Tag Archives: Governor Macquarie

Australia, Australia Colonial history, Christianity, History

Governor Lachlan Macquarie – the Father of Australia (2)

From my book (Chapter 1) PRISON HULK TO REDEMPTION. Lachlan Macquarie as a nation builder.

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THE BRITISH GOVERNMENT was determined to end the Colony’s chronic problems that only an energetic authority, they seemed to think, could overcome. An energetic authority, in their terms, was an authority that secured obedience. Fortunately, the man they chose was not one to come with a big stick to beat the people into submission no matter what. It was Colonel Lachlan Macquarie who arrived with his wife in 1810. He has been given the title ‘Father of Australia.’ The title is not at all undeserved. Though interrupted and bent at times, the basic lines of his regime would carry on into the future and be the foundation of the nation that would officially bear the name Australia before his return to the mother country. He was conscious of his supreme authority and the administrative and moral tasks ahead but was determined to be just to all. Above all, he accurately sized up the cultural groups that were jostling each other. He set about calibrating their power position.

First, he disbanded the New South Wales Corps and absorbed those staying in the Colony into the 73rd Regiment, which he had brought with him as their commander. The rest of the New South Wales Corps returned to the mother country. He had thereby considerably reduced the power of one class. He then embarked on an extensive infrastructure building program. Schools, churches, courthouses, hospitals, and army barracks rose everywhere. Towns and roads were improved, and new roads laid. Each district was to have a new town with a church, a school, and a courthouse. At the end of his tenure as governor, he could look with pride on 265 buildings, some of which one can only describe as imposing today, particularly those designed and built by the convict architect Francis Greenway.

At the same time, he took measures to raise the community’s moral standards. His Christian faith was of the first importance to him, so he was eager to uphold Christian morality as well as the requirements of gentility and civility. Accordingly, he combated the easy tendency of cohabitation between couples, enforced the Sabbath, prohibited drunkenness, and promoted Bible study. The truly ground-breaking policy, however, was his treatment of convicts, ex-convicts, and their children. And this is where his regime, highly regarded in London as well as in the Colony, met resistance. It would be his undoing. That warhorse, that monstrous troublemaker and despiser of all authority except his own, John Macarthur, would be back in town by 1817 to take his place in the vanguard of attempting to get rid of Macquarie.

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Australia, Australia Colonial history, Culture

Lachlan Macquarie – Father of Australia

Governor Lachlan Macquarie was called the ‘Father of Australia’. The title is just. It was his governorship that corrected many of the inveterate problems caused by troublemaker John Macarthur, the ‘exclusives’, and the NSW Corps who instigated the Rum Rebellion and removed Governor Bligh. Below is a short piece about Macquarie by Dennis Hill on his Facebook page. As is currently the trend, Hill gives too much space in such a short piece to the inevitable conflict with the Aborigines. See my next posting which has the section on Governor Macquarie from my book PRISON HULK TO REDEMPTION. I concentrate on Macquarie’s determining role as a nation builder.

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Lachlan Macquarie

by Dennis Hill FB

AUSTRALIAN HISTORY -THE WAY IT WAS – A NOSTALGIC LOOK AT OUR PAST | Facebook

Major General Lachlan Macquarie, CB ( 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. Macquarie expressing a desire for Aboriginal peoples to be treated kindly, in 1816 he gave orders that led to the Appin Massacre of Gundungurra and Dharawal people during the Hawkesbury and Napean Rivers

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.

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Australia Colonial history, Conservatism, Culture, History

Australia did not exist before 26 January 1788

The historical detail for the reasons I claim Australia did not exist before the 26th of January 1788 is in chapter 2, Foundations of a Nation of my book PRISON HULK TO REDEMPTION SECOND EDITION. The philosophical arguments about what it means to be a people are in my essay Edmund Burke on what it means to be a people. Both should be in read in combination to appreciate the full argument.

Prison Hulk to Redemption

Chapter 2

Foundations of a new nation

On 28 April 1770, the then Lieutenant James Cook steered his ship, the Endeavour, into a broad open bay and dropped anchor at its southern shore. He named it Stingray Bay because of the abundance in its waters of stingrays on which his crew gorged. He later crossed out Stingray Bay in the ship’s logs and entered Botany Bay in tribute to Botanist Joseph Banks, the ship’s eager scientist. Banks had put together an impressive collection of specimens of unknown plants and animals after trekking around the land bordering the bay’s shores.

Cook and the Endeavour were on their way back to England after carrying out the official task of observing the transit of Venus from the island of Tahiti. There were also unofficial tasks, one of which was the order to investigate the existence of the South Land, whose ancient mythology promised great riches of all kinds. From Roman times, it had been called Terra Australis Incognita—Unknown South Land. The search for the mysterious land of the south had occupied the Portuguese, the Dutch, the Spanish, and later the English in the person of William Dampier (1688 and 1689).  Dampier added little to the findings of the Dutch seamen.

Until Cook’s voyage, the most successful effort to map what was south of present-day Indonesia and New Guinea was the voyage of Dutchman Abel Tasman in 1642 and1643. This eight-month voyage on the order of the Governor of Batavia to find the South Land took Tasman west from Batavia (today’s Jakarta). Keeping the Indonesian islands to the north of him, he eventually turned and sailed far to the south before turning directly east. After navigating a great distance, he hit landfall. He followed the shoreline south, mapping it as he went, turned east, then north, but left the coast to head east again. He named this bushy landmass Anthoni Van Diemens Landt after Batavia’s governor. After some days, he made landfall again. Thinking the land he had come across reached as far as Tierra Del Fuego in South America, he noted Staten Landt in his logbook. Staten Landt was the Dutch for the Spanish name of Argentine’s Isla de Los Estados.

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