achieve wealth and respectability unlike anything they’d had before.
Earl Bathurst, running the Colonial Office, decided to send out Commissioner John Thomas Bigge, ex-chief justice of Trinidad, to conduct an inquiry into what was really happening in NSW. Bathurst’s instructions outlined the problem as he saw it.
Transportation, the second worst punishment aside from execution, was now being explicitly requested by those convicted of even minor crimes. And transportation only worked as a deterrent, clearly, if people didn’t want to be sent. Something had to be done to make transportation once again ‘an Object of Real Terror to all Classes of the Community’. Bigge’s job was to work out what, and how. Bathurst warned him to avoid letting any ‘ill considered Compassion for Convicts’ lessen transportations main purpose: The all-important ‘Salutary Terror’ that would keep potential British crims in check.
Big Country? Big Ambitions? Bigge the Inspector? Big Problem!
Commissioner Bigge arrived in Australia in 1819 with a remit to find out all that was necessary to change NSW back into an object of ‘Salutary Terror’ for would-be crims in Britain. As such, Bigge was always going to clash with Macquarie, who had long decided that the purpose of NSW was not as a stern deterrent against crime in Britain but as an opportunity for convicted felons to start again, in a new land with a clean slate.
The first flashpoint between Bigge and Macquarie took place over Macquarie’s promotion of ex-convict William Redfern to magistrate. Macquarie had appointed ex-convicts in previous years, but in those years no other candidates were available for the post. This time, however, other choices were possible, but Macquarie ignored them to give the appointment to a man who many considered to be an old Macquarie favourite.
This, thought Bigge, was insupportable and he gave Macquarie an ominous warning: Giving Redfern the job was a move that the British Government would ‘regard as a defiance of their Authority and Commands’. And Governors who defy His Majesty’s Authority and Commands tended not to last long in their careers.
A little verbose maybe, but Macquarie got his point across. More basically: This country belongs to them; don’t take it away. But more than that it was a plea to a man who had more power than any other to shape the future trajectory of the colony to not condemn the social edifice he’d been creating.
And Bathurst, ultimately, did agree with Bigge on Redfern’s appointment, saying ex-convicts certainly couldn’t be turned into magistrates. And, when Bigge finally published his reports on the colonies of NSW and Van Diemen’s Land after he returned to England, it turned out that Bathurst agreed with Bigge on just about everything else as well. (See Chapter 6 for the effects this had on colonial Australia and the system of transportation.)
Recognising Macquarie’s Legacy
Macquarie left NSW in 1821, with large crowds lamenting his departure. He endured a cold and hostile reception on his return to Britain, just as the highly critical Bigge Report was published. He died in 1824, feeling bitter, misunderstood and misrepresented. But despite how he came to be viewed by most people in power in Britain, Macquarie created a legacy, something beyond the innumerable Macquarie Streets, Macquarie townships, Macquarie Harbours, and Macquarie Rivers, fields and hills which he so delighted in naming.
Australia was now known as Australia, and it was Macquarie who got the continent’s official name changed from New Holland (refer to the sidebar ‘Flinders goes investigating and finds the name Australia’ for more on this). And for the first time in Australia’s history, the man in power decided that this new society was being built not for the officials, the officers or the few free settlers, nor for the British Government to use as simple dumping ground or receptacle for punishment. Australia was here for the convicts and ex-convicts themselves, their children and descendants.
In the decades that followed Macquarie’s rule, a new tone became evident in colonial debate and discussion, as the mass of colonials began loudly declaring: ‘This country belongs to us’.
Exactly why Macquarie promoted this idea is hard to say. He was no progressive, wanting to innovate and change society’s structures and mores. His actions were the product of no revolutionary new social code or progressive movement. He was a classic, gruff, 18th-century old-style Tory conservative, who believed in hierarchy, obedience, respect and order. He wanted to combine kindness with firmness.
Perhaps the chance to play benevolent patriarch and to preside, Scottish-chieftain-style, over a flourishing and vibrant new colony simply brought out a strong element in his character that had previously not had such scope to express itself. It’s not every day you get appointed autocrat over a whole colony, after all. Regardless, because of Macquarie, the sense of Australia began to shift significantly — and it’s why he’s the only governor or leader from these early years to have inscribed on his grave the epitaph, ‘Father of Australia’.
Part 2
1820s to 1900: Wool, Gold, Bust and then Federation
IN THIS PART …
Understand why Britain belatedly tried to introduce more order, efficiency and discipline into the convict system and colonial life in general in the 1820s — and why in the 1840s Britain began getting out of the whole convict thing, and transportation to NSW ended.
Find out more about the newly self-governing Australian colonies hitting the gold jackpot — pulling the colonies out of the chronic slackness of the 1840s global depression, triggering a long boom that lasted more than 30 years, and transforming the shape and nature of colonial society.
Discover how the 1850s to 1880s saw rapid expansion in cities, settlement, exploration, transportation and technology — and a growth in ‘larrikinism’
