1

A ‘Good King’? Lachlan Macquarie in New South Wales, 1810-1821

By Dr Mark Hearn*

Lachlan Macquarie was sworn in as the governor of New South Wales on New Year's Day,

1810. He was only the sixth individual to hold the office of governor since the colony’s

foundation in January 1788. He would rule until 1821, fulfilling the longest term of any

governor up to that time. Macquarie presided over a number of significant changes and

reforms during the decade of his rule, but the importance attributed to his term of office by

history was largely unacknowledged when he sailed back to England, to face bitter criticism

of his actions as governor. In this respect, Macquarie had something in common with the

governors who preceded him: all left Sydney exhausted or defeated by the challenges of

running an isolated colony of convicts and free settlers, a small and insular population much

given to cultivating factions and feuds.

Macquarie brought with him his own regiment, the 73rd, which replaced the NSW Corps as

the colonial garrison, disgraced for its role in deposing Macquarie’s hapless predecessor,

William Bligh in the ‘Rum Rebellion’ of 1808. For several years, Macquarie was able to

preside over NSW in the absence of the colony’s chief troublemakers – particularly John

Macarthur, the former Corps officer and wealthy landowner who languished in London until

1817, a consequence of his leading role in Bligh’s downfall. It was probably just as well:

Macquarie was stern and autocratic, a military officer accustomed to command and intolerant

of dissent.
 2

A native of Scotland, Macquarie became an ensign in a Highland regiment in 1777, at the age

of 15. He served the British Empire in the American colonies, during the War for

Independence; in the campaign against Napoleon in Egypt in 1801, and in securing the

empire’s hold on India, Britain’s wealthiest and most important colonial asset after the loss of

the American colonies.

Macquarie was 48 years old when he became NSW governor. He had sought the position

because it paid well, carried a degree of status and would help provide for a comfortable

retirement in the Isle of Mull in Scotland. Yet in 1810 Macquarie was not simply preparing

for an easy, pre-retirement life. He knew that he would face many challenges as governor,

and there were other aspects of his personality that he would help prepare him for this task: as

well as an autocratic temperament he was also gregarious, able to look on life in a self-

confident and positive way, and he soon revealed a capacity to respond boldly to the

challenges that he faced. Macquarie’s enthusiasm was undoubtedly strengthened by the

presence of his wife Elizabeth, whom he praised for her ‘most excellent judgement and sound

understanding’ (Atkinson, p.318). Elizabeth proved as ambitious to improve the colony and as

curious of its nature as her husband, expressed in her interest in landscape design and

architecture, and her participation in the governor’s various tours of the colony.

The challenges facing New South Wales in 1810 remained those that had troubled the colony

since white settlement in 1788: how to develop as a self-sustaining community, able to feed

itself without the fear of inadequate food supply or even famine; and how to reconcile the

growth of a convict settlement side by side with a colony of free settlers, and a colony

increasingly populated by ex-convicts. Macquarie sought to develop opportunities for

 3

economic growth by expanding the territory of the colony, beyond the confines of the plains

around Sydney, hemmed by the shadow of the Blue Mountains, or the other isolated

settlements, like Newcastle, over one hundred kilometres to Sydney’s north, or over a

thousand kilometres to the south in Van Diemen’s Land.

In 1810, the population of these colonial settlements stood at around 19,000 European

inhabitants. In the Sydney settlements, which included Parramatta and the farming

communities in the Hawkesbury district, there were 15,500 men and 2,200 women. About a

third of the population were convicts. After just over twenty years, the colony still lacked the

basic infrastructure required by a growing community. It lacked a substantial hospital and

government buildings, a properly established government bureaucracy and legal system,

roads, financial institutions and even currency.

Some historians do not see Macquarie’s dedication to the task of colonial development as

simply reflecting a process of practical governance. The historian Alan Atkinson argues that

‘Macquarie cast himself as a new founder’ of the colony, setting himself up as a ‘good King’,

the source of all colonial power and patronage (Atkinson, p.321-2). As Governor, Macquarie

could exercise virtually unfettered power. There was no form of parliamentary or local

community representation. Macquarie could exercise the power of life and death over the

convicts. He could lavishly reward citizens with generous land grants, if he chose to do so.

Land was the basis of economic power in the colony, from which personal fortunes could be

built, as John Macarthur had achieved with a ruthless pursuit of his own self-interest,

developing extensive pastoral holdings in Parramatta and Camden and undermining

Governor Bligh’s attempts to limit his interests, and those of his allies.
 4

Many free settlers and emancipated convicts saw one advantage to life in remote NSW: they

could make money and own land in ways unimaginable back in Britain. As Jan Kociumbas

describes, the commercial world of early colonial NSW reflected ‘rampant individualism’, a

competitive culture of ‘contracts and courts, wheeling and dealing’, an acquisitive culture

which all the colonial governors of the period sought to encourage (Kociumbas, p.112).

Macquarie found a number of ways of exercising his authority and bestowing patronage on

those he favoured. In 1810 Macquarie decided to build a new military barracks, a new

general hospital, and a road to Parramatta. The barracks were completed by the end of 1810,

the Parramatta road in April 1811. The new general hospital was built by D'Arcy Wentworth,

the principal surgeon, and two other colonists. The contract to build the hospital was a kind

of public-private partnership that later became familiar in New South Wales: Wentworth and

his partners were granted the right by Macquarie to a limited monopoly of importing spirits.

For this reason the hospital became known as the ‘Rum Hospital’, and Macquarie was

criticised by the government in London for agreeing to a monopoly of the liquor trade.

Standing on a hill on Macquarie Street and looking over the town of Sydney below, the

hospital, completed in 1816, symbolised Macquarie’s determination to put his stamp on the

colony.

D’Arcy Wentworth was one of the first colonists favoured with Macquarie’s patronage and

he was a controversial choice. Prior to arriving in NSW in 1790, Wentworth had been three

times charged with highway robbery, although he had never been convicted. A number of the

leading free settlers in the colony saw Wentworth as little better than a convict. Macquarie
 5

appointed Wentworth principal surgeon in February 1810, and put him charge of the colonial

police force later in the same year. Wentworth was also the recipient of a number of generous

land grants during Macquarie’s term of office.

The projects Macquarie initiated in 1810 were designed to both improve the civic life and

welfare of the population, and to develop the economic opportunities of the colony.

Macquarie’s building projects began to transform Sydney, Parramatta and the new townships

that Macquarie also began to establish in districts further inland, including Windsor,

Richmond and Liverpool. In 1822 Macquarie listed 265 public works that had been carried

out during his rule.

To stimulate economic activity, in October 1810 Macquarie opened a new market-place in

Sydney, to provide a better regulated and more efficient site for transactions of produce and

cloth and consumer goods. In July 1813 Macquarie authorised the distribution of new silver

coinage. A hole was punched in imported Spanish dollars in order to created two coins, in

place of an unreliable system of barter and promissory notes. The holey dollar was worth five

shillings and the dump fifteen pence. At the end of 1816, despite the opposition of the British

government, he supported the creation of the colony's first bank, the Bank of NSW.

Macquarie also encouraged local manufacturing in mills and workshops, which produced

flour, cloth, leather and building materials such as bricks. The government also intervened in

the marketplace by controlling the price paid for grain and meat, which was purchased by the

government commissariat from farmers and graziers. This could also result in corruption,

with the commissary officials sometimes involved in both the government’s purchase of

produce, and the private production of that produce. Many of these economic measures were
 6

driven as much by necessity as ambition: the colony experienced periods of economic

depression, drought and poor harvest during the Macquarie era (Karskens, p.225).

Macquarie also encouraged trade with the Asia Pacific region, which he was probably not

supposed to do, as such trade could conflict with the trading monopoly enjoyed by the East

India Company, the vast private enterprise that reflected the commercial nature of Great

Britain’s empire. Macquarie encouraged entrepreneurs in Sydney to trade with Bengal in

India and other parts of the region, and as a result: ‘metal goods and textiles arrived in

convict transports; grain, sugar, spices and spirits came from India; American schooners

brought salt pork from Tahiti for the New South Wales market and bêche-de-mer [a type of

marine animal] from Fiji for re-export to China; sealers and whalers called regularly en route

for England with cargoes of skins and sperm-oil’ (Ritchie, Lachan Macquarie, pp.124-5).

Distant from Britain, NSW was establishing a lucrative trading relationship with its

neighbours.

In both the trading networks and the building projects that Macquarie initiated, he was

assisted by emancipated convicts. Macquarie encouraged their participation in both public

service and in private enterprise. Francis Greenway, a convict who had been transported for

forgery, was appointed civil architect by Macquarie in 1816. Greenway was an inspired

choice, a well-trained architect with a superb instinct for the restrained style of Georgian

architecture. Greenway provided many of the symbolic monuments of Macquarie’s rule,

including the lighthouse, known as the Macquarie Tower, on the south head of Port Jackson,

completed in 1817. By 1819 Greenway had designed a female factory for women convicts at

Parramatta and a large barracks and compound for male convicts in what is now Queen's
 7

Square, Sydney, just near the northern corner of Hyde Park. When the barracks were

complete Macquarie granted Greenway an absolute pardon. In 1817 Greenway began St

Matthew's Church, Windsor. Greenway also designed St James's Church, across from the

barracks in King Street, Sydney, and the Supreme Court building immediately behind the

church.

Greenway’s designs, and the purposes the buildings were intended to fulfil, not only reflected

Georgian taste; they also reflected Macquarie’s determination to impose order and hierarchy

on the colony and its citizens, with the governor at the symbolic head of this hierarchy. The

Hyde Park Barracks, the Female Factory, and the churches were intended to reflect the

principles of order and authority under God and Lachlan Macquarie. The barracks and the

Female factory were also intended as centres of both reform and confinement, although

neither were large enough to contain the entire populations of convict men and women. John

Ritchie observes that in 1817, Macquarie admitted that he viewed the colony as an asylum,

by which he meant a refuge in which the convicts could be raised to a moral way of life, and

allow them to be restored to a better position within society (Ritchie, Lachan Macquarie,

p.160). Macquarie believed in the principle of emancipation, and sought to encourage this

principle through the example of men like Francis Greenway.

Macquarie also believed that the convicts had to be led by a firm hand to this promise of

emancipation. Macquarie despaired of the vicious and ungodly habits of many convicts; soon

after his arrival in the colony in 1810 he issued instructions to enforce strict observance of the

Sabbath, and attempted to force the large number of men and women in de facto relationships

to marry. In 1805 it had been estimated that two thirds of the children in the colony were
 8

illegitimate, and despite Macquarie’s intentions that figure probably remained similar

throughout his term of office.

One of the fundamental notions imported to New South Wales was the ‘imagined gender

order’ of the colony. As Marian Aveling observes, ‘the sexual division of labour was

imported from Britain in the heads of the white invaders’, a division based on the principle

that ‘men were the main producers, and that reproduction was women’s work’ (Aveling,

pp.6-7). Macquarie attempted to extend the ‘paternal authority’ of the governor over convict

women by segregation and control, with convict women confined to the Female Factory at

night, although not all convict women could practically be subject to this restriction. Ex-

convict women had some greater degree of liberty, although they suffered the social and

economic restraints exerted upon emancipated convicts. According to the discriminations of

British society at the time, free settler women were also denied a role in public life and in

marriage were denied property rights.

Macquarie used the constabulary to maintain a tight surveillance of the convict population.

Houses in Sydney were numbered for the first time, and householders were ordered to submit

lists of residents. Convicts were subject to a nine pm curfew – they had to be off the streets

and in their homes. Public execution also providing a harsh and exemplary lesson: each year

an average of eleven convicts were publicly hung at the execution grounds near Brickfield

Hill. Recidivists, that is, convicts who re-offended in the colony, were sent to the grim

secondary sites of confinement, at Coal River near Newcastle or Sarah Island in Van

Diemen’s Land. Other recidivists might be placed in solitary confinement, or worked in hard

labour in chain gangs; convicts could be publicly flogged, or pilloried in stocks.

 9

On one hand, as John Ritchie observes, ‘violence was never far from the surface of life and

the authorities acted as if their society were under siege’ (Ritchie, Lachan Macquarie, p.130).

Yet the same Macquarie who presided over this system of surveillance and punishment also

sought to reform the character of the convict through encouragement and mercy. Macquarie

attempted to restrict the sentences of corporal punishment imposed by the magistrates, and he

was generous and consistent in pursuing his policy of emancipation: between 1810 and 1820

Macquarie granted 366 absolute pardons, 1,365 conditional pardons and 2,319 tickets of

leave. The factor that unites the apparently contradictory policies of punishment and

emancipation is that Macquarie stood at the head of either system, the only individual in the

colony able to bestow the power of life and death, servitude or freedom.

Macquarie had a strong sense of history, and his own place in it. Macquarie also had a strong

sense of his own importance, reflected in his tendency to name a great many places after

himself – the Macquarie plains and Macquarie River in Van Dieman’s Land, the Macquarie

Tower at South Head. As the governor of a young and still largely unexplored colony, he

understood that he had an opportunity to expand and to define the terms of this new,

unexplored territory. Macquarie encouraged a number of expeditions to explore beyond

Sydney, and he was keen to tour as much of the territories under his control as possible.

These tours included two visits to Van Diemen's Land in 1811 and 1821, three to Newcastle,

and one to Port Macquarie, which he founded in 1821. After the Blue Mountains to Sydney’s

west had been crossed by the explorers Gregory Blaxland, William Lawson and William

Wentworth (D’Arcy’s son) in 1813, Macquarie travelled along the new road across the range

in May 1815 and selected the site for the town of Bathurst.
 10

In expanding the areas of white settlement within the Sydney region and beyond it,

Macquarie was increasingly intruding into the territory occupied by the various indigenous

tribal groups who had been settled on the land for thousands of years. When Macquarie

arrived in 1810, the indigenous tribes of the coast around Sydney Harbour, including the

Cadigal and the Cammeragal, had already been dispossessed of their tribal territories by

white settlement. The populations of both these tribes and those of the Cumberland plain, to

the west of Sydney and Parramatta, had also been decimated by a small pox epidemic in the

1790s. The tribes of the plains surrounding Sydney now found themselves on the frontier of

white settlement, as farming activities developed around the Camden area to the south,

Parramatta to the west, and the Hawkesbury district in the north-west.

In the first few years of Macquarie’s rule, there was relative peace between the white settlers

and the tribes of the Cumberland plain. This peaceful coexistence was shattered in 1814 when

an aboriginal boy was shot dead and a white soldier speared to death in a fight near Appin, to

the south of Sydney, after the soldiers discovered a group of aborigines in a white farmers

maize field. As Grace Karskens describes in The Colony, the aborigines of the Cumberland

plain would often take white agricultural produce and livestock, as they considered it part of

the bounty of their land. At other times they destroyed white farm houses, speared livestock

or set fire to crops in retaliation for dispossession and white attacks. The confrontation at

Appin in 1814 led to a pattern of payback and reprisal, as vigilante groups of whites attacked

and killed indigenous tribes people, often women and children, and the aborigines responded

with payback raids, which was part of their traditional response to acts of violence.
 11

Since his arrival in 1810 Macquarie had wanted the white settlers to live in peace with the

aboriginal tribes. Macquarie believed the aborigines to be honest and well-intentioned,

although they were only just beginning to emerge from a state of ‘rude and Uncivilised

nature’. It was presumably Macquarie’s assumption of a lack of civilisation that allowed him

to overlook the consequences for aboriginal people of pushing white settlement further into

tribal lands. Macquarie believed that the only viable future for the aborigines was to be

assimilated into white society. Although it might be too late to impose that civilisation on

adult indigenous people, it might be achieved with their children. In 1814 Macquarie

established a Native Institution at Parramatta to educate indigenous children in the

knowledge and customs of white society. In order to prevent the children from returning to

tribal life after their education was concluded, Macquarie sought both male and female

children who could later be marriage partners. It was also Macquarie’s intention that once

children were sent to the school, they would never be permitted to return to their parents, or

to their traditional way of life.

The outbreak of violence in 1814 might have delayed or destroyed hopes of establishing the

Native Institution; when it opened its doors only a handful of pupils were enrolled, and

several of these ran away. However Macquarie decided that the Government’s response to

the violence could help develop the Native Institution. In April 1816 Macquarie sent three

detachments of soldiers to either capture or kill any aborigines they encountered in the

Cumberland Plain. He wanted hostile aborigines driven across the Blue Mountains, where

they could no longer interfere with the progress of white settlement. Macquarie also ordered

the officers of these military detachments to bring back healthy boys and girls who could be

placed in the Native Institution. From 1816 the Native Institution enjoyed something of a
 12

boost in enrolments, and Macquarie was fond of using the Institution as a showcase for

visitors to the colony.

The results of these punitive expeditions were largely futile pursuits of an elusive enemy,

except for one successful attack on an aboriginal camp near Appin on 17 April 1816. The

white soldiers trapped a party of predominately old men, women and children between the

line of their rifles and the edge of deep ravine. At least fourteen aborigines died from either

gunshot wounds or as a result of jumping or falling to their deaths. Following Macquarie’s

orders, the bodies of three of the natives, two men and a woman, were taken to a nearby hill

and hung as an exemplary warning to the other natives. The bodies were also decapitated. As

Grace Karskens concludes, this ‘drive’ of aborigines to their deaths at Appin established a

pattern of white settler response to dealing with the aborigines (Karskens, pp.514-5).

After the Blue Mountains were crossed in 1813, white settlement expanded into the plains

that spread west of the mountain range and into the territory of the Wiradjuri people.

Macquarie toured this district in 1815, and named the new town of Bathurst, in honour of his

patron in London, Lord Bathurst, the Colonial Secretary. As John Ritchie records,

Macquarie’s party of visitors to the district celebrated the naming of Bathurst on 7 May: ‘The

party drank a toast to its future prosperity, hoisted a flag, fired volleys and gave three cheers.

They heard divine service and also an injunction to treat the aborigines with kindness. To

Macquarie, the adjacent soil seemed fit for cultivation and for pasture, suitable for modest

farmers as well as for great graziers’ (Ritchie, Lachan Macquarie, p.143). Macquarie seems

to have hardly noticed that his ritual of naming and assuming possession effectively

dispossessed the local indigenous people. Less than a year later Macquarie declared war on
 13

the aborigines of the Cumberland Plain, a conflict, as historian Peter Read describes, that

would be resumed against the Wiradjuri of the Bathurst Plains in the 1820s.

John Ritchie notes that in 1815 Macquarie was fifty-four years of age, and had reached ‘the

apogee of his achievement. He considered that there was peace and plenty in his land, that his

people improved in manners and in morals and that the immense continent would eventually

become one of the greatest colonies in the British Empire (Ritchie, Lachan Macquarie,

p.143). If Macquarie’s first five years as governor were marked by relative success and

harmony, the later years of his term were marked by division and a confrontation with the

brutal realities of the colony, both of its race relations, and the fractious dynamics of the

power structures within white colonial society.

By 1815, Macquarie was increasingly distracted by a dispute with Ellis Bent, the colony’s

Judge Advocate, and with brother Jeffrey. Ellis Bent arrived with Macquarie in 1810 and had

administered both the criminal and civil jurisdictions of the colonial legal system. Jeffrey

Bent arrived in the colony in 1814 to become the first judge of the new Supreme Court of

NSW. The colony was gradually developing a properly functioning legal system, a process

that Macquarie had encouraged, and the courts represented the only constraint upon

Macquarie’s power as governor. Both Ellis and Jeffery Bent believed that Macquarie still

exercised too much unregulated authority, and was too inclined to promote emancipated

convicts into positions in both government and the law. Macquarie had allowed emancipated

convicts to practices as barristers. He had appointed ex-convicts such as Simeon Lord, one of

the wealthtiest merchants in Sydney, as a magistrate, and into other positions of authority.

Jeffrey Bent refused to conduct sittings of the Supreme Court until barristers could arrive
 14

from Britain who were not emancipated convicts. Both the Bent brothers and the Reverend

Samuel Marsden, the senior chaplain of the Church of England in the colony, refused to

accept that Simeon Lord should hold important public offices. The ‘exclusivists’ like the

Bents and Marsden were also appalled that Macquarie invited leading emancipists like

Simeon Lord to dine at Government House, where they would have to treat emancipated

convicts as social equals.

Why was Macquarie so determined to promote emancipated convicts? John Hirst argues that

Macquarie ‘was recognising men according to their merits and accomplishments in

developing the country…Macquarie came to the colony to build and shape and improve, not

to accept it as it was and to preside over a pathetic imitation of old-world “society”’ (Hirst,

Convict Society and its Enemies, pp.154-5). Macquarie, Hirst also argues, had a very low

opinion of the free settlers, whom, despite their elitist pretensions, were often themselves

quite ‘low born’. Macquarie also had an ‘exalted’ view of his own status as governor, and

expected others to accept his views and decisions.

Macquarie resented any challenge to his authority and any resistance to his determination to

bring emancipated convicts into a greater role within colonial society. In 1815, Macquarie

observed that since his arrival he had seen himself as the patron and champion of all

‘meritorious persons’ who had been convicts, and he would not desert them now. Here again

Macquarie cast himself in the role of the Good King. Kings usually don’t like to be defied,

and in the short term Macquarie defeated the challenge posed by Ellis and Jeffrey Bent. In

1816 they were recalled to London for defying the governor’s authority.
 15

However Jeffrey Bent had succeeded in developing an opposition faction to Macquarie, a

faction that attracted a number of the colony’s wealthiest free settlers, who did not wish to

share their society, or their financial and political power, with emancipated convicts. Many of

these leading free settlers also had powerful patrons and friends amongst the ministers of the

British government. John Macarthur returned to Sydney from London in 1817, and although

he had been instructed by the British government not to become involved in public affairs as

a result of his participation in the Rum Rebellion, Macarthur soon fell out with Macquarie.

Macarthur was opposed to Macquarie’s encouragement of emancipated convicts, and the

governor would not provide Macarthur with further grants of land. Macarthur began to work

behind the scenes to have Macquarie removed from office. Samuel Marsden became a focus

Macquarie’s resentment at criticism of his policies; in 1818 Macquarie accused Marsden of

organising a seditious conspiracy against him.

Increasingly, Macquarie reacted intolerantly against both his critics and perceived

troublemakers, whether those troublemakers were persons of power or simply convicts.

Macquarie had three convicts summarily flogged for trespassing on the public Domain near

government house; his declaration of punitive attacks on the aborigines were also issued as

he lashed out at his critics. John Ritchie observes that the bitterness of Macquarie’s disputes

with his critics intensified between mid 1815 and mid 1816: ‘public affairs changed from

calm to turmoil and Macquarie’s conduct was alternatively marked by depression and

recklessness’ (Ritchie, Lachan Macquarie, p.161). Macquarie was both emotionally stressed

and physically unwell. In December 1817, Macquarie wrote to Lord Bathurst and offered his

resignation as governor.
 16

Bathurst did not accept Macquarie’s offer of resignation, or at least he asked Macquarie to

postpone it. Bathurst had decided to instigate an inquiry to examine the effectiveness of

transportation as a deterrent against crime. Bathurst chose a lawyer, John Thomas Bigge, to

conduct a royal commission into virtually all aspects of the administration of the colony.

Bathurst further instructed Bigge that the transportation system should be made 'an object of

real terror', a fate feared by criminals. Any weakening of this punitive intention by 'ill

considered compassion for convicts' in the policies of Governor Macquarie should be

reported to the British government. Bathurst had obviously been listening to Macquarie’s

critics, although Bathurst was also influenced by debate in London about the cost and

effectiveness of the transportation system, and at a time when Britain was facing serious

economic difficulties, with the government struggling to contain expenditure.

Bigge arrived in Sydney in 1819 armed with sweeping powers not only to inquire into the

transportation system, but also to act as a kind of alternative governor – at least that is how

Bigge interpreted his instructions. Bigge soon made it clear that he disapproved of

Macquarie’s policy of allowing emancipated convicts to hold public office. Bigge challenged

a decision by Macquarie to appoint an emancipist medical practitioner, Dr William Redfern,

as a magistrate. Macquarie found Bigge’s challenge to his authority as governor intolerable,

and soon came to believe that the conduct of Bigge’s inquiry was little more than an attack

upon him and his policies as governor. Bigge hardly discouraged this impression, often

spending time staying with the Macarthur family, signalling where his political sympathies

lay.
 17

The controversies over Bigge’s inquiry largely consumed Macquarie’s remaining tenure as

governor, and even after he sailed for England in February 1822 Macquarie spent his

remaining years attempting to negate the impact of the three reports that Bigge presented on

the state of the colony, reports which ranged over the transportation system, the

administration of the colony and the colonial economy.

A number of the recommendations Bigge made acknowledged the need to allow the colony

to continue to develop as a civic community, to begin to move away from the autocratic rule

of a single governor. As Manning Clark describes in his History of Australia, Bigge sought to

develop the colony’s economy and society while preserving the traditional divisions of

power, and restraining both the role and the rights of emancipated convicts (Clark, History of

Australia, p.369). Bigge recommended the establishment of a limited constitutional

government through a Legislative Council, a representative body of citizens, although

appointed by the governor - not elected by the people. Bigge also recommended that Van

Diemen's Land be established as a separate colony, and that better provisions be made for the

reception of convicts from England. Bigge refused to approve the introduction of trial by jury

or the modification of the military tribunals that composed the criminal courts, hence

hindering the development of a fairer and more socially inclusive legal system. Bigge’s

report also repeated a number of personal attacks made against Macquarie by disgruntled

colonists virtually as fact.

Bigge recommended that convicts whom had been granted a ticket of leave should be

allowed to be tenant farmers but not owners of land, and could only take legal action to

protect their property rights at the discretion of the courts. In blocking land grants to
 18

emancipated convicts Bigge hoped, as Manning Clark observed, that the emancipists would

remain in the class to which they belonged, the class of labourers, rather than being

encouraged to become part of the class of owners, with the same rights as emigrant settlers.

Here was a vision of society based on privilege, and artificial barriers to social and economic

improvement, rather than merit. It was this vision of restricting emancipist rights that enjoyed

an ascendancy under Macquarie’s successor as governor, Sir Thomas Brisbane.

In Punishment and Profit John Ritchie provides a detailed analysis of Bigge’s inquiry and the

impact of his recommendations. Ritchie concludes that Bigge’s reforms helped to streamline

the convict transportation system, and to reconcile the principles of punishment and profit, in

the interests of the free settlers. Increasingly, convicts were sent away from Sydney into new

areas of settlement or new penal camps in an attempt to reduce their influence on colonial

society; and it became extremely difficult, if not impossible, for emancipists to be appointed

to public office. As Ritchie concludes, ‘The days when emancipists were admitted to the

society of government house had ended’ (Ritchie, Punishment and Profit p.248). The cause

of the emancipists would have to await the rise of a new generation of political agitators.

Lachlan Macquarie died in London in 1824, exhausted by his attempts to regain his

reputation. Macquarie suffered from a degree of pride and arrogance, and his rule of New

South Wales sometimes reflected an intolerance of dissent that might be expected on a

military parade ground, rather than the flexibility needed to govern an increasingly complex

and unruly colonial society. Yet in his support of emancipated convicts, Macquarie

instinctively understood that the future of colonial society lay with the integration of those

who had been transported and excluded from society, and a society based on a principle of
 19

merit, rather than aristocracy or a privileged background. Macquarie may not have been a

democrat in his practices as governor, but there was a democratic spirit in his promotion of

emancipation.

In 1817, Macquarie received a copy of Matthew Flinder’s charts, which referred to the

continent the explorer had circumnavigated as ‘Australia’. Macquarie hoped that name would

be adopted to describe the continent, and encouraged its use. Like Flinders, Macquarie

understood the significance of naming, and identifying imagined spaces, making them part of

your own experience and your hope for the future. Macquarie looked at the chart of a still

largely unexplored land and saw a new history being written, of which he had been a part.

Helping to project the name of Australia into the future, Macquarie understood that he had

tied himself, and his own name, to that future.

* Dr. Mark Hearn is a lecturer in the Department of Modern History, Politics and
International Relations at Macquarie University and the Unit Convenor of MHIS109, The
Making of Australia.

Sources and Further Reading

Alan Atkinson, The Europeans in Australia, Vol.1 Oxford University Press Melbourne 1997.
Marian Aveling, ‘Imagining New South Wales as a Gendered Society 1783-1821’,
Australian Historical Studies, vol.25 No.98 April 1992.
James Boyce, Van Diemen’s Land, Black Inc., Melbourne 2008.
James Broadbent and Joy Hughes (ed.) The Age of Macquarie, Melbourne University Press,
Melbourne 1992.
C.M.H. Clark, A History of Australia, Vol.1 Melbourne University Press, Melbourne 1962.
Kay Daniels, Convict Women, Allen & Unwin Sydney 1998.
Robert Dixon, The Course of Empire: neo-classical culture in New South Wales, 1788-1860,
Oxford University Press Melbourne 1985.
Ross Fitzgerald and Mark Hearn, Bligh, Macarthur and the Rum Rebellion, Kangaroo Press,
Kenthurst, 1988.
John Hirst, Convict Society and its Enemies, Allen & Unwin Sydney 1983.
John Gascoigne, The Enlightenment and the Origins of European Australia, Cambridge
University Press, Melbourne 2002.
Grace Karskens, The Colony, Melbourne University Press 2009.
 20

Jan Kociumbas, Possessions, The Oxford History of Australia, Vol.2 Oxford University Press
Melbourne 1992.
David Mackay, A place of exile: the European settlement of New South Wales, Oxford
University Press, Melbourne 1985.
Peter Read, A hundred years war: the Wiradjuri people and the state, Australian National
University Press, 1988.
John Ritchie, Punishment and profit: the reports of Commissioner John Bigge on the
Colonies of New South Wales and Van Diemen's Land, 1822-23, Heinemann, Melbourne,
1970.
John Ritchie, Lachlan Macquarie: a biography, Melbourne University Press, Carlton, 1986.