A Forger's Progress

by Alasdair McGregor

  So, as the government’s exchequer was to be spared the burden of the new premises, Macquarie proffered this ‘revenue-neutral’ argument as his patently flimsy excuse ‘for not sending, for Your Lordship’s Approval, a Plan and Estimate of the Expence [sic] of Erecting a New Government House’. By now he knew full well the sort of reception that something like Greenway’s sweepingly extravagant sketch might receive, were he foolish enough to send it.

  What Macquarie carefully avoided disclosing to Bathurst was that in July 1817 he had instructed his architect, among a number of tasks:

  To draw a Ground Plan and Elevation of a Handsome and commodious Castletted [sic] House for the residence of the Governor in Chief of the Colony; agreeably to the Schedule of the numbers and description of Apartments herewith delivered; which Castletted House is to be built of Stone; but the form of the House and disposition of the Apartments are entirely left to Mr Greenway’s own taste and judgement.12

  Macquarie’s disingenuousness skids from every remaining line of his December despatch. He felt sure that had he only sent the plans to England, he ‘might probably have thereby escaped the Observations and Censure Conveyed to Me …’13 The governor continued to dig a slippery and steep-sided hole for himself, only the weather coming to his rescue on this occasion:

  It happens, however, very fortunately that, in Consequence of the long Continued heavy Rains … and the Delay occasioned thereby … that I have been prevented Commencing on the proposed New Government House and Offices. This being the Case, I shall leave it to My Successors to arrange the Mode and Plan for Carrying the Measure into Effect.

  Lest the good Lord Bathurst be worried about the governor’s welfare in far-distant New South Wales, he would content himself ‘in the Mean time with the inadequate Accommodation I now occupy’. Macquarie ended his remarks on the subject by ‘Assuring Your Lordship that no private Gentleman in this Colony is worse off for private Accommodation … than the Governor of the Colony’. If he intended to antagonise his overlords, such a statement could not be bettered.

  A desperate Macquarie would eventually instruct Greenway to patch up and extend Government House, all without informing Whitehall. No payments were recorded for the work, which was begun in late 1818 and completed in 1820. The architect and the all-suffering governor gathered up the broken and incomplete, hotchpotch parts of the old house and made the best of the architectural mélange. According to Broadbent and Hughes, ‘out of it came the first attempt at picturesque, asymmetrical, classical planning – the ‘Italianate’ style – in the colony’.14

  The Macquaries, by fair means or furtive, finally had a Government House, that, if not a palace fit for a viceroy, was at least an improvement on the previous ruinous pile. In a sense, though, the governor’s minor outsmarting of Bathurst was by that stage academic. He and his family would be gone from Sydney in February 1822, perhaps not much more than a year after the Government House alterations were complete.

  Back in 1817, in the depths of his disappointment, Macquarie’s indignation at Bathurst’s censure was already ringing hollow. On 1 December, more than a week before drafting his despatch in rebuttal, Lachlan Macquarie had penned another document to the colonial secretary – his letter of resignation. He had been taken to the brink by more than his collapsing house, the priority of one building over another, or their perceived and inappropriate lavishness; there was much else besides that brought Macquarie to his resignation. In one instance, expecting to be supported, he was instead heavily criticised by Bathurst over his disciplining of two officials, Benjamin Vale and William Moore, regarded by the governor as ‘disrespectful, Insolent and Insubordinate’. Macquarie also thought that Moore was at the ‘Root of … every Faction and Cabal that takes place in the Colony’.15

  And more broadly, the whispering campaign on the part of disgruntled settlers and their contacts in England was taking its toll on Macquarie. The Colonial Office seemed incapable of sorting fact from a tissue of lies and distortion, leading Macquarie to perceive a loss of confidence on the part of their lordships. After seven years in the colony, a term longer than for any previous governor, Macquarie had had enough, writing to Bathurst on 1 December 1817:

  Finding … from the tone and Manner of conveying your Sentiments of disapprobation and Censure, I have the Misfortune to lose that Confidence which your Lordship has hitherto been kindly pleased to repose in me; I could not with any satisfaction to myself, nor consistently with my own propriety and sense of Public Duty, any longer wish to retain the high and important Office I have had the honour to hold as Governor in Chief of this Colony …16

  Macquarie’s letter would take months to reach England, and for the time being in New South Wales it was business as usual.

  TRANSPORTATION: ‘AN OBJECT OF CONSIDERABLE TERROR’

  On 26 January 1818, when Australia Day was officially celebrated for the first time, and Greenway’s commemorative portrait of Arthur Phillip hung proudly in Government House, Sydney was a town of roughly 10 000 inhabitants. Close to that number also lived in the outlying districts of Parramatta and the Hawkesbury. In the 30 years since Phillip’s landing, the colony had grown from a miserable repository for Britain’s outcasts to a place of well-made streets and roads, and under Greenway’s creative guidance, a place graced by a handful of soundly constructed public buildings. There was a growing confidence about the colony; a nascent identity was forming, at once British but also Australian.

  But while Macquarie fretted and grumbled over the state of his quarters and otherwise ran New South Wales as an enlightened autocrat, at home, Britain was counting the cost of decades of war. Veterans joined the ranks of the unemployed, the destitute and the desperate. For many, Thomas Hobbes’s observation that life was ‘solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short’ was their grim reality. The twin upheavals of the industrial and agrarian revolutions were reshaping Britain in the most profound and disruptive way since the Norman invasion 800 years before. The economy was in decline and crime was on the rise.

  In Whitehall, the very nature and purpose of transportation was coming under review. Between 1805 and 1818 in England and Wales, convictions for capital crimes each year had more than tripled to 9000, while execution rates continued to fall. Judges and juries were reluctant to pass capital sentence, and witnesses baulked at giving evidence that might contribute to a prisoner’s death. Transportation remained the preferred solution for dealing with a criminal population that looked in no hurry to repent of its felonious ways, but as a punishment, transportation was increasingly seen as an insufficient deterrent to crime. Just as the exclusives sent back coloured reports to Britain, so the well-to-do emancipists and their children, the so-called currency lads and lasses, told of a society of unimaginable promise. For some, transportation had proved a second chance and not a punishment.

  By the third decade of the 19th century, the evolution of New South Wales and Van Diemen’s Land into places of free settlement was starting to gather pace, yet during Macquarie’s term as governor, convict arrivals in Sydney jumped from a low of 672 in 1810 to 3563 ten years later. Nearly 22 000 prisoners were shipped to New South Wales alone during his 12 years in the colony, while the entire population stood at less than 26 000 in 1820.1 The unruly and awkward mix of a military garrison, free society and penal settlement seemed set to stay. To quell increased agitation for action on crime and punishment, the Colonial Office decided in 1818 to send a commissioner of inquiry to the colony, to ‘examine into all the Laws, Regulations and Usages of the Settlements … and into every other Matter or Thing in any Way connected with the Administration of the Civil Government …’2

  Whitehall’s man was to be John Thomas Bigge, an ambitious, socially aspiring 39-year-old bachelor and one-time chief justice of the former Spanish slave colony of Trinidad. Bigge was a fellow of Christ Church Oxford, the alma mater of Henry Goulburn, undersecretary to Bathurst in the Colonial Office. He possibly came to Bathurst’s attention through Goulburn, but h
ow three years’ experience of a West Indian economy founded on slavery qualified him to ‘remould the policies of an antipodean colony, none knew’.3

  Redheaded, with a round countenance and rather delicate appearance despite a largish nose, Bigge was reserved, bookish, fastidious and a stickler for detail. Compliant and sufficiently wanting of original thought, he seemed almost tailor-made to do Bathurst’s bidding. With his uppity social pretensions, the po-faced Bigge was destined to hit it off with the bunyip aristocracy of the colony to the exclusion of the emancipists and their sympathetic governor. He was to act as a virtual inquisitor, a spy in Whitehall’s secret service, reporting direct to Bathurst, and bypassing Macquarie, on any individual ‘however exalted in rank or sacred in Character’.

  Bathurst did not seek impartiality in his functionary – like all good bureaucratic inquiries its general outcome was known before a single fact was gathered or question posed. Famously, the colonial secretary hoped to restore transportation as ‘an Object of considerable terror’, and his instructions to Bigge made starkly plain the tenor expected from the commissioner’s eventual reports:

  The great end of punishment is the prevention of crime … If therefore, by ill considered compassion for convicts, or from what might under other circumstances be considered a laudable desire to lessen their sufferings, their situation in New South Wales be divested of all salutary terror, transportation cannot operate as an effectual example on the community at large.4

  The commission was also an instance of a time-honoured stalling tactic, in this case intended to placate the gathering force of protest from the exclusives and their agents in Britain on the one hand, and dampen the growing sense of entitlement to liberty and equality from the emancipists on the other. Transportation was too convenient and attractive a remedy for the system not to be reformed. Somehow, tales of terror and depredation were to filter back to Britain and so persuade successive generations of the wages of sin.

  Appointed by Bathurst in September 1818, Bigge received his commission the following January. He departed England aboard the convict transport John Barry at the end of April, arriving in Sydney on Sunday 26 September 1819, where he was welcomed ashore by a 13-gun salute thundering from the artillery battery on Dawes Point.

  After nearly ten years’ service in New South Wales, Macquarie was tired, and more than ready to pack up and go home to his beloved Hebrides. He had been waiting expectantly for nearly two years for an answer to his resignation, but among the usual bundles of official documents landed that day with Mr John Thomas Bigge Esq., there was nothing to cheer Macquarie. There was no reply from Bathurst to his resignation; the original letter was lost somewhere, never to be found. For the foreseeable future, Lachlan, Elizabeth, and young Lachlan Macquarie were not going anywhere.

  If the commissioner’s arrival puzzled the veteran soldier and seasoned administrator, he kept such feelings to himself. His military discipline held the day. He had only become aware of the commission’s establishment and Bigge’s pending arrival five days earlier, per the captain of the convict transport Daphne, but Macquarie welcomed Bigge with appropriate dignity and civility. Giving the matter due thought, he perceived a benefit, and when writing to his brother Charles, Macquarie described Bigge’s unexpected appearance as a ‘most fortunate thing for me, as it will place my conduct at Home on an eminence beyond the reach of faction malevolence … I certainly feel obliged to H. M’s Ministers for sending out a Commissioner as his report must be favourable to my administration of the Colony’.5 Macquarie assumed that Bigge would be impressed by the progress made in New South Wales, the turning of the wilderness into an outpost of European and, most importantly, British civilisation.

  In the early afternoon of 7 October, the civilian and military officers of the colony assembled at Government House, where Judge Advocate John Wylde read Bigge’s commission and administered the oaths of office. Following a royal salute, in Macquarie’s words, ‘the Commissioner then addressed the meeting in a very beautiful appropriate Speech’. Introductions made, ‘Wine and Cake … [were] handed round afterward to all present’.6 From the tone of his diary entry Macquarie could well have believed that he had found an ally in the commissioner. If the acting civil architect was among the civilian officers introduced over wine and cake, his presence was not recorded.

  Bigge’s secretary and relative by marriage, Thomas Hobbes Scott, accompanied him.7 As a one-time bankrupted wine merchant, Scott was even less appropriately credentialed to enquire into the state of the colony than the commissioner himself, yet was charged with taking over should Bigge meet with misfortune. With a salary of £3000, Bigge was to be paid a third as much again as the governor, and in all matters except the deployment of the military, the commissioner was empowered to overrule Macquarie. The governor was now faced with the veto of his administration from a man 20 years his junior, with no administrative experience to speak of compared to his own military and civil background spread across four decades and four continents. And in the absence of a torrent of conciliatory sentiment contained in Bathurst’s lost reply to his resignation, Macquarie would soon feel humiliated, smarting under the conclusion that his administration was so little regarded back home.

  Bigge and Scott were to remain in the colony until February 1821, gathering an enormous body of evidence either informally or sworn under oath, and through answers to written questions. The commissioner’s relentless probing into the affairs of New South Wales was to prove disastrous for Macquarie. Among numerous unfortunate consequences, his ambitious building program was immediately brought into question. Now that one of Whitehall’s own had been lobbed into his midst, his long-running subterfuge through selective reporting aided by geographical isolation came to an abrupt end. Commissioner Bigge would decide what was built and in what order of priority. Projects under construction were altered and disrupted at Bigge’s behest, while the intended use of others radically changed. Still more projects were cancelled or deferred indefinitely. Nothing of significance escaped the commissioner’s meddling. Architectural ornament, and the supposed extravagance it betrayed, became his bête noire. For Bigge there was no room for civilising touches in a place of punishment.

  For the tactless and arrogant Greenway, serving two masters would prove an impossible feat. He lacked an adroit political eye through which he might clearly see where his best interests lay, and he cared only for the effects of Bigge’s interference on the purity of his architectural vision. Amid the tensions that arose between the governor and the commissioner, Greenway failed to display the wit required to maintain good relations with his patron and protector. Through the interminable disputes that plagued 1819 and beyond, he would side with one, and then the other. Loyalty was a word that deserted the architect’s vocabulary, and inevitably he would lose his most precious asset, the confidence of Lachlan Macquarie.

  Until Commissioner Bigge’s arrival, the governor had happily justified his building projects on the basis that the muscle used was convict muscle, and therefore, apart from their food plus care and minimal wages or payment in kind, their labour came practically free. Numbers surged during his administration, so putting convict backs to public works seemed nothing but logical. But in March 1819, sensing his argument was not being heeded by Bathurst, an increasingly anxious Macquarie pleaded that:

  The Cost and Expence [sic] of these Public Buildings … consists Chiefly in the Number of Artificers and Labourers employed on them, the feeding and Clothing of them being almost the entire Expence, the whole of the Materials … being made or procured by those Government Men; and as such a vast Number of Male Convicts at present Unavoidably remain on the Hands of the Government, who must be fed and Clothed at all Events.8

  Obviously, Macquarie’s detractors saw the situation quite differently, and theirs was a view Commissioner Bigge would soon come to share. Prominent landholders such as the Machiavellian John Macarthur, or that meddlesome parson the Reverend Samuel Marsden, regarded convict la
bour as a resource for the use of the exclusives in the enrichment of their estates. Both would press on Bigge the pastoral potential of the colony, with its limitless bounty to be tapped but for the want of convict labour.

  It was also one of the themes that such agitators fed to the likes of Henry Grey Bennet, who in turn launched a scathing attack on Macquarie in a published letter to the former prime minister and then home secretary, Henry Addington, 1st Viscount Sidmouth. In his Letter to Viscount Sidmouth on the Transportation Laws, the State of the Hulks, and the Colonies in New South Wales, Bennet admonished Bathurst and Macquarie for what he imagined to be their virtual collusion in preventing a representative council of citizens being established in the colony.

  According to Bennet, but for his absolute power, Macquarie ‘would not have been able to make pardoned convicts justices of the peace … nor would he have presumed to impose arbitrary duties on all articles of imported merchandise, in order to build palaces for surgeons, and temples round pumps’.9

  The timing as well as the substance of Bennet’s attack was unfortunate for Macquarie. In the aftermath of the 1819 Peterloo Massacre in Manchester, Lord Liverpool’s Tory government feared revolution, and under Sidmouth’s repressive direction, the so-called Six Acts were passed, restricting public assembly and gagging the press. In such a climate, Macquarie was easily viewed as an agent of an increasingly autocratic government. Fuelled by the slanted views of the governor’s enemies, Bennet and abolitionists such as William Wilberforce attacked the penal and transportation systems, but in so doing they branded Macquarie as a tyrant rather than a progressive administrator. Writing in the Edinburgh Review, the Reverend Sydney Smith, a well-loved satirist and Whig sympathiser, typified the reaction to Macquarie’s policies from the exclusives and their supporters in Britain:

  A man who thinks of pillars and pilasters, when half the colony are wet through for want of any covering at all, cannot be a wise or prudent person. He seems to be ignorant, that the prevention of rheumatism in all young colonies is a much more important object than the gratification of taste …