happened. He fell in love with the place, with the new kind of world that people were making in NSW.
Converting Macquarie
After Bligh, and because of the bad press circulating from various disgruntled Evangelical Christians and people of influence (refer to Chapter 4), Macquarie arrived in NSW fully expecting a crime-ridden, chronically inebriated nightmare hellhole. Instead, he found a social experiment that had been bubbling along for some 20 years. Starting out with the maligned ‘dregs’ of British society, the unplanned experiment seemed to show that if you took even criminals and misfits and gave them
A chance to start again
In a new place entirely
With plenty of chances to get ahead
Lo and behold, people often did succeed.
As well as the very successful, there was everyone else — the skilled and unskilled labourers, the servants, the publicans and innkeepers, the dozens of professionals, clerks and administrators, the jailers and constables. Many of them, from top to bottom, were the classic ‘lower orders’, who in Britain had comprised the bulk of the soldiers and the criminal classes. Out here in the colony, they were filling practically every social role and occupation (including, of course, the drunks and repeat offenders — but these hard cases Macquarie didn’t mention quite so often). All in all, the social and economic world of Sydney and its hinterland, and soon enough in Van Diemen’s Land also, was starting to take robust shape.
Macquarie’s stroke of genius was to recognise this world order and seize upon it — not try to turn it back to what the original planners or current ministers in London expected, insisted or wanted it to be. Instead, he chose to fast-track it. He recognised the positive outcomes of this (accidental) social experiment, and began to champion it.
This went against express instructions from the Colonial Office and general British opinion.
Living under the Macquarie regime
Macquarie believed in giving ex-convicts ‘every equality’, which he started pushing for in his official correspondence from quite early on. He gathered successful ex-convicts around him and gave them prominent positions, making them magistrates, police superintendents, surveyors and architects — and even making one a poet laureate. They were all warmly welcomed into ‘society’, invited by the Governor and his wife to receptions and dinners at Government House.
Macquarie also believed in treating newly arrived convicts as if their slate was cleaned of past behaviour. In this he was helped by the fact that, like previous governors, he had precious little information about the crime or character of those getting off the boat: A note about the sentence, a behaviour report from the hulk he or she had been transported from, and that was about it. This bureaucratic inoperativeness worked in Macquarie’s favour. The way he saw it, things started over when you arrived as a convict in Australia. Your behaviour, your diligence and (most of all) your usefulness was what counted most. The chance for convicts to start again was the priority.
FLINDERS GOES INVESTIGATING AND FINDS THE NAME AUSTRALIA
In 1803 the explorer Matthew Flinders circumnavigated the Australian continent in the Investigator. The only thing was the continent wasn’t called Australia. The western side of the continent had been named New Holland in the 17th century (which you can read more about in Chapter 2), while the eastern side of the continent was named New South Wales by Captain Cook after he’d sailed up along it in 1770 (refer to Chapter 3). Now that Flinders had gone around charting every nook and cranny of the continent, people could say for sure that no gulf or strait separated the two.
But what to call it? Flinders quite liked the Latin name that had been used in ancient Rome — Terra Australis, or ‘southern land’. But the Latin seemed a bit old fashioned. So he changed it to Australia. Not everyone liked it — Sir Joseph Banks (the botanist on Cook’s voyage and powerful patron of the settlement thereafter), for instance, thought it sounded terrible. So strongly did people not like it that when Flinders published his book in 1814 (just before he died), it was titled A Voyage to Terra Australis, rather than A Voyage to Australia. But in the intervening decade (between Flinders circumnavigating the continent and publishing his book) the name Australia had begun to stick with ordinary people living in the colony of NSW. Macquarie liked it, and in 1817 he formally requested that the name be used in dispatches and official correspondence. The Governor who came after Macquarie, Thomas Brisbane, liked the name so much that he called his daughter Eleanor Australia.
Macquarie’s Main Points of Attack
Macquarie wasn’t content with just occupying the colony — he wanted to push outward past and through previously impassable geographic barriers (like, say, the Blue Mountains; see the sidebar ‘Getting through the Blue Mountains blues’).
Macquarie also wanted to put Indigenous relations on a better footing. Macquarie figured that if he could act like an all-powerful chief with white colonists, he could act like a benevolent chief with the local Aboriginal people as well. The idea of having annual tribal gatherings, where he dispensed gifts and authority, and opening a school for Aboriginal children to be taught reading, writing and the various skills of European civilisation, appealed to him a great deal.
When it came to the convicts, while Macquarie was surprised and pleased at how successful convicts had become (refer to the preceding section), he also wanted them to behave in a more orderly, less raucous fashion. He did his best to make this a reality too.
