Lachlan Macquarie(1762–1824)

Lachlan Macquarie was born at Oskamull on the small Hebridean island of Ulva, off the west coast of Mull in the Inner Hebrides, on the thirty-first of January 1762, son of Lachlan Macquarie of Ulva and Margaret Maclaine of Lochbuie. The MacQuarrie chiefs held Ulva from the fifteenth century until the year of Lachlan's birth, when the chiefship was forced to sell up under heavy debts; the family moved to a smaller croft on the same island. He was educated at the parish school at Kilninian on Mull, joined the British Army at fifteen as an ensign in the 84th Regiment of Foot, the Royal Highland Emigrants raised for service in Nova Scotia, and within five years had seen active service on the North American station of the American Revolutionary War.

He served for the next thirty years in the regular establishment of the British Army across the empire: in Jamaica through the 1780s, in India through the 1790s under Cornwallis at the Siege of Seringapatam and under Wellesley in the Mysore wars, in Egypt with General Abercromby's expeditionary force at the Battle of Alexandria in 1801, and as commanding officer of the 73rd Highlanders in Bombay through the early 1800s. He returned to England in 1807 with a brevet colonelcy, the regimental command of the 73rd, and the reputation of a careful, unflashy, methodical Highland officer of independent means.

In May 1809 he was offered the governorship of the convict colony of New South Wales in succession to William Bligh, whom the colony's New South Wales Corps had deposed in the so-called Rum Rebellion the year before. He sailed in his fiftieth year with his wife Elizabeth, took up the governorship at Sydney on the first of January 1810, and held it for the next eleven and a half years. He found a settlement of about ten thousand people, two-thirds of them convicts and time-served emancipists, run as a punitive military depot under the New South Wales Corps and with an officer class that profited from the rum trade and held the convicts in informal indenture. He left at the end of 1821 a self-governing settler society of nearly forty thousand, with a civil judiciary, a chartered banking system, a town plan, a road network and a public school system, a colony that became a country.

The achievements of his governorship are written across the modern map of Australia. He disbanded the rum-trade officer class by sending the New South Wales Corps home and replacing it with his own 73rd Highlanders. He commissioned the convict architect Francis Greenway to design the public buildings of the new town: St James's Church at King Street, Hyde Park Barracks, the Conservatorium of Music, the original Government House at Parramatta, the lighthouse at South Head, all still standing and still in use, the foundation of the architectural inheritance of Sydney. He cut the Great Western Road through the Blue Mountains under William Cox in 1814, opening the interior of the continent to European settlement; founded the towns of Bathurst, Liverpool, Windsor, Richmond, Castlereagh, Pitt Town and Wilberforce; commissioned the first census of the colony in 1820; chartered the Bank of New South Wales in 1817, the foundational banking institution of modern Australia. He pursued an emancipist policy that gave time-served convicts full civic rights and treated them in his public ceremonies on the same footing as the free settlers; the Macquarie name on the modern Australian banking and university institutions descends from that policy.

He returned to Britain in 1822, retired to Jarvisfield, his Isle of Mull estate, and died at Duke Street in London on the first of July 1824 in his sixty-third year. He was buried at the Mausoleum he had built for his family on Mull, where his epitaph reads The Father of Australia. The capital of New South Wales is still substantially the town he drew on the map: the streets of central Sydney run on his 1810 grid, Macquarie Street is the seat of the New South Wales Parliament, Macquarie University is one of the leading research universities of the country, the Macquarie River runs from the Great Divide to the inland plains, and Lake Macquarie is the largest coastal salt-water lake in the southern hemisphere. The MacQuarrie name carries the weight of the Ulva-born governor who turned a prison settlement into a country.