Clan MacQuarrie

On the first of January 1810, on the quayside of Sydney Cove on the east coast of New South Wales, Major-General Lachlan Macquarie, forty-seven years old, the Ulva-born former Black Watch officer of the American, Indian and Egyptian campaigns of the British Army, took up the governorship of the British convict colony of New South Wales (established as a penal settlement at Sydney Cove on the twenty-sixth of January 1788, on the First Fleet landing). Macquarie inherited a colony of about eleven thousand convicts and free settlers in a state of near-mutiny (his predecessor Governor William Bligh, the Bligh of the Bounty mutiny of 1789, had been deposed in the Rum Rebellion of January 1808 by the New South Wales Corps under Major George Johnston). Over the twelve years of his governorship (1810–1821), Macquarie rebuilt Sydney from the disorganised convict-camp of 1810 into the coherent colonial city of 1821: he laid out the Sydney street-grid that still defines the modern central business district, commissioned over two hundred public buildings (the Hyde Park Barracks 1819, the St James's Church 1822, the Macquarie Lighthouse 1818), founded the Bank of New South Wales in 1817, built the Great Western Highway over the Blue Mountains in 1814–15 (opening the Western Plains to grazing-agriculture for the first time), established the policy of encouraging emancipated convicts (emancipists) to take government office on the merit-of-service principle. He is, by every careful judgment of Australian historians (Manning Clark, John Ritchie, Anne-Maree Whitaker), the foundational governor of the modern Australia and the most influential governor of any nineteenth-century British colony. His treatment of Aboriginal Australians, particularly the 1816 Appin Massacre on the Dharawal country south of Sydney, is the contested aspect of his legacy.

Read the story →