Post by Chips on Dec 26, 2009 4:25:51 GMT 9.5
The Father of Australia
December 26, 2009
Major-General Lachlan Macquarie
A fitting enough title - argues the NSW Chief Justice, James Spigelman - but Lachlan Macquarie's contribution could have been even greater had his London masters not resisted him.
Lachlan Macquarie landed in Sydney on December 28, 1809 and assumed office on January 1, 1810. Friday will be the 200th anniversary of his taking over as the fifth governor of NSW.
With supervisory jurisdiction over the lieutenant governor in Tasmania, Macquarie served for 12 years as the chief political executive of modern Australia - a continent which he named by endorsing the suggestion of Matthew Flinders.
He is the second longest serving person in such office in our history, after Sir Robert Menzies.
Macquarie was the first head of the executive to strive to transform the colony from an open-air prison to a British settlement. During his period of office many of Australia's foundational institutions and social and physical infrastructure were established or the seeds sown for their development.
This included the full range of public facilities - schools, churches, hospitals, roads, lighthouses and other public buildings. Upon his retirement he was able to list 265 distinct public works constructed during his term of office.
Macquarie created a range of new institutions: for education, including Aboriginal education; for social welfare - the Benevolent Society; for child protection - the Orphan School at Parramatta; as well as creating our first coinage - the "Holey Dollar" and the "Dump"; the first commercial bank - now Westpac; and supporting the development of agriculture, industry, trade and the exploration of the continent for future growth.
His most dramatic and, in the event, only partially successful political intervention, was his modification of the severity of the convict experience and his attempt to eliminate completely any permanent convict stain.
His basic policy was that, subject to good behaviour, convicts who had served their terms or had been pardoned were entitled to be restored to the position in society that they had originally occupied. That policy was particularly focused on the convicts who had arrived with technical skills or manifested ability during their period in Australia. This infuriated the local elite.
The Australian social system of this era was based on castes. Different social groupings were segregated by differences of function and culture - almost as distinct as the castes of the Indian subcontinent. The castes included convicts, emancipists, free settlers, civil officials, the military, the native born and Aborigines, together with the human flotsam of a seaport in The Rocks.
In an age preoccupied by status, for those who could not rely on the presumption of respectability conferred by aristocratic birth or lesser forms of "breeding", actual conduct alone revealed the character entitling one to gentry status.
Once a person had manifested a defect in character, only his or her exclusion from polite society could restore the proper social order. This policy of social exclusion was so widely accepted that those, like Macquarie, who took a different view, could not escape censure by those whose status was thereby rendered less secure.
Macquarie's "clean slate" policy was more meritocratic than egalitarian. It was in part a product of Enlightenment principles, in part a product of Macquarie's own achievement as a self-made man who had risen from a family background of genteel but abject poverty in rural Scotland, and in part the pragmatism of a military man who was most concerned with what worked.
It would be wrong to cast Macquarie as a liberal democrat. He was formed by years of military training and exercise. He thought and acted as an autocrat, albeit a benevolent one at times of his choosing. He often treated disagreement as insubordination.
His outreach to the Aborigines - with whom he instituted an annual gathering at Parramatta in a spirit of reconciliation which, regrettably, did not survive - did not prevent him from instituting reprisals or continuing policies of land dispossession. Nor did his liberality towards convicts - he issued a steady flow of pardons, conditional pardons and tickets of leave - impede his deployment of flogging and other harsh punishment at his discretion.
However, his general policy towards convicts was an anathema to the social exclusivists in the colony and to the Tory government in England, which was hostile to the spirit of improvement that Macquarie represented, was suffering an acute fiscal crisis and was determined to ensure that transportation to Australia again became a significant deterrent for the criminals of Great Britain.
There was a widely held view among the lower orders in England that being sent as a convict to NSW was preferable to being unemployed in England. It probably was.
The economic depression after the final victory against Napoleon in 1815 led to a crime wave. The principal contemporary concern of the British political nation was fear of the lower orders, both in terms of criminality and also political radicalism. Dominating the intellectual mindset of this political nation was the apocalyptic experience of the French Revolution followed by two decades of almost continual warfare. There was a visceral fear of what the political elite called "the Mob" and political radicals called "the People".
Macquarie's liberal policies were overturned by his immediate successors. The result was the enhancement of severity of punishment for serving convicts, the diminishment in the social standing of emancipated convicts and a substantial reduction in public expenditure.
Perhaps the principal reason Governor Macquarie is remembered with a degree of fondness not afforded to any of the other early governors is his legacy of public buildings - buildings of urbanity and gentility - which, at least over recent decades, have come to be admired as a fundamental part of our national urban heritage.
His first major public building was Sydney Hospital in Macquarie Street - of which two wings remain - Parliament House and the Mint, clearly influenced by Macquarie's time in India - with their graceful verandas of double Tuscan-upon-Tuscan colonnades. The hospital was built by private enterprise, at a time when he had been told not to spend any money on buildings, in exchange for a three-year monopoly on the import of rum. It was, like many of Macquarie's projects, open to criticism - it was too big, there were no kitchens or lavatories - but it is a precious inheritance.
The "Rum Hospital", as it became known, was Australia's first private-public partnership and, in many respects, is the model for the construction of most of the tunnels and expressways that have been built in this city in the past two decades. Only the unnecessary step of charging the public through the intermediation of alcohol has been superseded.
Macquarie managed to ignore or evade most attempts to constrain his public works program. At the time he was appointed in 1810, Macquarie was told by the secretary for the colonies to restrain any extravagance in public works and not to build anything without prior approval. He never obeyed. Furthermore, he regularly deceived London by delaying dispatches until any reply could not interfere with the building work which he had commenced without that requisite approval.
Macquarie has left us, among numerous public buildings, some of our most graceful churches, an obelisk, the Government House stables, now occupied by the Conservatorium of Music, the Female Factory at Parramatta, the Hyde Park Barracks, and the South Head Lighthouse - the present structure being a replica when the unsafe original had to be torn down. There is a striking photograph of the two lighthouses side by side.
Some of Macquarie's public works have not survived. I particularly regret the loss of the folly that was the Newcastle lighthouse in the shape of a Chinese pagoda.
Macquarie has left an indelible imprint on the physical structure of Sydney and its immediate region. He brought a vision to the structure of the township and to its infrastructure and built form which has rarely been equalled, let alone surpassed.
In all of this his wife, Elizabeth, made a critical contribution. It was she who brought a book of building and town designs. Her role is recognised in the title of the road and point it leads to, Mrs Macquaries Chair, and in the not-well-remembered facts that Elizabeth Street is named after her and Campbelltown bears her maiden name.
One of Macquarie's first acts was to organise and plan the roads - so that they would be at least 50 feet (15 metres) wide - which required some houses to be removed and to build new roads. Macquarie brought a sense of civic order to a streetscape where before, as one historian has put it: "No honest man could fall drunk without fear of being savaged by foraging pigs or trampled by straying cattle."
Macquarie gave our principal streets their names; changing that of High Street to George, after the king, naming the parallel streets after the king's sons, the dukes of York, Clarence, Kent and Sussex, or after the principal political figures of the day, Pitt and Castlereagh, and other streets after his predecessors - Phillip, King and Bligh, while naming the putative principal official thoroughfare on the eastern ridge of the town after himself.
His urban planning extended to the location and development of the regional towns of Liverpool, Windsor, Richmond, Castlereagh, Wilberforce and Pitt Town.
One of his most important public works, of vital economic significance, was the construction of the road over the Blue Mountains, establishing and naming the first town over the ranges, Bathurst.
Macquarie made a major contribution to Australia. That his influence could have been greater if his liberal policies towards convicts and his public works program had not been overturned by the imperial government, does not detract from his status in the first rank of Australian statesmen. His tomb in Scotland, with only some exaggeration and inadequate recognition of the critical role of Elizabeth, bears the inscription "The Father of Australia". His bicentennial is worthy of commemoration.
December 26, 2009
Major-General Lachlan Macquarie
A fitting enough title - argues the NSW Chief Justice, James Spigelman - but Lachlan Macquarie's contribution could have been even greater had his London masters not resisted him.
Lachlan Macquarie landed in Sydney on December 28, 1809 and assumed office on January 1, 1810. Friday will be the 200th anniversary of his taking over as the fifth governor of NSW.
With supervisory jurisdiction over the lieutenant governor in Tasmania, Macquarie served for 12 years as the chief political executive of modern Australia - a continent which he named by endorsing the suggestion of Matthew Flinders.
He is the second longest serving person in such office in our history, after Sir Robert Menzies.
Macquarie was the first head of the executive to strive to transform the colony from an open-air prison to a British settlement. During his period of office many of Australia's foundational institutions and social and physical infrastructure were established or the seeds sown for their development.
This included the full range of public facilities - schools, churches, hospitals, roads, lighthouses and other public buildings. Upon his retirement he was able to list 265 distinct public works constructed during his term of office.
Macquarie created a range of new institutions: for education, including Aboriginal education; for social welfare - the Benevolent Society; for child protection - the Orphan School at Parramatta; as well as creating our first coinage - the "Holey Dollar" and the "Dump"; the first commercial bank - now Westpac; and supporting the development of agriculture, industry, trade and the exploration of the continent for future growth.
His most dramatic and, in the event, only partially successful political intervention, was his modification of the severity of the convict experience and his attempt to eliminate completely any permanent convict stain.
His basic policy was that, subject to good behaviour, convicts who had served their terms or had been pardoned were entitled to be restored to the position in society that they had originally occupied. That policy was particularly focused on the convicts who had arrived with technical skills or manifested ability during their period in Australia. This infuriated the local elite.
The Australian social system of this era was based on castes. Different social groupings were segregated by differences of function and culture - almost as distinct as the castes of the Indian subcontinent. The castes included convicts, emancipists, free settlers, civil officials, the military, the native born and Aborigines, together with the human flotsam of a seaport in The Rocks.
In an age preoccupied by status, for those who could not rely on the presumption of respectability conferred by aristocratic birth or lesser forms of "breeding", actual conduct alone revealed the character entitling one to gentry status.
Once a person had manifested a defect in character, only his or her exclusion from polite society could restore the proper social order. This policy of social exclusion was so widely accepted that those, like Macquarie, who took a different view, could not escape censure by those whose status was thereby rendered less secure.
Macquarie's "clean slate" policy was more meritocratic than egalitarian. It was in part a product of Enlightenment principles, in part a product of Macquarie's own achievement as a self-made man who had risen from a family background of genteel but abject poverty in rural Scotland, and in part the pragmatism of a military man who was most concerned with what worked.
It would be wrong to cast Macquarie as a liberal democrat. He was formed by years of military training and exercise. He thought and acted as an autocrat, albeit a benevolent one at times of his choosing. He often treated disagreement as insubordination.
His outreach to the Aborigines - with whom he instituted an annual gathering at Parramatta in a spirit of reconciliation which, regrettably, did not survive - did not prevent him from instituting reprisals or continuing policies of land dispossession. Nor did his liberality towards convicts - he issued a steady flow of pardons, conditional pardons and tickets of leave - impede his deployment of flogging and other harsh punishment at his discretion.
However, his general policy towards convicts was an anathema to the social exclusivists in the colony and to the Tory government in England, which was hostile to the spirit of improvement that Macquarie represented, was suffering an acute fiscal crisis and was determined to ensure that transportation to Australia again became a significant deterrent for the criminals of Great Britain.
There was a widely held view among the lower orders in England that being sent as a convict to NSW was preferable to being unemployed in England. It probably was.
The economic depression after the final victory against Napoleon in 1815 led to a crime wave. The principal contemporary concern of the British political nation was fear of the lower orders, both in terms of criminality and also political radicalism. Dominating the intellectual mindset of this political nation was the apocalyptic experience of the French Revolution followed by two decades of almost continual warfare. There was a visceral fear of what the political elite called "the Mob" and political radicals called "the People".
Macquarie's liberal policies were overturned by his immediate successors. The result was the enhancement of severity of punishment for serving convicts, the diminishment in the social standing of emancipated convicts and a substantial reduction in public expenditure.
Perhaps the principal reason Governor Macquarie is remembered with a degree of fondness not afforded to any of the other early governors is his legacy of public buildings - buildings of urbanity and gentility - which, at least over recent decades, have come to be admired as a fundamental part of our national urban heritage.
His first major public building was Sydney Hospital in Macquarie Street - of which two wings remain - Parliament House and the Mint, clearly influenced by Macquarie's time in India - with their graceful verandas of double Tuscan-upon-Tuscan colonnades. The hospital was built by private enterprise, at a time when he had been told not to spend any money on buildings, in exchange for a three-year monopoly on the import of rum. It was, like many of Macquarie's projects, open to criticism - it was too big, there were no kitchens or lavatories - but it is a precious inheritance.
The "Rum Hospital", as it became known, was Australia's first private-public partnership and, in many respects, is the model for the construction of most of the tunnels and expressways that have been built in this city in the past two decades. Only the unnecessary step of charging the public through the intermediation of alcohol has been superseded.
Macquarie managed to ignore or evade most attempts to constrain his public works program. At the time he was appointed in 1810, Macquarie was told by the secretary for the colonies to restrain any extravagance in public works and not to build anything without prior approval. He never obeyed. Furthermore, he regularly deceived London by delaying dispatches until any reply could not interfere with the building work which he had commenced without that requisite approval.
Macquarie has left us, among numerous public buildings, some of our most graceful churches, an obelisk, the Government House stables, now occupied by the Conservatorium of Music, the Female Factory at Parramatta, the Hyde Park Barracks, and the South Head Lighthouse - the present structure being a replica when the unsafe original had to be torn down. There is a striking photograph of the two lighthouses side by side.
Some of Macquarie's public works have not survived. I particularly regret the loss of the folly that was the Newcastle lighthouse in the shape of a Chinese pagoda.
Macquarie has left an indelible imprint on the physical structure of Sydney and its immediate region. He brought a vision to the structure of the township and to its infrastructure and built form which has rarely been equalled, let alone surpassed.
In all of this his wife, Elizabeth, made a critical contribution. It was she who brought a book of building and town designs. Her role is recognised in the title of the road and point it leads to, Mrs Macquaries Chair, and in the not-well-remembered facts that Elizabeth Street is named after her and Campbelltown bears her maiden name.
One of Macquarie's first acts was to organise and plan the roads - so that they would be at least 50 feet (15 metres) wide - which required some houses to be removed and to build new roads. Macquarie brought a sense of civic order to a streetscape where before, as one historian has put it: "No honest man could fall drunk without fear of being savaged by foraging pigs or trampled by straying cattle."
Macquarie gave our principal streets their names; changing that of High Street to George, after the king, naming the parallel streets after the king's sons, the dukes of York, Clarence, Kent and Sussex, or after the principal political figures of the day, Pitt and Castlereagh, and other streets after his predecessors - Phillip, King and Bligh, while naming the putative principal official thoroughfare on the eastern ridge of the town after himself.
His urban planning extended to the location and development of the regional towns of Liverpool, Windsor, Richmond, Castlereagh, Wilberforce and Pitt Town.
One of his most important public works, of vital economic significance, was the construction of the road over the Blue Mountains, establishing and naming the first town over the ranges, Bathurst.
Macquarie made a major contribution to Australia. That his influence could have been greater if his liberal policies towards convicts and his public works program had not been overturned by the imperial government, does not detract from his status in the first rank of Australian statesmen. His tomb in Scotland, with only some exaggeration and inadequate recognition of the critical role of Elizabeth, bears the inscription "The Father of Australia". His bicentennial is worthy of commemoration.