[Elizabeth Farm is a] home endeared to me by its having been my abode so many years and in a variety of circumstances—some indeed of a very painful nature—and others of serene happiness—and surrounded by many blessings conferred upon me for which I pray to God I may be sufficiently thankful.
ELIZABETH MACARTHUR TO EDWARD MACARTHUR, 31 MAY 1849
Elizabeth may have had words with Lady Gipps, furious at her for encouraging the unsuitable match, although the family’s reasons for rejecting Parker as a suitor are not at all clear. James and his wife Emily described Parker as penurious, which was to some degree true given he only had his modest salary to live on. His father in England was well off, but, as a fourth son, Henry’s expectations of an inheritance were probably low. Elizabeth admitted that Parker’s reputation was sound but found him bad tempered and narrow minded. She wrote to Edward, as the head of the family, seeking guidance—her concerns were ostensibly all about Emmeline’s happiness. ‘I feel horrified and apprehensive when I look forward—fearful for the happiness of the poor thing, the youngest and most cherished and indulged.’1
Was it Emmeline’s happiness she was fearful for though, or her own? In an 1829 letter to Edward, Emmeline had responded to his request for details of home life with a searing insight into her daily life:
Every day occurrences of this place cannot possibly interest you and as for home details an account of the stupid monotonous life we lead would give you the horrors—I certainly envy you when I read your letters from Italy and Switzerland—so interesting—so captivating to a poor unsophisticated Australian!2
More to the point, with her sister Elizabeth’s death it was now entirely clear to Emmeline (and her family) that the care of her elderly mother would fall to her. So the timing of her engagement was perhaps not at all coincidental and nor, perhaps, was her family’s refusal to allow it.
Elizabeth had, some f ifteen years earlier, refused on Emmeline’s behalf, another offer of marriage. In 1827 Saxe Bannister, then attorney-general of New South Wales, had suggested to John Macarthur a match between himself and the then nineteen-year-old Emmeline. John consulted with Elizabeth, and they were of one view when John replied, firmly, in the negative. As far as Elizabeth was aware, Mr Bannister and Emmeline ‘had never been thrown into each other’s company nor could we discover the least partiality other than that of a very general nature. We none of us dropped the least hint to her, not thinking it necessary as Mr Bannister was so soon to quit the country.’3
Henry and Emmeline were forced to wait for nearly a year, until the family heard back from Edward. It seems little wonder that with Emmeline pining in Parramatta, Elizabeth spent much of her time in Sydney. Of course Elizabeth could consent to the wedding without Edward’s approval, but perhaps she privately hoped that in the time it took to receive Edward’s reply, Emmeline’s affection for Henry would wane. For once, though, Edward said the right thing and sided with his younger sister. Perhaps he hoped to annoy his brothers at the same time. He reminded his family that Emmeline had reached an age when she was fully capable ‘or ought at least to be of judging with discretion herself’.4 He then asked some pointed questions about whether James had allowed her annuity to fall into arrears.
The family duly allowed the marriage to go ahead and in November 1843 the couple was wed. The governor and his wife travelled from Sydney especially to attend. James gave the bride away, Hannibal’s youngest daughters were bridesmaids (the family feud was obviously not so deep as to preclude them), and the church at Parramatta was crowded with spectators. Elizabeth did not attend the church service, although whether she was unwell or still unwilling to face so many strangers is unclear. She was certainly well enough to receive guests afterwards at an elegant breakfast at Elizabeth Farm. Governor Gipps and his wife did their best to mend bridges by making themselves very agreeable and assuring Elizabeth of the bridegroom’s ‘worth and integrity of character’.5 The vice-regal couple then returned immediately to Sydney, graciously allowing the newlyweds a brief honeymoon at the governor’s Parramatta residence.
The Macarthur family now wondered how best to care for Elizabeth, who was in her late seventies. There was some pressure for her to move to Camden Park, where she would have the benefits of living with family. There would also be the financial benefit of not maintaining a second household at Elizabeth Farm. The Bank of Australia, of which John Macarthur had been a founder and where Hannibal was still a director, had just spectacularly failed. Elizabeth had become a shareholder on John’s death and she may have incurred a direct loss. And the family as a whole was still suffering financially. Another long drought had meant that both the quality and quantity of wool shipped to London declined during this period. An auction was held to disperse some seventy or so of the family’s horses but many failed to find buyers.6 Small-time suppliers to the family, like the miller who provided their flour, went bankrupt and, in a domino effect, hit the family with serious losses. Mary’s family continued to require support. And large loans from London—to fund the expansionary activities of James and William into the Argyle and Murrumbidgee regions—were incurring ever increasing rates of interest.
Elizabeth voluntarily went without her annuity and in her will renounced all rights to arrears. She explained to Edward that although they could produce most of the necessities of life, as well as wine, fruit and dairy products, ‘still there is the lack of money to pay wages and to purchase tea, sugar and cloathing’.7 Meat and grain were selling so cheaply ‘that it does not pay the grower’.8 Without mentioning it to James and William, Elizabeth asked Edward to discreetly enquire about the allowance she paid to her half-sister Isabella Hacker in Bridgerule, and to find out whether it might be appropriate to allow it to lapse. After the death of her mother some seven years earlier, Elizabeth had ensured that her mother’s allowance flowed to Isabella, who had since emigrated to Prince Edward Island, Canada, with her husband and at least one of their seven daughters.9 Edward’s enquiries led to the allowance being gradually withdrawn. Elizabeth had hoped to continue the allowance for the rest of her sister’s life but, as she explained to Edward, ‘such has been the money embarrassments here that I have been fearful to incur any expense’.10
A year later, much to Elizabeth’s surprise, Isabella sent a letter—the first and last Elizabeth ever received from her. Isabella thanked Elizabeth for all her help over the years, which had been of great assistance, and hoped the affairs of New South Wales would soon mend. In a letter to Edward, Elizabeth noted that Isabella’s letter was well expressed ‘but very ill spelt…much did your dear father lament that no education was bestowed upon her’.11 It was more than fifty years since Elizabeth had seen Isabella but she fell easily into the role of the finger-pointing elder sister.
Although the Macarthurs remained asset-rich, their cash-flow problems continued, with William many years later vowing that he would never again wish to live through the events of the decade following 1842. The immediate problem of Elizabeth’s care was resolved by Emmeline and Henry. The couple moved into Elizabeth Farm, and Henry Parker—perhaps pointedly—paid all the farm’s upkeep costs. It was at first a temporary arrangement, but it would continue for the rest of Elizabeth’s life. Elizabeth became fond of Henry, and appreciative of his kindness.
Emmeline and Elizabeth took ‘carriage exercise’ almost every day, and Elizabeth continued to take great pleasure from walking in her garden. Emmeline wrote to Edward in 1844, providing an intimate vignette:
Our dear Mother goes regularly to church with us when the weather will permit—receives the Sacraments and joins us again at evening prayers which we have in the dining room—& sometimes the tradespeople employed by the family come & with the Servants Cottagers and their children we have quite a little congregation.12
In late July of that year, Elizabeth’s old friend Anna King died at the Vineyard. She was a year older than Elizabeth, and about to turn eighty. Surely Elizabeth could not help but reflect on her mortality, and pray for a peaceful end when her own time came.
In late 1844 Elizabeth went to Camden for two months, staying there for Christmas and, accompanied by her son William, returning to Parramatta in January. Within a few days of Elizabeth’s arrival home, her Bowman grandsons were brought up from Sydney by their Uncle Henry. A ‘very, very merry’ dinner ensued which Elizabeth and William obviously enjoyed. Two days later, Elizabeth and the Parkers attended church for the 26 January Anniversary Day celebrations—it was fifty-seven years since the First Fleet arrived at Sydney Cove, and, as Elizabeth remembered well, thirty-seven years since the overthrow of Governor Bligh. But he was long gone and, despite it all, Elizabeth’s family had persevered. It was with some satisfaction that she sat with Emmeline and Henry in a very full church, and made room for two young Marsdens, whom she described as ‘fine youths’.13 Hannibal and his many family members sat in a pew nearby, and all in the congregation could hear the distant Sydney guns, firing a salute.
Elizabeth, even in her old age, retained a shrewd understanding of the world around her and continued an active interest in current affairs and the expanding colonial frontier. Her great-nephew James Macarthur, Hannibal’s son, had in 1840 explored the Australian alps and travelled south through Gippsland with Polish scientist Sir Paul Edmund de Strzelecki. It was Strzelecki who climbed Australia’s highest peak and named it—after the Polish democratic leader, Tadeusz Kosciuszko. Hannibal’s younger brother, Charles, a captain in the Royal Marines, established the first white settlement at Port Essington, in 1838, in what is now the Northern Territory. Ludwig Leichhardt, the Prussian naturalist and explorer, travelled with his party nearly 5000 kilometres overland from Moreton Bay (now Brisbane) to Port Essington in 1844–45. Leichhardt returned to Sydney where his long-time correspondent and friend, William Macarthur, welcomed him to Camden Park so he could work on preparing his journals for publication. Later, Leichhardt visited Elizabeth at Parramatta. He was ‘a very modest and most intelligent person,’ wrote Elizabeth to Edward, ‘and by no means spoilt by his being made so much of a Lion since his return’.14 Edward continued to send Elizabeth books and periodicals, so she could stay up to date, but now there was also a good library in Sydney.
Edward, serving in the army once more and transferred to Ireland, sent his mother newspapers from Dublin as well as from London. Elizabeth duly scoured the library shelves for books about Ireland and, in line with Edward’s sympathies, was much distressed about the sufferings of the Irish people. ‘What an unhappy and maybe ill-used country!!!’ she wrote. The plight of the Irish stayed on her mind for some time and, ever practical, she took ‘some solace in reflecting that the bitter cold of winter was then passed away and the season of harvest approaching’.15 This was, however, at the height of the potato blight and for many there would be no harvest.
As happy and engaged as she was, Elizabeth was not immune to the pain of further loss. In 1845 Mary Bowman, again at Ravensworth, fell from a verandah and broke her leg. She couldn’t walk for many months and her family feared she may never regain the full use of her leg. She would later claim that her husband was ‘selfish and to me harsh and cruel’ and that the only respite she had from his bad temper was while a member of her family was visiting.16 Was that another reason Elizabeth stayed so often with her daughter in Sydney? She confessed that Mary’s ‘was not a happy married life at any period for any length of time’.17 Perhaps tellingly, no one mentions exactly how Mary fell from the verandah.
One year later James Bowman suffered an apoplectic fit and died. Mary did not seem sorry, writing to her mother to say that ‘disappointments of many kinds, falsehood and ill-treatment have changed me’ and that she had not expected ‘to be left as I am, a beggar in all things’. She thought that if she took care of the children and behaved as a wife should, then surely her husband would fulfil his side of the bargain and take care of ‘worldly things’, only to discover too late that he had ‘gambled all away, so disgracefully’.18
Elizabeth feared that Mary’s reaction to his death was not quite seemly. ‘I cannot arrive at any conclusions with respect to the feelings of poor Mary,’ Elizabeth wrote to Edward. ‘Let us hope they are such as becomes a Christian and erring Mortal.’19 Although Mary recovered and was able to walk again, she and her eldest son were unable to carry on with the farming ventures, and in 1848 Ravensworth was sold. Mary and her children moved to Camden Park to be supported by James and William.
Elizabeth also worried about, and feared for, Emmeline. She and her husband, both aged thirty-five when they married, suffered enormously in the years following their wedding. A son was stillborn, and a daughter born prematurely died soon after birth.20 Elizabeth praised Henry’s care of his wife in these dark times, writing to Edward to say that ‘nothing can be more tender and affectionate than his conduct’.21 During at least one of Emmeline’s ‘painful disappointments’—probably a miscarriage—Elizabeth was herself unwell and unable to provide her daughter with care and support. Instead, Elizabeth found herself an invalid, although her recovery was ‘greatly accelerated by the use of a warm Bath placed near my bedside, into which I was assisted twice a day for several weeks and attended like an infant—nothing can have exceeded the affectionate attention of our dear Emmeline and her no less kind Husband’.22 In late1846, in the wake of Emmeline’s losses and Elizabeth’s unidentified illness, their doctor recommended a change of air. Hannibal was pleased to offer them the use of his marine villa at Watsons Bay. Hannibal had purchased the property from the original Robert Watson—pilot, harbourmaster and lighthouse keeper—a few years earlier.
In January 1847 Henry Parker hired a steamship to take his precious passengers and their luggage direct from the Elizabeth Farm wharf on the Parramatta River right down through the long harbour past Sydney to Watsons Bay—a picturesque cove on the sheltered, Port Jackson side of the South Head peninsula. An Aboriginal community lived beside the lagoon at nearby Camp Cove, and the small European community at Watsons Bay was made up of fishermen, pilots, sailors and their families. Elizabeth noted with pleasure that there was ‘a goodly number of children and plenty of young voices’.23 Hannibal, for reasons Elizabeth could never discover, called his little villa Clovelly. The villa is long gone but Clovelly Street remains, as does Robertsons Park, which once formed the villa’s grounds. From the cove the ground rises gently towards the narrow spine of the peninsula. The house sat well up the hill, with one side facing Military Road. Elizabeth was able to sit at the other side of the house and look back across the harbour towards Sydney while ‘breathing in as much of the sea air as I conveniently can’24 and watching Emmeline swim.
Elizabeth was soon going for walks again, with the aid of a stick and accompanied by Emmeline and Henry. They made their way around the point to Camp Cove, or climbed the short rise behind the villa. Elizabeth wrote that ‘by a singular Gap in these stupendous Rocks which form the South Head, you are at once open to the Ocean without’.25 It is indeed a spectacular view from that gap, with a tumble of rocks to the left leading to the South Head of the harbour, and to the right a long vista of sandstone cliffs falling to the surf below. And ahead are the open waters of the Pacific Ocean.
What did Elizabeth think about while looking out to sea, that small elderly woman in whom love and ambition and sheer force of will had combined to create a dynasty? In a chair brought up for her especially, Elizabeth liked to sit and see the ships arrive at the heads, watch the pilot boats go out to meet them and then to follow their progress up the harbour. It was hard to believe that the mighty Port Jackson, now so full of comings and goings and so famously described by Elizabeth’s friend Governor Phillip as ‘the finest harbour in the world, in which a thousand sail of the line may ride in the most perfect security’, had ever, since the arrival of the First Fleet, lain empty of ships.26 But Elizabeth had seen it so.
Throughout the summer Elizabeth and the Parkers entertained a string of visitors. All five of the young Bowmans came to stay, as did Doctor Anderson, who had treated John Macarthur at his worst. Anderson had remained a family friend and had for some years been living at Hambledon Cottage. William, who had been ill at Camden Park, arrived looking thin but cheerful, and his mother took pleasure in watching him regain his health through a steady diet of fresh fish, oysters and sea bathing. Many of the Watson Bay fish he caught himself, in company with Emmeline and Mr Parker, in a small boat from which he could see his mother sitting happily on the villa’s verandah. Occasionally Elizabeth ventured out with them on short excursions to various parts of the harbour. Then, in March 1847 she and the Parkers returned to Elizabeth Farm much refreshed by their holiday.
Governor Gipps and his wife had returned to England the year before, to be replaced by Sir Charles Augustus Fitzroy and his wife Lady Mary. Elizabeth had yet another vice-regal couple to befriend. Lady Mary, adept with the needle and with a fine eye for design, amused herself by creating patchwork quilts. She employed a technique still in use today: paper piecing. Hundreds of paper templates were cut, then the fabric was basted on top of the paper, then each hexagon was whip-stitched to those adjacent. According to family lore, Elizabeth started making a hexagon quilt too and it’s entirely possible the women worked on their projects while they visited each other. In early December 1847, there was a wedding at the Vineyard, for yet another of Hannibal and Maria’s six daughters, and the vice-regal couple were pleased to attend. But four days later Lady Mary, aged fifty-seven, was killed.
She had climbed into her carriage at Government House in Parramatta, ready to be driven to Sydney by her husband. But he had barely taken the reins when the horses bolted and charged along the driveway, which curved down a hill. The barouche overturned and smashed against a row of oaks that lined the drive. Lady Mary suffered a fractured skull and died almost immediately; her husband survived with only minor injuries. The Macarthurs were shocked, as was all of Sydney: thousands of people came to pay their respects and there were more than eight hundred mourners in the funeral procession.27 The patchwork coverlet Lady Fitzroy was working on remains unfinished to this day—the colours of her basted hexagons still quite bright, having spent a century and more tucked in her sewing bag. Elizabeth didn’t finish her own quilt either but at some time Emmeline, or perhaps her granddaughter Elizabeth, finished it for her. Every now and again Elizabeth Macarthur’s quilt is displayed as the rare and beautiful museum piece it has become.
Lady Mary’s accident cast a pall over the Macarthur households, but there was more bad news to bear. The liquidation of the Bank of Australia in 1843 had hit Hannibal, as one of the bank’s directors, particularly hard. In 1848 he was ‘obliged to bend to the storm and to pass through the Insolvent Court’.28 He was declared bankrupt, and he and Maria went first to their son-in-law’s home in Braidwood and then later to Moreton Bay, where one of their married daughters was living at a property called Newstead. Hannibal had kept up appearances so carefully that his financial failure came as a complete surprise to Elizabeth and her family. Even if they had wished to provide financial support, though, it was beyond them. They were so deep in debt that Elizabeth’s family hadn’t even been able to help Mary to retain Ravensworth. The Vineyard was sold to a Catholic archbishop and within a few years renamed Subiaco. It became a Benedictine convent and school for young ladies. Henry Parker managed to buy Hannibal’s villa, Clovelly, at Watsons Bay. Hannibal sold it to him for £450, having originally paid £1800 for it. Such were the effects of the economic crisis—or the bonds of family.
Parker completely refurbished the house and planted the Moreton Bay figs and Norfolk Island pines that can still be seen today. In January 1849 he once again hired a steamship to collect his wife and mother-in-law from Parramatta and carry them to the harbour-side retreat. The family was worried enough about Elizabeth’s health and advancing years that their party included Doctor Anderson. The journey was quite a logistical exercise. They carried so much baggage that a luggage boat was towed behind the steamship, which left the wharf at Parramatta at noon. By three o’clock they called in at Sydney Cove, where William Macarthur and Captain Phillip Parker King joined the flotilla. At Watsons Bay the resident pilots and their boat crews were happy to lend a hand with the unloading, and so by six o’clock the villa’s residents were seated at dinner, while William and Captain King returned to Sydney on the steamer. By ten o’clock Elizabeth had retired for the night, in one of her son Edward’s comfortable old field beds. Unsurprisingly, she thought of him ‘not a little’.29
Again, Elizabeth enjoyed her months beside the sea. Emily and James Macarthur came to visit, with their only child, Elizabeth, now almost nine years old, and her two youngest Bowman cousins. With their grandmother, they all set out on a long excursion by boat along Middle Harbour, then a remote reach of Port Jackson, and didn’t return to Watsons Bay until sunset. Elizabeth, now eighty-two, still relished her walks and sightseeing at the Gap. She enjoyed talking with the fishermen and pilot crews. She also befriended an elderly couple who lived in a cave, their home ‘built up a little in front and divided into two or three apartments kept orderly and very clean’.30 The couple were born in Devon, like Elizabeth, and she often walked over to their cave residence to reminisce with them. A newspaper article of 1903 featured Watsons Bay, describing the ‘bachelor camp’ of fishermen who still lived in that cave—really not much more than a deep overhang. Those men believed the earliest white inhabitants of the site had been ‘Billy Taylor and his old lady’.31
When the holiday was over, Elizabeth was pleased to return to the familiar rhythms of Elizabeth Farm. In her beloved home she could comfortably receive her regular stream of visitors. Her own children and grandchildren, of course, but also the grown-up children of the many friends of her youth. During 1849, Mary’s daughter Isabella contracted scarlet fever and was sent from Camden Park to be cared for in isolation at Elizabeth Farm. Mary and her daughter stayed in a tiny spare room called the Oak Tree Room and, from a couch squeezed into the room for the purpose, Mary nursed her little girl through the illness.32 In the course of a day Elizabeth might stroll in her garden, discuss the state of the orchard with the head gardener, and then retire to write a letter or two while there was still daylight enough to do so. She still regularly wrote to Edward in Ireland, and to Emily, James and William at Camden Park—letters that confirm that her mind remained bright even as her body faded. Late each afternoon, as she had done her whole life, Elizabeth changed for dinner and joined her family in prayer before eating a meal made from the produce of her own gardens and farms.
In the summer of 1850, aged eighty-three, Elizabeth was strong enough for a third stay at Watsons Bay, yet frail enough to ensure that she and the Parkers again travelled in the company of Doctor Anderson. As a young woman, Elizabeth had written from Sydney to her friend Bridget Kingdon about ‘a Bay near the Harbour’s mouth’ where she and her new Sydney acquaintances ‘passed the day in Walking among the Rocks, and upon the sands very agreeably’. Elizabeth spent time that long-ago day remembering her friend and ‘I looked carefully for some shells for you’,33 but she could find none better than Bridget might find herself on the English beaches near her father’s vicarage. Now, sixty years later at the same beach, Elizabeth’s thoughts still returned to Bridgerule. The scenes of her youth and childhood, Elizabeth remarked, could not ‘be easily forgotten, nor will the memory of dear friends departed, nor of those that still remain, once my young playfellows, be effaced from memory while it pleases God that I retain that faculty’.34
Little is known of Elizabeth’s final illness beyond the bald fact that she suffered a stroke and, on 9 February 1850, in the company of her daughter Emmeline and her friend Doctor Anderson, she died.35
Elizabeth’s death cannot have been unexpected but that it occurred at isolated Watsons Bay, in the summertime, presented an immediate and pressing problem. Perhaps, from among the Watsons Bay community, a ship’s carpenter was quickly able to build a simple coffin for her. With the roads in and out of Watsons Bay still rudimentary at best, Elizabeth’s body was most likely taken to Sydney by steamer, accompanied by Henry Parker and Doctor Anderson, and possibly by Emmeline too. From Sydney surely a swift messenger was dispatched to Camden Park to break the grim news and to confirm that Elizabeth would be buried beside her husband and eldest daughter, in the family graveyard on the rise opposite Camden Park House. In that hard hilltop soil, at the hottest time of the year, men laboured with picks and shovels to create a final resting place while a wagon bearing her little body made the slow journey from Sydney. There is no record of any kind of public funeral for Elizabeth, so we must merely assume that, in line with the customs of the day, Mary and Emmeline did not attend, and were instead represented by James and William, who listened to the local reverend intone the familiar words and watched as their mother’s coffin was lowered into the ground.
William planted the graveyard with tall, exotic palms which in time could be seen from the grand house his father designed and where Elizabeth’s descendants still live. The woman who, with her arrival in the colony in 1790, represented all the complexity, optimism and pragmatism of the antipodean colonial experiment, died a mere year before the discovery of gold would change everything again.
There was nothing inevitable about the Macarthurs’ success. Plenty of others with similar ambitions failed to do so well. The secret to their achievements was a combination of skill, good timing, and—mainly—the combined efforts of the family. Having first John, then their grown-up sons, as agents and catalysts in England proved a boon to the Macarthurs’ ability to sell wool, lobby for regulatory change and receive additional land grants. Having the capable Elizabeth on hand to oversee the family business ventures in New South Wales for a total of twelve years while her husband and sons were overseas was equally crucial to the subsequent success of their enterprise. The family fortune was then cemented by the efforts of the second and third generations.
Months after Elizabeth’s death, her daughter-in-law Emily wrote to an aunt in England: ‘little can I tell you how much I have missed the dear old lady.’36 And that image of Elizabeth Macarthur, as genteel lady, as helpmeet to John Macarthur’s genius or—erroneously—as some sort of social-climbing society matron has somehow been the picture that has endured in the Australian imagination.
Australian history has been, until recently, very much the history of white men working—as farmers, as soldiers, as miners, as explorers. Women and other outsiders were largely written out, as if they were merely peripheral to the real story. In the history of Australian farming, though, women very much were the real story. Elizabeth Macarthur is only one of many women who were—and are—crucial to the family farming enterprise. In her ambition, her fortitude and her love for her family she was just like many other strong and intelligent farm women.
Elizabeth was a real-life Elizabeth Bennet who married a Wickham, instead of a Darcy—albeit a Wickham who loved her as much as he was able. She is interesting not because she was some sort of paragon, but because she was in fact so very typical. She was an ordinary English country woman who fell in love with a difficult man and, as a result of his decision to sail to New South Wales, she lived an extraordinarily interesting life.
Her successes, and those of women farmers like her, truly deserve to be one of the iconic stories of Australian history.