The savages have burnt and destroyed the shepherds’ habitations, and I daily hear of some fresh calamity.
ELIZABETH MACARTHUR TO ELIZA KINGDON, MARCH 1816
The bulk of Elizabeth’s farming problems lay in getting the wool from the Australian sheep to the English shore.
The first bales of wool she sent to England for sale were well received, but the wool was considered very dirty, contaminated with ‘innumerable grass seeds’ and ‘particles of dead leaves and sticks’ as well as ‘minute portions of charred wood and bark with which the fleeces abound, especially in dry seasons’.1 In addition, the fleeces weighed more than they should have because of the quantity of sand they carried. Elizabeth was not satisfied with supplying a degraded product. She initiated a wool-cleaning process (which was further developed and refined by her sons) that rapidly became customary throughout the colonies. It was a sensible and ingenious response to the problem: the sheep were washed before they were shorn.
Almost thirty years later, the process was described in the diary of another woman farmer, Anne Drysdale, in the Barwon district of Victoria. Her washing place consisted of long logs (or spars) placed across a river between two trees. The logs formed two pens into which ‘the sheep are flung & allowed to swim & while they are there pushed by a forked stick under the middle spar & men with flat sticks rub off the dirt after which they swim out by an approach & go dripping & exhausted to join their companions.’2 After this ordeal the sheep had a day or two to recover, as they could still not be shorn ‘until the yolk rises, or the wool becomes greasy’.3 They also needed time to fully dry out and woolsheds were purpose-built with a ‘skilling or verandah along one side under which some sheep are to be placed all night, that they may be ready to shear in the morning, otherwise they would be so wet with dew that the men could not begin until 9 or 10’.4 Drysdale’s men, working with hand clippers (of which there were never enough), could together shear about 200 sheep in a day.
Elizabeth’s wool clip was stored on site, in ‘wool houses’ she had built for the purpose. The wool was baled in a press cobbled together by Hannibal from materials to hand. ‘I found a very fine screw among the Iron-work which came out in the Argo,’ he wrote to his uncle, and it ‘proves to be the best Press in the country’.5 After sorting, the poorest quality fleeces were sold to the government and sent to the female factory at Parramatta, to be spun and woven into coarse cloth by the convict women. The rest was baled, transported to Sydney and (if luck and the weather held) dispatched to England. The transport costs were high, but the high level of demand from the English manufacturers meant there was still a profit to be made.
John being in London to oversee the wool’s sale was just what Elizabeth needed. He talked it up, made the right contacts and was able to provide valuable feedback about how to obtain a better price. Hannibal seems to have been in charge of shipping the wool and John exhorted Elizabeth to ensure he took more care to ensure the wool was properly sorted because ‘the same Bale contained half a dozen different qualities of Wool’.6 This made it difficult to price the wool accurately without opening all the bales, at some expense, and thus the price they eventually received was lower than it might have been. John continued with his advice and suggestions in letters to Elizabeth, and despite Hannibal’s careful explanations kept sending instructions, such as: ‘When Wool is sent in future it should be washed as clean as possible’,7 noting that he ‘was much disappointed that the Wool should have come home in such a state’.8 As if the whole colony didn’t have to rely on the one man suitably qualified to sort wool; as if Elizabeth didn’t go to enormous trouble to ensure that the wool was presented as well as it could be—amidst the dust and dirt of a colony almost as far as it was possible to be from ‘England’s green and pleasant land’.9
From his exile in England, John suggested to Elizabeth that she cultivate Governor Macquarie. She should sound out his interest in schemes that involved his granting to Macarthur additional land and convict servants—presumably in return for a quiet share of the profits. It is unlikely Elizabeth did anything quite so unsubtle, but she was not above manoeuvring the colony’s bureaucracy to her own ends. In 1815 she managed to persuade Governor Macquarie to add an adjacent sixty acres to the Cow Pastures property because she had, as the Governor recorded, ‘by mistake built a small Cottage on it’.10 If it was a mistake, it was a profitable one.
When several of his wife’s letters finally arrived all together in 1814, John replied with a litany of his physical and mental complaints, writing ‘believe me my Elizabeth the period of my separation from you has been an almost uninterrupted scene of indescribable wretchedness’.11 He suffered from chronic indigestion, which regularly attacked him ‘with considerable violence, with an extraordinary irritation of nerves, and a sort of nervous Gout’. The gout was precipitated by many days of ‘such dreadful depression of spirits as no one can conceive’.12 John believed that he would only improve upon being reunited with his wife in New South Wales, but he wasn’t beyond being critical of her reports of their farms.
He ever so helpfully pointed out to his wife that ‘Many important things escape your memory at the moment of writing—do adopt the practice of making short memos when anything occurs worth repeating’.13 He went on to provide a list of the sorts of things he wanted to know, such as the terms of sale for a flock of sheep, or the prices received for horses, because ‘when I am asked the price of Stock which I frequently am I know not what to say’.14 At least he had the good grace to finish his letters with phrases full of love, for example: ‘it will be the study of my life to requite you for all that you have suffered on my account’.15 Did she roll a wry eye at such a letter, reading it twice or three times for comfort before folding it up, tucking it safely with the others and getting on with her work?
From 1813 to 1815, the colony suffered though drought, and Elizabeth’s work became harder and even less profitable. She asked if one or both of her sons could be sent home to help her but John prevaricated, noting that he would give the matter ‘the gravest consideration before I decide’.16 He evidently decided the boys should stay with him and instead sent out another cargo of goods for Elizabeth to sell. Groceries, straw bonnets and ‘Peace Printed Cottons’17 were hardly fair compensation for the boys she was longing to see. In his accompanying letter John frankly discusses the anticipated profit. That was all very well, but first the cargo had to be unloaded, examined, advertised, exhibited, sold, delivered and accounted for. John also asked for news about the renewal of the ‘lease of the Sydney cottage’ and noted with approval the additional land grant of swampland near Parramatta that Elizabeth had secured from Macquarie, which made ‘a desirable whole of the Farm to secure us from interruption’. He went on to suggest Elizabeth work with Macquarie to negotiate a swap of the Toongabbie farm for more land at Cow Pastures ‘but I leave the arrangement entirely to you’.18 Elizabeth was hard put to find enough hours in her day.
Hannibal helped when he could, but he was attempting to establish his own properties and Elizabeth felt the lack of support. She had, she wrote to her Bridgerule friends, been so long ‘deprived of any assistance from any male branch of my family that I cannot say I am comfortable or happy’.19 During the drought her flock numbers declined significantly, as sheep died or were culled. Once-lush pastures turned golden, then brown, then shrivelled to little more than dust in the face of fierce north winds. Elizabeth looked on in distress as her cattle starved.20 Rivers dried to a chain of puddles and stock died in the mud, stuck fast in their desperate bid for water. And fire, of course, was an ever-present threat. On hot, windy days all eyes scanned the horizon, checking again and again for any hint of smoke or haze. A fire front could arrive faster than a terrified messenger could ride to warn those in its path. Modern Australian farmers are familiar with the cyclical—although never quite predictable—nature of Australian droughts, fires and rains, but Elizabeth and her farming peers were still learning, and learning the hard way.
They were, of course, not the only ones doing it tough. The Aboriginal people of the Sydney basin had been dispossessed, attacked and terrorised for some twenty-five years, and now with the drought, many were probably hungry too. Tensions rose, and Elizabeth was soon to be surrounded by bloodshed and grief. In May 1814 soldiers shot and killed an Aboriginal boy who was part of a group ‘raiding’ a field of corn on a farm near Appin, about fifteen kilometres to the southeast of Elizabeth’s Cow Pastures properties, but much further by road. One of the soldiers was subsequently speared, and his body was mutilated. A vicious series of attacks and counter-attacks ensued.
English settlers ambushed a camp of sleeping Aboriginal people, killing three children and a woman and then mutilating the dead woman’s corpse. Aboriginal men were blamed for killing one of Elizabeth’s workers, a convict man described by Hannibal to John as ‘your old favourite William Baker’,21 who had been with them almost since they had arrived in New South Wales. Killed also was the wife of one of Elizabeth’s shepherds. So were three white children at Bringelly, about halfway between the Cow Pastures and Parramatta. Hannibal noted though, that ‘in addition to the Natives numbers of convicts are roving uncontrolled through the country committing all kinds of depredations and I have every reason to believe some of them were concerned with the Natives in the attack’.22 Anxieties among the settlers rose further with rumours that Aborigines planned an attack en masse at the next full moon, in early June. Terrified women and children were evacuated. In the end, nothing happened that night, but Elizabeth and her neighbours continued to live and work with the worry of attack.
To the forefront of Elizabeth’s mind was the fact that these attacks mirrored earlier killings of her own workers. In 1805, a few weeks before John arrived back in New South Wales from his first trip to England, Aboriginal people ‘from the interior of the mountains’ used tomahawks to kill two stockmen working at one of the outlying Macarthur properties.23 The mountain Aborigines were considered ‘wild’, and dangerous, in comparison to the ‘friendly’ Aboriginal people of the lowlands south of Sydney. The latest rounds of reprisals were also said to have been undertaken by those Gandangarra mountain people.
Governor Macquarie visited the region to attempt an investigation. He learned of the rape of Aboriginal women and decided that Aboriginal payback justice had been satisfied. ‘Having had their Revenge in the way they always seek it,’ he wrote, ‘I am not at all apprehensive of their making any further attacks.’24 Governor Macquarie clearly knew about Aboriginal payback law and their justice system. He ordered both sides to refrain from further attacks, but even before the proclamation was published the white men who had attacked the sleeping campsite were speared and killed. Macquarie sent out a reprisal party of armed civilians but, after three weeks, the party returned empty-handed.
An uneasy peace, of sorts, was maintained until February 1816. A party of thirty or forty Gandangarra mountain men raided a farm near Bringelly and stole servants’ possessions. The following day a reprisal party walked into an ambush, had their muskets wrenched away and were shot at and showered with spears. Four white men were killed, another was speared and the rest were chased back to where they had come from. The next day the Gandangarra warriors raided another farm (this time the frightened settlers reported their numbers at sixty) and again left with everything they could carry. A week later the Gandangarra headed south and attacked Elizabeth’s properties at Cow Pastures, killing three men and burning their huts. Once more the women and children living in the area were evacuated and once more a party went in search of retribution. Elizabeth retreated to the relative safety of her home at Parramatta.
The colonist’s reprisal party was assisted by Budbury, a Dharawal man of the country south of Botany Bay. The white settlers understood that a fierce enmity existed between the people of the plains, the Dharawal, and the Gandangarra mountain people and they planned to use this to their advantage. As in all things, the reality was much more complex and there was substantial interaction between the two groups. Budbury either deliberately or unaware, led the settlers straight into another ambush: the waiting Gandangarra men rained spears and stones down on the reprisal party, and the settlers fled. It was, reported one man afterwards, a ‘wonder a great number of us was not killed, some even threw off their shoes to enable them to run fast…’25 The defeated white men crept home, terrified of finding their families speared to death although in fact the next few weeks were eerily quiet. But at the end of the month an English woman and her male servant were killed, their corpses ‘mangled’, and Macquarie felt forced to take action. A fraught situation was to be resolved with hideous and brutal simplicity.
The governor sent out three detachments of soldiers, with orders to capture all Aborigines, and to kill any who failed to surrender. There was no distinction between ‘wild’ and ‘friendly’ although each detachment was accompanied by Aboriginal guides and each had a list of the names of Aboriginal men who were wanted for murder. The expeditioners were exhorted to ‘use every possible precaution to save the lives of Native Women and Children’,26 but Macquarie also ordered that Aboriginal men who were killed were to be strung up in trees, as a warning to survivors.
One detachment headed north to the Hawkesbury region. Over the course of several raids and false leads they did not see a single Aborigine. A second detachment headed down to Elizabeth’s Belgenny Farm in the Cow Pastures region. This group’s Aboriginal guide was Tindale, and the colonists considered him a ‘Chief of the Cow Pastures Tribe’, the Muringong people. He also magnificently failed to lead the detachment to any Aboriginal campsites. A white stock-keeper from the Macarthur estates led the soldiers to an Aboriginal village of seventy huts near Bringelly, only to find the site deserted; the inhabitants had clearly been warned. Not so lucky was a group of Aboriginal people camping on the Macarthur estate itself. In a dawn raid, most of the people managed to flee in the nick of time but the soldiers shot one man, who later died of his wounds, and took a teenage boy prisoner.27
Elizabeth’s attitude towards Aboriginal people seemed to harden. Like many others in the colony, she moved away from her original conciliatory view, which in the earliest days had seen her welcome the visits of Daringa and her baby. Now that there were substantial sums of money to be gained or lost, now that white people known to her personally had been killed, Elizabeth could only see the original inhabitants as a threat. She shared the colonists general lack of insight about Aboriginal culture, affording it no credence or legitimacy. ‘Attempts have been made to civilise the natives of this country,’ she wrote from Parramatta to her goddaughter in Bridgerule, ‘but they are complete savages, and are as lawless and troublesome as when the Colony was first established. Our out settlements are constantly subjected to their depredations.’28 That the same could equally be said by Aboriginal people, about the colonists, completely escaped her. Elizabeth, like most of the other white farmers, was far more concerned for her livestock than for the Aboriginal people of the area and felt herself to be ‘much oppressed with care on account of our stock establishments at our distant farms, at the Cow Pastures, having been disturbed by the incursions of the natives’.29
After the promising beginnings of Governor Phillip’s interactions with the Eora people of Sydney Harbour, the Aboriginal people of New South Wales as a group were now, in the minds of the colonists, relegated to sub-human savages. Individuals could (and would) be befriended and respected—even loved—but collectively the Aboriginal people were feared and despised. The English colonists acted on their fear in the same way as colonial invaders had done the world over—with state-sanctioned murder.
At the time Elizabeth wrote her letter, a third detachment of soldiers, marching due south of Sydney, spent frustrating weeks following false leads and finding no one. Finally they were led, in the middle of the night, to an Aboriginal campsite south of Appin. The campsite, which was on high ground not far from a steep rocky gorge through which the Cataract River flowed, was empty but the fire was still burning. In the subsequent search, the soldiers heard a child cry and the commanding officer immediately ‘formed line rank entire’ and the soldiers ‘pushed through a thick brush’ towards the noise. The advancing line of redcoats spotted the fleeing people and opened fire. Some Aboriginal people were killed; some were so badly wounded ‘death would…be a blessing’.30 Others, in their panic and fear, ran right off the cliffs, and fell more than fifty metres to their deaths on the rocks below. The soldiers took two women and three children prisoner and counted fourteen bodies—including women, children, two warriors and an old man. The corpses of the warriors were hauled for more than a mile to a hilltop, where their bodies were hung up in the trees. The men’s heads were later sent to the anatomy department of the University of Edinburgh.
The Appin massacre failed to bring peace to the colonial frontier, although violence against Europeans on and around Elizabeth’s properties ceased to be reported. Attacks and reprisals continued apace, largely along the edge of white settlement, which at this point had moved to the far side of the Blue Mountains. Macquarie issued proclamations which, in practice, allowed settlers to shoot Aboriginal people with impunity, but in April 1817 he wrote to the colonial secretary in London to say that ‘all Hostility on both Sides has long since ceased’.31 In fact attacks would continue, in various forms, until well into the twentieth century. It seems unlikely that Elizabeth participated in any murderous raids, although other women farmers did. But even if Elizabeth did not herself kill anyone, even if she did not directly order her workers to kill, the killings still occurred on and around her land and to her benefit. She had to believe in the moral superiority of her own people, and her own cause, and conversely in the moral and inhuman degeneracy of Aboriginal people, in order to carry on in her colonial ventures.
Any doubts Elizabeth felt about the family enterprise, any concerns she held as a devout Christian for her own immortal soul, any qualms about killing men, women and children so that her livestock might graze in peace could never, ever be discussed. Who could she tell? The ladies who gathered at Government House to take tea? It was one more coal to add to her smouldering resentment of John, whose actions were the sole reason she was forced to carry such burdens alone. Always and again, her thoughts turned to England and her absent husband and boys. When were they coming home?