A Forger's Progress

by Alasdair McGregor

  Concern for the moral redemption of convicts and their full restoration to society fitted well with the world view of a child of the Enlightenment such as Lachlan Macquarie. He was no stranger to harsh discipline, which was as brutal in the army as in any corner of society. But as a self-made man who had escaped the poverty and injustices of 18th-century Scotland and accumulated a modest fortune by his own exertion, the plight of the convict had almost the sense about it of ‘there but for the grace of God go I’. A few years hence, when his own judgment and actions were being attacked, and the official mood behind transportation had changed from a desire to reform lost souls to one of example through ‘salutary terror’, Macquarie would write:

  What can be so great a stimulus to a man of respectable family and education, who has fallen to the lowest state of degradation, as to know, that it is still in his power to recover what he has lost, and not only to become a worthy member of society, but to be treated as such? … This country should be made a happy home to every emancipated convict who deserves it … Here, according to my system, they feel encouraged and protected, if they deserve it, and are on a footing of equality with the general population …

  My principle is, that once a man is free, his former state should no longer be remembered, or allowed to act against him …4

  Despite Whitehall’s expectation of an enlightened policy towards emancipists, Macquarie’s vigorous fulfilment of their lordships’ intent would create serious tensions in colonial society, pitting the governor and the emancipists against factions in the military and judiciary, and their landholding exclusivist allies. Falsehoods would spread to England via the pens of malcontents such as the Reverend Samuel Marsden and the likes of the Macquaries’ erstwhile travelling companion Ellis Bent, and Bent’s brother Jeffrey. Ironically, their class-ridden and skewed perspective would find a hearing among reformers critical of the whole transportation system. The radical Whig politician Henry Grey Bennet would brand Macquarie a despot, rather than laud his progressive policies, in an attempt to embarrass the Tory government of the day.

  Fireworks and bonfires greeted the new governor and his consort when the Dromedary warped into Sydney Cove in late December 1809. The festive mood belied mutterings of ongoing disquiet in Sydney Town. But only once he had calmly asserted his authority – the mutinous corps, along with his predecessor and the last of the conspirators, packed off back to England within months – could Macquarie properly begin his term as governor.

  His initial impressions of the colony were perhaps not as sanguine as those of his future architectural collaborator. At the close of his long administration some 12 years later, Macquarie would famously reflect on his observations on first arriving in New South Wales. Admittedly, the former governor’s words were coloured by bitter experience and written at a time when he was struggling to claw back his reputation:

  I found the Colony barely emerging from infantile imbecility, and suffering from various privations and disabilities; the Country impenetrable beyond 40 miles from Sydney; Agriculture in a yet languishing state; commerce in its early dawn; Revenue unknown; threatened by famine; distracted by faction; the public buildings in a state of dilapidation and mouldering to decay; the few Roads and Bridges … rendered almost impassable; the population in general depressed by poverty …5

  In one of his first despatches to Castlereagh, Macquarie complained about the lack of accommodation for the garrisoned troops and the general paucity of public buildings in sound repair:

  I am sorry to inform your Lordship that I shall be under the necessity of putting the Crown to a very considerable expence [sic] in the erection of Barracks and other essentially necessary Public Buildings, those I find here being in a rapid state of decay … There will be an absolute necessity for building a New General Hospital as soon as possible, the present one being in a most ruinous state …6

  Macquarie also cited a need for ‘Granaries and other Public Stores, as well as Barracks for the reception of the Male and Female Convicts on their first arrival in this Country’.

  With an inadequate stock of public buildings, and many among those that were standing ‘so much decayed that it would be an useless expence [sic] to attempt to repair them’, Macquarie needed urgent help to turn around such a dire situation. His despatch to Castlereagh continued:

  It would be highly necessary and very desirable that a Government Architect should immediately be sent out to this Colony to plan and superintend the erection of all Public Buildings, and I respectfully entreat your Lordship will send out a well qualified person of this description to the Colony as soon as possible.7

  A further despatch a month later repeated the same message, with perhaps a dash more urgency, as ‘the want of such an officer is severely felt on the present occasion …’8

  MH Ellis painted a colourful and almost tragic picture of a forlorn Macquarie some two years later, around the time Greenway fronted the Bristol Assizes. Here was ‘an irate and fever-marked officer in a scarlet coat and staff aiguillettes … sitting in a damp and termite-infested Government House … rummaging eagerly through dispatches from England’. For many months, Macquarie had waited patiently for an architect to arrive, and if not a professional man in the flesh, then at least an answer to his request. Ellis imagined Macquarie searching in vain through his papers, ‘and as he flung aside the last unfruitful letter, he no doubt uttered a soldierly imprecation in the rich brogue of Mull’.9

  In 1812, Robert Jenkinson, 2nd Earl of Liverpool, succeeded Castlereagh as secretary of state for war and the colonies, but Whitehall’s attitude remained unwaveringly consistent. The long and draining conflict with France meant that drastic economies would have to be made elsewhere. Macquarie’s brief might have talked of the development of towns and other advances, but any attempt by him to prise open the Treasury’s coffers would inevitably receive short shrift. In his despatch of 4 May 1812, Liverpool made no mention of Macquarie’s need of an architect and ignored the governor’s warnings about the cost of correcting previous neglect. Instead, Liverpool spoke of the ‘Burden of the Colony … upon the Mother Country’. By Liverpool’s calculation that burden had been ‘much increased’ since Macquarie assumed office.10 He exhorted the governor to:

  use the most unremitting exertions to reduce the expence [sic] at least within former limits [and] … undertake no public buildings … without having the previous Sanction of His Majesty’s Government … or without being enabled to prove most clearly and Satisfactorily that the delay of reference would be productive of Serious Injury to the Public Service.11

  As for bridges, roads and wharves, if free settlers and emancipists benefited from such public works, then they could contribute to their cost.

  Macquarie received Liverpool’s despatch in November 1812 and the frustrations he was to continue to face while steering the colony’s development must have by then seemed all too depressingly obvious. But in the strung-out hiatus between despatch and receipt, the governor had not been idle. As would always be his and Elizabeth’s wont, the Macquaries were builders and improvers. They had been busy from the start – submissive adherence to instructions from Whitehall was put to one side. Among a number of public works, construction of new military barracks (approximately on the alignment of York Street between Jamison and Barrack streets today) had commenced in July 1810, and extensions were made to barracks built by Lieutenant Governor Joseph Foveaux during the Bligh interregnum. On the western side of Sydney Cove, the massive commissariat stores (also begun by Foveaux) were completed, providing secure storage for government food rations and equipment.

  With little money at his disposal, Macquarie’s most notable project from the early days of his governorship involved a highly irregular contract with three local entrepreneurs to build a new hospital, the urgent need of which had been so lamented. The so-called Rum Hospital, and its structural and architectural shortcomings, were matters with which Greenway would later become intimately, and almost obsessively, inv
olved (see chapter 10).

  The hospital was but one of the risky early games of fiscal cat and mouse between a cash-starved governor and their parsimonious lordships in Whitehall. As his term as governor unfolded, Macquarie did not let up in his attempts to circumvent the monetary constraints of the government. Whitehall’s answer to this and other perceived problems on Macquarie’s watch would eventually be to send one of their own – John Thomas Bigge – to investigate the administration of New South Wales and the effectiveness of the entire transportation system.

  But as Macquarie perused the indents for the latest convict ship arrival, such an upheaval to his plans for the colony was still a few years off. The indents for the General Hewett listed Francis Howard Greenway as having been born about 1778 and aged 34 at the time of his conviction. As to his appearance, he was recorded as ‘5 feet 6¾ inches tall’ with a fair, ruddy complexion, light-coloured hair and hazel eyes. Studying the documents, Macquarie might have barely noticed the physical description of prisoner ‘no. 101’ – short of stature and fair-skinned, like most of his fellows – but what must he have thought when he read that his occupation was ‘Architect & Painter’?12 At that moment he just might have resorted to a further ‘soldierly imprecation in the rich brogue of Mull’, but this time in pleasure and relief.

  Had ‘that slippery Goddess, Fortune’, as Macquarie was moved to describe her, finally conspired to bring him his longdesired professional help?13 And knowing the government’s unsympathetic attitude, what men of influence totally unbeknown to Macquarie might have interceded with that goddess and curved Greenway’s path, placing the architect – right when he was most needed – at the threshold of the governor’s crumbling mansion? No one would ever know, or would ever need to know. The circumstances of Greenway’s fall from grace mattered naught to the enlightened Lachlan Macquarie. All that mattered was that he at last had his man, yet for a short time he would be content just to watch and wait.

  TO COPY A COURTHOUSE

  Macquarie’s fourth year in New South Wales was difficult. According to Ellis, through the course of 1814 Macquarie was ‘like a lion caught in a net … breasting his way through a very tempest of urgent problems’.1 Among a host of issues, the deaths and sickness aboard the General Hewett, Surry and Three Bees occupied his attention, as did the evacuation of Norfolk Island early in the year. Rumours circulated that the French might threaten Sydney, and then in May the Three Bees itself caught fire and blew up off Bennelong Point. All of Sydney was nervous. Macquarie’s own 73rd Regiment departed for Ceylon and was replaced by the 46th, the loyalty of whose officers he could not guarantee. And perhaps worst of all, a severe drought held the colony in its withering clutches. Wheat sold for £2 a bushel, while bushfires ravaged the land. Writing to Lord Bathurst, Liverpool’s successor as secretary of state for war and the colonies, Macquarie observed a ‘complete change in this climate within the last three years’.2 After Elizabeth had suffered numerous miscarriages, the Macquaries’ only son, also named Lachlan, was born in March and nearly died. And on the frontier, guerrilla warfare with the country’s original inhabitants continued. The Sydney Gazette hoped that ‘measures judiciously acted upon will put an early termination to those evils to which the lonely settler is exposed from the predatory incursions of an enemy … in a wild temperament of fury’.3

  Greenway’s arrival did not herald an immediate start in the governor’s employ, despite Macquarie’s urgent pleas for assistance. Rather, it seems there was little public construction planned or underway at the time. And on top of the pressures and distractions of a difficult year for Macquarie, Whitehall’s warnings about spending may have temporarily curbed the governor’s passion for building.

  On 7 March 1814, just one month after he came ashore from the General Hewett, Greenway was granted a ticket of leave by Macquarie. Mary and the three boys were expected in Sydney in a few months, and consistent with Macquarie’s enlightened policies, the ticket was granted that soon ‘on account of his wife and family with the view of enabling him the better to maintain them’.4 A ticket of leave allowed a convict to seek their own employment within a strictly policed district, independent of being assigned as a labourer, farm worker, domestic servant or the like. It was in effect a form of parole.

  And then there was that precious letter from Arthur Phillip. It is impossible to tell when an eager Greenway sent it, or delivered it in person to the governor, but its influence would have been priceless. Macquarie had great respect for the old admiral and the two had corresponded.

  With an architect finally in his midst, Macquarie no doubt kept tabs on Greenway and tried to assess his potential usefulness. His initial tasks may have involved verbal reporting on minor matters of building or engineering, with no defined role or official position. Greenway would later contend that he ‘first served the Government as a surveyor and engineer … from the month of July, 1815, to March, 1816, without having received any salary, pay or remuneration’.5 During this time, Captain John Gill of the 46th Regiment (recently arrived in the colony and appointed acting engineer and artillery officer) would also have supervised Greenway’s activities and movements closely.

  Greenway’s first recorded contact with Macquarie occurred nearly six months after his arrival in Sydney. The tone of the surviving documents from that exchange says much as to the tenor of the relationship that would unfold between the quixotic and querulous architect and the activist and at times impetuous governor.

  Macquarie had obviously requested samples of the architect’s work, and towards the end of July 1814, Greenway’s portfolio duly arrived on the governor’s desk. Obviously proud of his work in Carmarthen, Greenway made particular mention in his covering letter of the ‘Market House & Town Hall’. He also confirmed that he would ‘immediately copy the drawing Your Excellency requested me to do’, but added the caveat ‘notwithstanding it is rather painful to my feelings mind as a professional man to copy a building that has no claim to classical proportion or character’.6 Greenway’s hubris was matched only by his recklessness; here was a convict telling the King’s representative that such a request dented his professional pride! Simply the deletion of the word ‘feelings’ indicates the emotional edge on which Greenway teetered, unthinking of the consequences of his actions.

  The copy that Macquarie required from Greenway was of a courthouse design, a project that would in ensuing years become increasingly dear to the viceroy. His underlying intentions are unclear; perhaps he wanted further development of an existing proposal or was simply using the exercise to test Greenway’s skills. And although there is no surviving drawing made in response that could confirm the design’s original author, the courthouse was possibly the work of Daniel Dering Mathew, a shadowy architect and engineer-cum-geologist who had arrived in the colony as a free settler in 1812. It seems that despite Macquarie’s express need of professional help, the hapless Mathew had so far failed to win the governor’s favour.

  Three months before Macquarie put Greenway’s talents to the test, Mathew had given the governor a drawing and detailed written description of the ‘proposed new Court of Justice’. The design came complete with a ‘Grecian Doric Portico … copied from the Temple of Theseus at Athens’.7 If Mathew’s design was the one in question, its classical embellishments did nothing to persuade Greenway as to its merit. Inevitably the pair became rivals. What might have beckoned as a tantalisingly open field to the free settler Mathew was soon crowded with Greenway’s superior talents or, as architectural historian Morton Herman put it, ‘he pricked the bubble of Mathew’s gorgeous vision of unlimited commissions from the Government’.8 Macquarie would later describe Greenway as the ‘only regular architect here’, so it seems that Mathew’s professional pretensions never fully convinced either the governor or his wife.9 An aggrieved Mathew would become part of a whispering campaign against Greenway, which short of actually uttering the word ‘bribe’, accused him of having his hand firmly in the pockets of contractors.
r />   One so self-opinionated and dismissive of the efforts of others as Greenway was bound to incur the ire of a foe such as Mathew. In such circumstances, a more astute individual would have seen the absolute necessity of currying favour with the governor in the murky small-town political pond that was early 19th-century Sydney; Macquarie was potentially Greenway’s patron, protector, promoter and entrée to colonial society.

  But what did Greenway do? As if his temerity at criticising Macquarie’s aesthetic judgment – and by association that of his influential wife – were not enough, he proceeded to lecture the governor on architectural taste. Obviously his copy of Chamber’s Treatise on Civil Architecture was still in one piece after the travails of the General Hewett, as Greenway quoted at length from the precious volume:

  Let it not however be imagined that building merely considered as heaping stone upon stone can be of great consequence; or reflect honour either on nations or individuals. Materials in architecture are like words in phrasiology [sic] having separately but little power, and they may be so arranged as to excite ridicule, disgust or even contempt; yet when combined with skill expressed with energy, they acuate the mind with unbounded sway. An able writer can move even in rustic language, and the masterly dispositions of a skilful artist will dignify the meanest materials; while the weak efforts of the ignorant render the most costly enrichments despicable.

  There is not a fawning word in Greenway’s letter to Macquarie. On the contrary, it is a letter to someone he assumed as an equal. Unbroken and even unrepentant, he treated his convict status as but an aberration, a temporary inconvenience brought on by a world indifferent to his talents. He was something entirely out of the ordinary; he was that rare animal, the true artist who would assuredly flourish once again through the strength of his genius. He was someone whose opinions mattered. Bringing his argument around to what he could offer the governor, Greenway continued: