Governor Macquarie

Major General Lachlan Macquarie, CB (; gd, Lachann MacGuaire; 31 January 1762 – 1 July 1824) was a British Army officer and colonial administrator from Scotland. Macquarie served as the fifth Governor of New South Wales from 1810 to 1821, and had a leading role in the social, economic, and architectural development of the colony. He is considered by historians to have had a crucial influence on the transition of New South Wales from a penal colony to a free settlement and therefore to have played a major role in the shaping of Australian society in the early nineteenth century.

Early life

Lachlan Macquarie was born on the island of Ulva off the coast of the Isle of Mull in the Inner Hebrides, a chain of islands off the West Coast of Scotland. His father, Lachlan senior, worked as a carpenter and miller, and was a cousin of a Clan MacQuarrie chieftain. His mother, Margaret, was the sister of the influential Murdoch Maclaine, 19th laird of Lochbuie. Despite this, his parents were relatively poor and probably illiterate, leasing and working a small farm as sub-tenants at Oskamull. In his early teens, Macquarie was sent to Edinburgh to be educated, possibly attending the Royal High School of Edinburgh where he learnt English and arithmetic.

British Army

America

Macquarie volunteered to join the British Army in 1776 and was assigned to the 84th Regiment of Foot. Later that year he travelled with it to North America to fight against the revolutionaries in the American War of Independence. On the way to America he participated in the Battle of the Newcastle Jane, the first naval victory for a British merchant ship over an American privateer. Macquarie was initially stationed at Halifax, Nova Scotia and obtained the junior rank of ensign on 9 April 1777. On 18 January 1781, he was promoted to lieutenant and transferred to the 71st (Highland) Regiment of Foot, and served with them in New York City and Charleston. Macquarie avoided being captured or killed by the victorious Americans by being posted in Jamaica at the time of the British defeat in the war.

India

In June 1784 Macquarie returned to Scotland, where he managed the Lochbuie estates of his uncle, Captain Murdoch Maclaine. Through the influence of Maclaine, he was offered a lieutenancy in the forces of the East India Company as long as he supplied fifteen additional recruits. By employing shanghaiing methods, Macquarie obtained the required men and on Christmas Day 1787 he received his commission as lieutenant in the 77th Regiment of Foot.

Macquarie arrived with his regiment at Bombay in August 1788 where he was stationed for two years. He saw active service from 1790 to 1792 during the Third Anglo-Mysore War, participating in the Capture of Cannanore and the 1792 Siege of Seringapatam. He was promoted to Major of Brigade of troops on the Malabar Coast in August 1793 and became a Freemason that same year at Bombay. In September 1793 Macquarie married Jane Jarvis, daughter of the late Chief Justice of Antigua, Thomas Jarvis, who had owned slave plantations there. According to their marriage settlement, Miss Jarvis was worth £6,000 pounds sterling which was paid out to Macquarie three years later when she died of tuberculosis. In 1795, he saw further action leading troops at the successful siege of the Dutch fort at Cochin. A year later Macquarie participated in the taking of Colombo and other Dutch possessions in Ceylon, and was made commander of the occupying garrison at Galle.

In May 1797, Macquarie led troops during the disastrous campaign against the rebel forces of Pazhassi Raja in the jungles around Manantheri. Employing guerilla tactics, Pazhassi inflicted sizable casualties on the 77th, killing a number of officers with Macquarie himself being wounded in the foot. The British torched all the villages in the district but conceded defeat with the East India Company forced into a peace treaty with Pazhassi. Macquarie resigned from his commanding role soon after the campaign.

He participated in front-line combat during the Fourth Anglo-Mysore War against the forces of Tipu Sultan, helping defeat them first at the Battle of Seedaseer and then at the siege and storming of Tipu's palace at Srirangapatna in 1799. He described the "glorious" aftermath where the bodies of Tipu and his people "lay in such immense Heaps on the Ramparts...as well as in different Parts of the Town that no regular account of them could be taken". Macquarie received £1,300 in prize money after the city was looted.

In 1800, Macquarie was part of the British entourage headed by Governor Duncan that forced Mir Nasiruddin Khan of Surat to sign a treaty with the East India Company dictating the handover of that province to Company rule.

Egypt

In 1801, Macquarie was appointed by General David Baird as Deputy Adjutant-General of the large British-Indian expeditionary force assigned to link up with Sir Ralph Abercromby's army to expel the French Army from Egypt. Macquarie sailed with his regiment to Egypt from India with the French already in retreat toward Alexandria. He arrived there two days after the capitulation of Alexandria to the British. Macquarie remained in Egypt for about a year during which time he met up with his brother and contracted syphilis.

Return to Britain, further duty in India

In 1803, Macquarie returned to Britain having amassed a fortune of £20,000. His elevation to the social elite saw him meet several times with Jacob Bosanquet and the directors of the East India Company and he also had a personal introduction to King George III. He served in London as Assistant Adjutant General to Lord Harrington and was able to purchase an estate on his native Isle of Mull, which he named ''Jarvisfield''. In 1805, Macquarie was ordered to return to India to take charge of the 86th Regiment of Foot and after arriving also became military secretary to Governor Duncan at Bombay.

In 1807 he travelled overland from India to Britain via Persia and Russia, and was very impressed by the layout and architecture of St Petersburg. Later that year, Macquarie married his third cousin Elizabeth Henrietta Campbell in Devon and took command of the 73rd Regiment in Scotland as a Lieutenant-Colonel. Macquarie's wife gave birth to a daughter in 1808 which died in infancy.

Governor of New South Wales

Arrival in Sydney

On 8 May 1809 Macquarie was appointed to the position of Governor of New South Wales and its dependencies. He left for the colony on 22 May 1809, on HMS ''Dromedary'', accompanied by HMS ''Hindostan''. The 73rd Regiment of Foot came with him on the two ships. He arrived on 28 December at Sydney Cove and landed officially on 31 December, taking up his duties on the following day. In making this appointment, the British government changed its practice of appointing naval officers as governor and chose an army commander in the hope that he could secure the co-operation of the corrupt and insubordinate New South Wales Corps. Aided by the fact he arrived in New South Wales at the head of his own unit of regular troops, Macquarie was unchallenged by the New South Wales Corps, whose officers led by John Macarthur had mutinied against and imprisoned the previous governor, William Bligh.

When he arrived in Sydney in 1809 he was accompanied by his Indian "slave-boy" named George Jarvis, whom he had purchased in 1795 for 160 rupees at age 6 (along with a 7-year-old named Hector). Jarvis was named after his deceased wife's brother while Hector later escaped. He wrote about them in his diaries: "very fine, well-looking healthy Black Boys".

Dealings with the NSW Corps

Macquarie's first task was to restore orderly, lawful government and discipline in the colony following the Rum Rebellion of 1808 against Governor William Bligh. Macquarie was ordered by the British government to arrest two of the leaders of the Rum Rebellion, John Macarthur and Major George Johnston. However, by the time that Macquarie arrived in Sydney, both Macarthur and Johnston had already sailed for England to defend themselves. Macquarie immediately set about cancelling the various initiatives taken by the rebel governmentfor example, all "pardons, leases and land grants" made by the rebels were revoked. However, after an avalanche of petitions from leaseholders were sent to Macquarie, he soon back-flipped and ratified them all.

Although the New South Wales Corps and its monopoly were soon ended, the military influence survived, with officers having sway over the justice system. Macquarie himself chose to keep the peace with the remaining NSW Corps officers and maintained an ambivalent attitude to the rebellion against Bligh.

Civil reforms

Part of Macquarie's undertaking of bringing order to the colony was to refashion the convict settlement into an urban environment of organised towns with streets and parks. The street layout of modern central Sydney is based upon a plan established by Macquarie. The colony's most prestigious buildings were built on Macquarie Street which he named after himself. Some of these still stand today including the 'Rum Hospital' part of which now serves as the Parliament House of New South Wales. The elaborate stables which Macquarie commissioned for Government House are now part of the modern structure housing the Sydney Conservatorium of Music.

Other notable edifices built during Macquarie's tenure include the Parramatta Female Orphan School, St James Church, and the Hyde Park Barracks. He also officially named and established Hyde Park as a public recreation area. These buildings were constructed by Macquarie in defiance of the British government's ban on expensive public building projects in the colony and reflect the tension between Macquarie's vision of Sydney as a Georgian city and that of powerful British colonists who saw it as not much more than a camp for cheap convict labour.

In late 1810, Macquarie toured the regions around Sydney naming and marking out the sites and street plans of future towns such as Liverpool, Windsor and Richmond. On a visit of inspection to the settlement of Hobart Town on the Derwent River in Van Diemen's Land (now Tasmania) in November 1811, Macquarie was appalled at the ramshackle arrangement of the town and ordered the government surveyor James Meehan to survey a regular street layout. This survey determined the form of the current centre of the city of Hobart. Another town-planning reform initiated by Macquarie was made when he ordered all traffic on New South Wales roads to keep to the left.

Macquarie is credited with producing the first official currency specifically for circulation in Australia. In 1812 he purchased 40,000 Spanish dollar coins and had a convicted forger named William Henshall cut the centres out of the coins and counter stamp them to distinguish them as belonging to the colony of New South Wales. The central plug (known as a "dump") was valued at 15 pence and the rim (known as a holey dollar) became a five- shilling piece. Any forging of the new currency was proclaimed as being punishable by seven years in the Newcastle coal mines. Macquarie also encouraged the creation of the colony's first bank, the Bank of New South Wales, in 1817.

Social reforms

Macquarie was given specific instructions to encourage morality and orderliness in the colony. He promoted marriage and church attendance, increased police patrols and made laws against public alcohol consumption. Central to this policy were the emancipists: convicts whose sentences had expired or who had been given conditional or absolute pardons. Macquarie wanted the ex-convicts to live reformed, law-abiding Christian lives.

Some of these emancipated convicts were either skilled professionals or had become very wealthy by operating commercial enterprises in the colony. Macquarie viewed these types of ex-convicts as ideal models of social transformation, and rewarded them by elevating their social standing and appointing them to important government positions. For example, Francis Greenway became colonial architect, Dr William Redfern became the colonial surgeon, while Andrew Thompson and Simeon Lord were appointed as magistrates.

The gentry in the colony, known as the "exclusives" were outraged at these appointments with some refusing to work alongside the promoted ex-convicts. However, an 1812 inquiry into the convict system in Australia by a Select committee on Transportation