Australian History For Dummies. Alex McDermott

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.

      

Early on in his governorship, Macquarie decided that the convicts, ex-convicts and others who were making a go of it in NSW weren’t the problem — they were the purpose of the place. Rather than treat the colony as simply an outpost of Britain’s imperial will, he began to see it from the convicted criminals’ point of view. The colony was a land of opportunity for the people living there, and it should be governed with their interests in mind. With a policy of part goodhearted benevolent patron, part authoritarian despot, he endeavoured to make sure that generations of convicts’ descendants who came afterwards would remember him warmly.

      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.

      Pushing expansion

      Macquarie was keen to get the colony of NSW moving even faster, pushing the expansion of both settlement and the economy. Declaring new townships at the drop of hat, he was also big on road construction and public buildings. This was the Macquarie vision: To not simply cut costs and keep things quiet, but to build the place up.

      Expanding settlement

      Macquarie encouraged expansion of settlement by establishing new peripheral settlements in the colony, such as Windsor, Wilberforce and Liverpool. But the biggest challenge to expansion was the Blue Mountains, which essentially lay in a ring around the settlement. Various attempts had been made to penetrate the forbidding range since the first few months of the First Fleet’s arrival at Port Jackson, but so far none had been successful. The arable land available in the settlement was by now nearing exhaustion and Sydney was in danger of becoming a permanent ‘limpet port’ — a small-scale settlement that clung to the side of an unknown continent, depending solely on its maritime flow, ready for abandonment if and when the British Government decided to give up the project as a bad exercise. People didn’t even know what lay on the other side of the mountains. Desert? An inland sea? Or, as some convicts continued to believe, China?

      

In June 1813, three settlers — Gregory Blaxland, William Lawson and William Wentworth — and their convict servants finally found a way over the Blue Mountains, discovering enough grassland on the other side to ‘feed all the stock in the colony for thirty years’. Macquarie sent his surveyor, George Evans, to investigate and Evans returned greatly impressed with what he had found: ‘I cannot speak too much of the country. The increase of stock for some 100 years cannot overrun it’.

      A new vista of what Australia might become opened up, and Macquarie set to work building a road out along the route through the mountains and proclaimed a new township — Bathurst.

      GETTING THROUGH THE BLUE MOUNTAINS BLUES

      For the first 25 years of white settlement, the Blue Mountains were a big problem. They formed a ring around the NSW settlements at Sydney, Parramatta and on the Hawkesbury River. If a way wasn’t found through the mountains, the colony would never reach its full potential.

      The Blue Mountains weren’t like the regular ‘ordinary’ mountains the European settlers were used