Clan MacQuarrie · 1810
Macquarie founds Sydney
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.
It is twenty past noon on the first of January 1810, on the wooden quayside of Sydney Cove at the south side of Port Jackson harbour on the east coast of New South Wales, in the clear summer light of the southern hemisphere's late-spring. He is forty-seven years old. He is Lachlan Macquarie, born at the small farm of Oskamull on the island of Ulva off the west coast of Mull in the Inner Hebrides on the thirty-first of January 1762, son of Lachlan Macquarie the elder (a Mull tacksman-farmer who lost his tenancy in the 1760s post-Culloden Highland Clearances and emigrated to the Lowlands) and Margaret Maclaine, in the British Army since 1777, in his thirty-third year of service.
He has, on the twenty-eighth of December 1809, taken the formal command of the Colony of New South Wales from Major Joseph Foveaux, the acting administrator who has been holding the Colony since the Bligh deposition of January 1808. Macquarie is in the formal Royal-Army-Major-General-uniform of red-coat-and-gold-epaulettes, with the Letters Patent of his governorship from George III in a leather portfolio at his left elbow.
He thinks: the Colony has about eleven thousand inhabitants: about six thousand convicts in active sentence, three thousand emancipated convicts (emancipists), about two thousand free settlers (mostly former military, mostly small-grant-of-Crown-land farmers), and an indeterminate native Aboriginal population that the First Fleet 1788 census estimated at about a million-and-a-half across the Australian continent and that the Eora-Dharawal-Gandangara-Wodi-Wodi-and-other-southeast-Australian peoples of the Sydney basin have, by the 1810 Smallpox-and-warfare reduction, lost about three-quarters of since 1788.
He thinks: the Bligh deposition of January 1808 was caused by the New-South-Wales Corps officer-mutiny against Bligh's attempted suppression of the Rum Trade monopoly the Corps had been running since 1795. The Rum Trade is, in plain reading, the currency-and-import-monopoly of the Colony. The Corps will, on my arrival, expect me to leave the monopoly alone.
He thinks: I will not leave the Rum Trade monopoly alone. I will, by the Colonial-Office order of the eighth of May 1809, replace the New South Wales Corps with my own 73rd Highlanders Regiment, send the Corps officers home, and establish the Bank of New South Wales as the standard-currency authority of the Colony. The Rum Trade will end as a monopoly within twelve months.
He thinks: the emancipist policy will be the foundational policy of my governorship. The emancipated convicts are, on my private judgement, the most-able-and-energetic single demographic in the Colony. The policy of excluding emancipists from public office and social-recognition that the previous administrations have followed is, in plain reading, wasteful of the Colony's human-resource. I will encourage the emancipists to take government office on the merit-of-service principle.
Macquarie took the formal governor's oath at twenty past one in the afternoon, in the presence of the Royal Marines guard-of-honour and the Colonial-Office Secretary John Thomas Campbell. He gave a brief inaugural address from the quayside-platform to the assembled colonists, in which he announced the three-point programme of his governorship: the emancipist policy of equal-standing-before-the-law for served-out convicts; the Sydney urban-planning programme that would build the permanent civic buildings of the Colony's capital; and the expansion-into-the-Western-Plains exploration programme that would open the trans-Blue-Mountains grazing country to European agriculture.
Over the twelve years of his governorship (1810–1821), Macquarie commissioned about two hundred and sixty-five public buildings across the Colony, including the Hyde Park Barracks at Sydney (1819, designed by the emancipist-convict architect Francis Greenway, who Macquarie had personally pardoned in 1814 on the merit-of-architectural-talent), the St James's Church (1822, Greenway), the Macquarie Lighthouse at South Head (1818, Greenway, the first lighthouse in Australia), the Government House Parramatta (rebuilt 1815–17). He founded the Bank of New South Wales in 1817 (the modern Westpac, the oldest bank in Australia). He built the Great Western Highway over the Blue Mountains 1814–15 under the engineering supervision of William Cox and the survey of George William Evans, opening the Western Plains to European grazing-agriculture for the first time.
His treatment of Aboriginal Australians is the contested aspect of his legacy. The April 1816 punitive military expedition against the Dharawal-and-Gandangara peoples of the Cowpastures-Appin country south of Sydney, ordered by Macquarie in response to the March 1816 settler-attacks on the frontier-grazing stations, resulted in the Appin Massacre of the seventeenth of April 1816 (about fourteen Dharawal people killed by the 46th Regiment under Captain James Wallis, the bodies including women and children). The Macquarie 1816 Government Order (the Order of the fourth of May 1816) authorised the Royal Army to use the force of arms against any Aboriginal group of more than six people armed with spears in the Crown-occupied territory. The Order is, by the modern Australian academic-historical-judgement (Lyndall Ryan, Pat Grimshaw, Henry Reynolds), the foundational legal-document of the nineteenth-century Australian frontier-wars.
Lachlan Macquarie retired from the governorship on the first of December 1821 and sailed for Britain. He died at his Mull estate of Jarvisfield on the first of July 1824, sixty-two years old. He is buried at the Gruline mausoleum on the Mull-Ulva strait, which carries the Latin inscription chosen by his widow Elizabeth: Lachlan Macquarie, governor of New South Wales 1810-1821, the Father of Australia. The Macquarie Street in central Sydney, Macquarie University at North Ryde, the Macquarie Harbour on the Tasmanian west coast, Macquarie Island in the Subantarctic, and a thousand miles of the Macquarie River in central New South Wales all bear his name. The Bank of New South Wales (founded by Macquarie in 1817) is, by the 2008 Westpac re-branding, Westpac Banking Corporation, the oldest financial institution in Australia. The twenty-six Greenway public buildings of the Macquarie era are, since 2010, a UNESCO World Heritage Site (the Australian Convict Sites World Heritage property).