Macquarie founds Sydney

A new country is rarely made by the men who arrive to govern it. More often it is made by a man who arrives expecting to administer a camp, looks at the disorder in front of him, and decides quietly that the camp will be a city instead. The decision is not announced in any dispatch. It is taken on a quayside, in a borrowed uniform, between one salute and the next.

THE TACKSMAN'S SON

He was born on the thirty-first of January 1762 at Oskamull on the island of Ulva, off the west coast of Mull, in a one-storey farmhouse with a turf roof. His father held the tenancy from the Macquarie chief and lost it within the decade, in the slow erasure of the old Hebridean tacksman class that followed Culloden. The boy was sent into the British Army at fifteen, into the 84th Royal Highland Emigrants, and from there into the campaigns that carried a Mull-Gaelic-speaking lieutenant across half the world: New York in the American war, the Coromandel coast against Tipu Sultan, the Red Sea and Egypt against the French. He came up by service, not by patronage. By 1809 he was a major-general of the 73rd Foot, with the Colonial Office's commission for New South Wales in his portfolio and the Letters Patent of George III sealed within.

THE QUAY AT SYDNEY COVE

The first of January 1810. Late spring in the southern hemisphere, the light hard and clean off the harbour water, the gum trees on the north shore pale against a sky that did not match any sky he had known. The colony had been a penal settlement for twenty-two years and looked it: a scatter of weatherboard sheds, a few brick stores, a Government House that the Rum Corps had occupied like a barracks since the deposition of Bligh two Januaries before. Eleven thousand souls, by the muster. Six thousand still in sentence, three thousand emancipists, two thousand free, and beyond them the Eora and Dharawal peoples of the basin, already three-quarters reduced by smallpox and musket since the First Fleet.

He was forty-seven. Red coat, gold epaulettes, sword at his hip. The Royal Marines guard stood at the salute. John Thomas Campbell, his colonial secretary, walked a half-pace behind with the oath book. Joseph Foveaux, who had been holding the colony since Bligh's overthrow, handed across the keys of the storehouse with the formal phrase and stepped back. The drums rolled once. Macquarie put his hand on the book.

THE SECOND OF DECISION

Between the oath and the inaugural address there was a span of perhaps forty minutes in which he stood on the quayside-platform and looked at the place he had been sent to govern. The Rum Corps officers were drawn up at the right, expecting him, by every precedent of the previous twenty years, to leave their monopoly intact and confine himself to dispatches. The emancipists were not drawn up at all. They were in the crowd at the back, in the dust, holding their hats.

His instructions from the Colonial Office, dated the eighth of May 1809, were specific on the Corps: replace them with his own 73rd Highlanders, send the officers home, end the rum currency. They were not specific on the emancipated convicts. On that question he had a private judgement, formed across thirty-three years of watching men come up out of the ranks, and the judgement was that the most able and most energetic single demographic in this colony was the men who had served out their sentences. To leave them barred from office, barred from the magistracy, barred from the table of the Government House, was, in plain reading, a waste of the only human material he had.

He could administer the place as a prison and go home in five years with the thanks of the Corps. Or he could treat it as a country in formation, the convicts as its first generation of citizens, the harbour as the head of a city, the western range as the wall to be crossed. A governor who chose the second would have no friends in the barracks and few in London. He chose the second. He did not say so, on the platform, in those words. He said three things in the inaugural address, and the three things were the whole programme: equal standing before the law for the emancipated; a Sydney built in stone and brick to a plan; a road over the Blue Mountains into the plains beyond.

THE TWELVE YEARS

He governed for twelve years and built. He pardoned the convict-architect Francis Greenway in 1814 and set him to work, and Greenway gave him the Hyde Park Barracks of 1819, the Macquarie Lighthouse at South Head in 1818, the St James's Church finished after his departure in 1822, the rebuilt Government House at Parramatta. Two hundred and sixty-five public buildings across the colony by the count of his own returns. He laid out the Sydney street-grid that still carries the city's traffic. He founded the Bank of New South Wales in 1817 and broke the rum currency inside a year. He sent William Cox and George Evans across the Blue Mountains in 1814 and 1815 and opened the western plains to grazing. He seated emancipists on the magistrates' bench beside free settlers and would not be moved on the point, though the free settlers wrote to London by every ship.

APPIN

There is a second account of the same governorship and it must be set down beside the first. In March 1816 settlers on the Cowpastures frontier south of Sydney were attacked, and Macquarie, on the tenth of April, ordered three detachments of the 46th Regiment into the country of the Dharawal and Gandangara peoples with instructions to take prisoners where possible and, where not, to use the force of arms. On the seventeenth of April, before dawn, Captain James Wallis's detachment came on a Dharawal camp at a gorge near Appin. The accounts speak of about fourteen dead, driven over the cliff edge or shot at the rim, women and children among them. Two bodies were hanged from trees on Macquarie's later order, as a warning.

On the fourth of May 1816 he issued the Government Order that authorised the army to fire on any party of more than six Aboriginal people carrying spears within the bounds of the settled districts. The Order is, in the modern Australian historical reading, the foundational legal document of the nineteenth-century frontier wars. He wrote in his private journal of the campaign that he had been driven to it. The country he was building was not built on empty ground, and the second account is the cost of the first.

JARVISFIELD

He retired on the first of December 1821 and sailed for Britain a private man. The London press, briefed by the free settlers he had crossed, received him coldly. He went home to Mull, to the estate of Jarvisfield he had bought with his army savings, and set about the small business of an Inner Hebrides laird. He died there on the first of July 1824, sixty-two years old. His widow Elizabeth had him laid in a granite mausoleum on the strait between Mull and Ulva, within sight of the farm at Oskamull. She chose the inscription herself: The Father of Australia.

A country is rarely founded by the man who arrives to administer it, and almost never named after him. Sydney's central street is Macquarie Street. The river that drains the western plains he opened is the Macquarie. The university at North Ryde, the harbour on the Tasmanian west coast, the subantarctic island in the empty southern ocean, all carry the Mull name. The bank he founded in 1817 trades, since the rebranding of 2008, as Westpac. The convict barracks Greenway built for him in 1819 stands in the centre of the city he laid out, on a corner of the street-grid he drew, and is, with the other Greenway buildings of his governorship, a UNESCO World Heritage site since 2010. The grey stone of the Hyde Park Barracks is the same grey as the granite of the Gruline mausoleum on the Mull-Ulva strait. He brought one home to the other.