy and his claims for the magical power of the sacramental bread as by his lack of credentials. The arrival of Therry and Conolly ensured that the Irish Catholics in New South Wales and Van Diemen’s Land would continue to be instructed in those ideals of charity, compassion, love of God, and the preservation of their holy faith by men who at times confounded these ideals with the worldly aspirations of the Irish people, just as the religious sentiments of the Protestants, their profession of faith in one God, the Maker of heaven and earth, were confounded with the worldly aspirations of the British. The Protestants mocked at the Catholics’ low standard of living, their stooping to their priests, their superstitions, the tinsel and ornament surrounding their acts of religious devotion. The Catholics grieved at the Protestants for sundering the unity of Christendom, for performing ceremonies that were but a pale shadow of their own rich liturgy, and for seeming to condemn a portion of God’s children to a perpetual position of inferiority in society. So by the end of the age of Macquarie two different views of man and his destiny confronted each other in Australia.
In the meantime wild reports were beginning to circulate in England about what was happening in the colony. Those with grievances against Macquarie had been doing their best to convince those of like mind in London that the governor was a hopelessly corrupt tyrant. The more responsible were alarmed by the increase in crime in the British Isles as well as by doubt of the efficacy of transportation in deterring from crime. In an attempt to find out the true situation the House of Commons in 1819 appointed a committee of inquiry into the state of the gaols. The Secretary of State for the Colonies, Lord Bathurst, was pondering over similar problems. He came to the conclusion that permission to settle in New South Wales had become the aim of all who desired to leave their native country.
How then could transportation continue to be an object of apprehension to criminals in the United Kingdom? Had it not lost its efficacy as a punishment? In 1819 Bathurst appointed John Thomas Bigge as commissioner of inquiry to report on whether transportation was any longer efficient as a punishment. He was also instructed to report on all the officials of the colony no matter how exalted their rank, or how sacred their character; to report on the case for restoring severity of punishment; on the possibility of improving religion and education; on the agricultural and commercial interests of the colony; and on the propriety of admitting into society persons who originally came to the settlement as convicts. In effect Bigge was invited to recommend what sort of society and civilization should be developed in Australia; whether it should be primarily a gaol for the punishment and reformation of British criminals or a colony using convict labour for the exploitation of its wealth. Bigge was then thirty-nine, a lawyer by education whose only previous experience had been his years as Chief Justice at Trinidad, which probably influenced him in favour of the use of slaves and convicts to create the wealth of the planters. Macquarie by then was fifty-nine, and had well over thirty years of service to the British crown in four parts of the world. This difference in years and experience began his deep division with Bigge and his dark, undying pain from the moment Bigge arrived in Sydney in October 1819.
Between October 1819 and February 1821 Bigge collected both oral and written evidence from the inhabitants of New South Wales and Van Diemen’s Land, travelling extensively in both settlements. Almost from the beginning of his stay he heard much of the extravagance of Macquarie, much on the impropriety of the emancipist policy, and much on those quirks of character that had bedevilled relations between Macquarie and the senior officers in New South Wales. Bigge had the gifts of the novelist and, in his private correspondence with Bathurst, sketched the characters of colonial society with a breadth of understanding and a sympathy for all points of view. Above all he heard of the clamour of the settlers for more convicts. Chaplain Marsden told him that sheep would be the source of unknown national wealth, if the government supplied convicts of the most experience and best characters to sheep farmers. By contrast, under the Macquarie system, as another settler reminded Bigge, the labour of an immense proportion of the convicts was being retained for the use of government at enormous public expense.
John Macarthur showed Bigge how the British interest in the reformation of the convicts could harmonize with the interest of the settlers in their labour. The very labour necessary for the rearing of sheep and cattle was also calculated to lead to the correction of vicious habits. Shepherds spent their days in solitude, where they had time for that reflection and self-examination that might lead to amendment of life, and where they no longer saw the dazzling sights or heard the tempting sounds of the towns. He suggested to Bigge that the British government should recommend land grants of not less than ten thousand acres to enable men with capital to become a powerful aristocracy: this in contrast to the democratic feeling that, he asserted, had already taken deep root in the colony as a result of the absurd and mischievous policies pursued by Governor Macquarie. The convicts would enable the settlers to grow wool; the manufacturers of Great Britain would buy the wool; the convicts would be reformed; New South Wales society would develop into a plantation-type society.
From the more opulent emancipists Bigge heard about their legal grievances, their contribution to the wealth of New South Wales, and their claim that this was a convict colony whose future development and ownership should be left in their hands. He heard, too, all the gossip of the colony, the personal feuds, the frictions, the grievances of Mad Tom Davey against the upright and censorious Macquarie – all the petty disputes of both societies. He listened to all with patience and dignity. But from the first his mind was set on the major issues of the colony of New South Wales.
On his return to England he emphasized again and again these issues in the three reports he published in 1822 and 1823. He recommended that the employment of convicts in the management of sheep might be made highly conducive to the improvement and reform of all but the most hardened criminals, who should be transported to penal settlements at Moreton Bay, Port Curtis, and Port Bowen. For the rest he recommended the abolition of the main features of the convict system as administered by Macquarie. He recommended severity of punishment rather than leniency, the restriction of the privileges of ticket-of-leave holders, and the abolition of land grants for emancipists. He also recommended the end of the Macquarie policy of appointing emancipists to positions of trust and responsibility. Macquarie, as Bigge saw it, had been influenced by the dictates of humanity. Bigge, on the other hand, was concerned with the stability of society, and he believed that to promote a man such as Simeon Lord, whose domestic life had been notorious and who was engaged in the low and common pursuit of selling things, could only degrade the office of magistrate in the eyes of people all too free of any sentiment for the might, majesty, and power of the law.
On the future institutions of New South Wales and Van Diemen’s Land, Bigge was just as conservative. The emancipists were clamouring for trial by jury and a legislative council on the grounds that these belonged to all Englishmen as a birthright and that free institutions would contribute to their material wealth. Besides, they argued, their wealth and behaviour were already such as to render them worthy of the character of useful and respectable citizens. Bigge, however, was impressed only by their argument for the restitution of their legal rights as free men on their emancipation from servitude. As for trial by jury it was, he believed, highly inexpedient and dangerous to expose the life or property of a free man to a jury of ex-convicts; they would have to be educated before they received their birthright as Englishmen. He saw a case for an improvement but not for a fundamental change in the judicial institutions of the colony. He did, however, recommend the granting of separate judicial institutions to Van Diemen’s Land.
The British government accepted these recommendations. Macquarie’s successor, Brisbane, was instructed to abolish most of the features of the old convict system, and every effort was to be made to separate the convicts from the mass of the population. An act of parliament, An Act to Provide for the Better Administration of Justice in New South Wales and Van Diemen’s Land, passed in 1823, created a legislative council of not more than seven nor less than five to be appointed by His Majesty. The right to initiate legislation was reserved to the governor, who could also proclaim an act without the consent of the council provided he stated in writing his reason for doing so. The governor was required to submit each bill to the chief justice, who was to certify whether the bill was repugnant to the laws of the United Kingdom. To preserve the sovereignty of the parliament of the United Kingdom, the crown might disallow any act within three years of its enactment. The trial of criminal cases was to be held under prosecution by the attorney-general, and all questions of fact were to be submitted to a jury of seven commissioned naval or military officers. A pardon by the governor was to restore a man to the full legal rights he had forfeited on becoming an attainted felon. The crown was empowered to create a separate colony in Van Diemen’s Land. By this series of administrative decisions and an act of parliament, the government proclaimed that whereas hitherto New South Wales had been treated as a penitentiary for convicts, from 1823 they proposed to treat it as a British colony.
Opinion in the colony greeted the promised change with enthusiasm. John Macarthur rejoiced that the changes had been already productive of much pleasure to his son in England and of much land to himself. The Reverend Marsden rejoiced because God, as he put it, had ‘filled his basket’. The young William Wentworth, then doing terms at Cambridge, wrote a poem prophesying the day when the convict blot had been forgotten and Australia had become ‘a new Britannia in another world’. Only one man was deeply hurt, and that was Macquarie, for by one of those ironies in human affairs the man who presided over the transition from gaol to colony was by then more concerned with the vindication of his name and his honour than with the future of New South Wales. Like most human beings he could not have what he most desperately wanted; he died in grief and anguish, not knowing that posterity would confer on him a more lasting gift than the confounding of his enemies: the title of Father of Australia.