Major-General Lachlan Macquarie (; ; 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 orchestrated urban planning in the colony. He had a significant impact on the development of modern Sydney, establishing the layout upon which the modern city centre is based, establishing Hyde Park as Australia's first public park, overseeing the construction of various public buildings along Macquarie Street, and devising the layouts of a number of settlements which today are part of Western Sydney. He also ordered the designing of a street layout for Hobart. A supporter of exploration, Macquarie authorised the 1813 expedition across the Blue Mountains, the first successful British traversal of the region. He ordered the establishment of Bathurst, the first inland British settlement in Australia.
While seeking to promote morality and orderliness, Macquarie favoured the liberal treatment of ex-convicts, known as emancipists, appointing them to prominent government positions and providing generous land grants.
Macquarie expressed a desire for Aboriginal peoples to be treated kindly, and established the first school for Aboriginal children; at the same time, he gave orders that led to the Appin Massacre of Gundungurra and Dharawal people during the Hawkesbury and Nepean Wars.
Early life Lachlan Macquarie was born on the island of Ulva off the coast of the Isle of Mull in the Inner Hebrides, a chain of islands off the West Coast of Scotland. His father, Lachlan senior, worked as a carpenter and miller, and was a cousin of a Clan MacQuarrie chieftain. His mother, Margaret, was the sister of the influential Murdoch Maclaine, 19th laird of Lochbuie. Despite this, his parents were relatively poor and probably illiterate, leasing and working a small farm as sub-tenants at Oskamull. In his early teens, Macquarie was sent to Edinburgh to be educated, possibly attending the Royal High School of Edinburgh where he learnt English and arithmetic.
British Army North America Macquarie volunteered to join the British Army in 1776 and was assigned to the 84th Regiment of Foot. Later that year he travelled with it to North America to fight against the revolutionaries in the American War of Independence. On the way to America he participated in the Battle of the Newcastle Jane, the first naval victory for a British merchant ship over an American privateer. Macquarie was initially stationed at Halifax, Nova Scotia and obtained the junior rank of ensign on 9 April 1777. On 18 January 1781, he was promoted to lieutenant and transferred to the 71st (Highland) Regiment of Foot, and served with them in New York City and Charleston. Macquarie safely saw out the end of the rebellion by being posted in Jamaica at the time of the British defeat in the war.
India In June 1784 Macquarie returned to Scotland, where he managed the Lochbuie estates of his uncle, Captain Murdoch Maclaine. Through the influence of Maclaine, he was offered a lieutenancy in the 77th (Hindoostan) Regiment of Foot, a British Army unit, which he took up on Christmas Day 1787. The cost of this regiment was met by the East India company because it was raised specifically for service in India.Woollright, Henry Herriot (1907). Records of the Seventy-Seventh (East Middlesex) The Duke of Cambridge's Own Regiment of Foot now the Second Battalion The Duke of Cambridge's Own (Middlesex Regiment). Aldershot: Gale & Polden.
Macquarie arrived with his regiment at Bombay in August 1788 where he was stationed for two years. He saw active service from 1790 to 1792 during the Third Anglo-Mysore War, under General Abercromby, participating in the Capture of Cannanore and the 1792 Siege of Seringapatam. He was promoted to Major of Brigade of troops on the Malabar Coast in August 1793 and became a Freemason that same year at Bombay.Freemasonry Australia In September 1793 Macquarie married Jane Jarvis, daughter of the late Chief Justice of Antigua, Thomas Jarvis, who had owned slave plantations there. According to their marriage settlement, Miss Jarvis was worth £6,000 which was paid out to Macquarie three years later when she died of tuberculosis. In 1795, he saw further action leading troops at the successful siege of the Dutch fort at Cochin. A year later Macquarie participated in the taking of Colombo and other Dutch possessions in Ceylon, and was made commander of the occupying garrison at Galle.
In May 1797, Macquarie led troops during the campaign against the rebel forces of Pazhassi Raja in the jungles around Manantheri. Employing guerilla tactics, Pazhassi inflicted sizable casualties on the 77th, killing a number of officers with Macquarie himself being wounded in the foot. The British torched all the villages in the district but conceded defeat with the East India Company forced into a peace treaty with Pazhassi. Macquarie resigned from his commanding role soon after the campaign.
He participated in front-line combat during the Fourth Anglo-Mysore War against the forces of Tipu Sultan, helping defeat them first at the Battle of Seedaseer and then at the siege and storming of Tipu's palace at Srirangapatna in 1799. He described the "glorious" aftermath where the bodies of Tipu and his people "lay in such immense Heaps on the Ramparts...as well as in different Parts of the Town that no regular account of them could be taken". Macquarie received £1,300 in prize money after the city was looted.
In 1800, Macquarie was part of the British entourage headed by Governor Duncan that forced Mir Nasiruddin Khan of Surat to sign a treaty with the East India Company dictating the handover of that province to Company rule.
Egypt In 1801, Macquarie was appointed by General David Baird as Deputy Adjutant-General of the large British-Indian expeditionary force assigned to link up with Sir Ralph Abercromby's army to expel the French Army from Egypt. Macquarie sailed with his regiment to Egypt from India with the French already in retreat toward Alexandria. He arrived there two days after the capitulation of Alexandria to the British. Macquarie remained in Egypt for about a year during which time he met up with his brother. Macquarie contracted syphilis while in Egypt.
Return to Britain, further duty in India In 1803, Macquarie returned to Britain having amassed a fortune of £20,000. His elevation to the social elite saw him meet several times with Jacob Bosanquet and the directors of the East India Company and he also had a personal introduction to King George III. He served in London as Assistant Adjutant General to Lord Harrington and was able to purchase an estate on his native Isle of Mull, which he named Jarvisfield. In 1805, Macquarie was ordered to return to India to take charge of the 86th Regiment of Foot and after arriving also became military secretary to Governor Duncan at Bombay.
In 1807 he travelled overland from India to Britain via Persia and Russia, and was very impressed by the layout and architecture of St Petersburg. Later that year, Macquarie married his third cousin Elizabeth Henrietta Campbell in Devon and took command of the 73rd Regiment in Scotland as a Lieutenant-Colonel. Macquarie's wife gave birth to a daughter in 1808 which died in infancy.
Governor of New South Wales Arrival in Sydney
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. Macquarie was promoted to colonel in 1810, Brigadier-General in 1811 and major-general in 1813, while serving as governor.
When he arrived in Sydney in 1809 he was accompanied by his Indian "slave-boy" named George Jarvis, whom he had purchased in 1795 for 160 rupees at age 6 (along with a 7-year-old named Hector). Jarvis was named after his deceased wife's brother while Hector later escaped. He wrote about them in his diaries: "very fine, well-looking healthy Black Boys".
Dealings with the NSW Corps Macquarie's first task was to restore orderly, lawful government and discipline in the colony following the Rum Rebellion of 1808 against Governor William Bligh. Macquarie was ordered by the British government to arrest two of the leaders of the Rum Rebellion, John Macarthur and Major George Johnston. However, by the time that Macquarie arrived in Sydney, both Macarthur and Johnston had already sailed for England to defend themselves. Macquarie immediately set about cancelling the various initiatives taken by the rebel governmentfor example, all "pardons, leases and land grants" made by the rebels were revoked. However, after an avalanche of petitions from leaseholders were sent to Macquarie, he soon back-flipped and ratified them all.
Although the New South Wales Corps and its monopoly were soon ended, the military influence survived, with officers having sway over the justice system. Macquarie himself chose to keep the peace with the remaining NSW Corps officers and maintained an ambivalent attitude to the rebellion against Bligh.
Civil reforms Part of Macquarie's undertaking of bringing order to the colony was to refashion the convict settlement into an urban environment of organised towns with streets and parks. The street layout of modern central Sydney is based upon a plan established by Macquarie. The colony's most prestigious buildings were built on Macquarie Street which he named after himself. Some of these still stand today including the 'Rum Hospital' part of which now serves as the Parliament House of New South Wales. The elaborate stables which Macquarie commissioned for Government House are now part of the modern structure housing the Sydney Conservatorium of Music.
Other notable edifices built during Macquarie's tenure include the Parramatta Female Orphan School, St James Church, and the Hyde Park Barracks. He also officially named and established Hyde Park as a public recreation area. These buildings were constructed by Macquarie in defiance of the British government's ban on expensive public building projects in the colony and reflect the tension between Macquarie's vision of Sydney as a Georgian city and that of powerful British colonists who saw it as not much more than a camp for cheap convict labour. Macquarie also dedicated a vast expanse of land as the Sydney Common that is collectively today’s Centennial Parklands group of parks, the Sydney Cricket Ground, Sydney Football Stadium and Victoria Barracks.