The governor deemed it necessary for the ‘Improvement and Ornament of the Town of Sydney’ to widen streets where practicable to ‘Fifty Feet, including a Footway on each side’. Fences were to be limited to a ‘uniform Height of Four Feet’, and they were to be ‘put up in a neat, regular, and durable manner’. Any houses in the way of the governor’s improvements would be relocated at public expense, or their owners compensated from the government purse. The approval of the acting surveyor, James Meehan, was required for all new dwellings, and any buildings erected without his sanction could be summarily pulled down. Macquarie considered these measures entirely reasonable, and thought the people of Sydney would ‘yield a ready and cheerful obedience … on account of the benefit the public at large will derive from them’.
The townsfolk of Sydney would soon grow used to the governor’s intrusions as he sought to regulate all aspects of their lives; in the same edition of the Gazette, Macquarie made pronouncements on the cultivation of flax and the issue of slop clothing and bedding from the government stores. And for the illiterate or apathetic, a town crier would shout out any new rules so no one could plead ignorance.
Once Greenway himself became involved in public affairs, he would press on Macquarie the need for planning regulations, and give the governor instruction on the layout of towns. ‘To lay down a town or city … requires the greatest circumspection’, he solemnly advised in 1816. ‘To lay out streets on paper, intersecting in certain points would be very well were the ground on which you are to build as level as the paper … but where the ground is irregular and full of hills and valleys, it requires a very different treatment …’
Greenway was perhaps underestimating the governor’s perceptiveness, and singling out Sydney’s main thoroughfare, he observed what Macquarie patently already knew: ‘In passing down George Street one perceives houses built in and out, up and down in all directions, facing any way but the right way, so that it would juggle the best judge to find out the intended line of the street in many places’.1 Greenway also claimed that he ‘gave the original and proper line of George Street, so as to make it as wide and regular as intended’. But more widely, from the ‘want of a Building Act’ – of course recommended by him – there arose ‘many encroachments in the principal streets’, a situation he described as ‘evil’.2
Back in October 1810, Macquarie issued a second decree concerning the look and layout of the town. He was ‘extremely desirous to do everything in his power … [to] contribute to the Ornament and Regularity of the Town of SYDNEY, as well to the Convenience, Accommodation, and Safety of the INHABITANTS thereof …’3 Among a list of measures, watch houses were to be erected in each district to deter ‘all disorderly and ill-disposed Persons committing nightly Depredations’. As the dusty streets and crooked lanes of the town were widened and straightened they were to be given proper names – George, King, Bligh, Bent, Market, and so on. And what was variously known as ‘The Common’, ‘Exercising Ground’, ‘Cricket Ground’ or ‘Race Course’, was to have its boundaries formally defined and be set aside ‘in future for the Recreation and Amusement of the Inhabitants of the Town, and as a Field of Exercise for the Troops’. Macquarie ‘thought [it] proper to name the ground thus described “Hyde Park” ’.
The governor also had plans for public spaces at the northern end of the town. The open ground around St Philip’s Church would become a ‘handsome Square’ and be named Charlotte Square for the King’s consort. And close by the shores of Sydney Cove, just to the east of the tidal mouth of the Tank Stream – the settlement’s first water supply and, quickly enough, its first sewer – lay a triangular scrap of land leftover from Sydney’s first wave of foreshore development. It would soon be designated Macquarie Place.
With no town-planning restrictions and consequently no defined commercial precincts in early Sydney, by 1810 this spare land had been defined on its northern side, and partly isolated from the waterfront, by the substantial homes-cum–trading houses of Sydney’s aspiring merchant class. Since as early as 1792, traders had muscled in on the choicest land along the foreshore. The likes of Simeon Lord, Andrew Thompson, and Thomas and Mary Reiby, had each staked out leases and built substantial waterfront premises. As the goods flowed into and out of the colony through their warehouses and bond stores, so the wealth of the merchant princes grew. All except Thomas Reiby were emancipated convicts, and all were part of a growing economic, social and political force.
To the south of the future Macquarie Place lay the houses of senior civil officers and the guardhouse to the governor’s residence; and also on the south side, past the Tank Stream crossing, ran an extension of Bridge Street serving as the main approach to the Governor’s Domain. But the rare plot of public open space in question was also encroached upon by a motley collection of outbuildings, fenced yards and the like. They were hardly becoming of the approach to the viceroy’s private precinct.
Macquarie’s October decree continued:
It being intended to remove all those old Buildings and Inclosures [sic] now on that space of Ground which is bounded by the Government Domain on the East, by the Judge Advocate’s, Secretary’s, Chaplain’s, and Commissary’s Houses on the South, by the Spring of Water and Stream on the West, and by the Houses of Mr. Lord, Mr. Thompson, and Mr. Reibey [sic] on the North, and to throw the same into an open Area, the said Area or space of Ground, has been named ‘Macquarie Place’ …
The newly named Macquarie Place, was, at the same time, being quietly steered into privileged seclusion. ‘Soldiers, Sailors, and Inhabitants of the Town’ were ordered to stop bathing during daylight hours in Sydney Cove by the government wharf, which just happened to be in full view of Government House. This ‘very indecent and improper Custom’ was to be punishable on pain of incarceration. The hoi polloi would now have no reason to venture anywhere near Macquarie Place unless in the course of their legitimate employment.
Divided off from the rest of the town by stone walls, timber fences and landscape shrubberies, the Domain was by now well established as a gentleman’s estate for the enjoyment of the viceroy, his guests and ‘the respectable Class of Inhabitants … [admitted] for innocent Recreation during the Day Time’.4 Early in Macquarie’s time, the guardhouse was shifted from the south-east corner of Macquarie Place to a more strategic site straddling the approach from Bridge Street. Public access to the foreshore from behind Government House was now blocked. With the civil officers’ homes on its south side, and the dross of more than 20 years of random development gone, Macquarie Place had arrived as Sydney’s elite residential precinct.
Fully six years after its designation by decree, Macquarie embarked on the consolidation, enclosure and enhancement of Sydney’s first town square. On 1 July 1816, he wrote in his diary: ‘This Day Nicholas Delaney’s Gang of Labourers commenced clearing and levelling that Piece of Ground … adjoining the Government Domain called “Macquarie Place”, preparatory to its being enclosed by a Dwarf Stone Wall and Paling’.5 Two months later, Macquarie recorded entering into a contract for a landscape ornament for Macquarie Place:
I have this day contracted with Edward Cureton, Stone Mason, to erect a very handsome Stone Obelisk in the Center [sic] of Macquarie Place, as an Ornament to this Part of the Town, and also for the purpose of measuring the miles to all the interior parts of the Colony … It is to cost Eighty five Pounds Sterling – and to be Completed within Six months from this date …6
With their allusions to antiquity, obelisks were a common feature in gardens of the era, and Lachlan and Elizabeth Macquarie would have needed little coaxing to exhibit their good taste with such a landscape adornment. The governor’s soldiering days in Egypt, or his architect’s well-versed historicism, might have provided the germ of the idea, as could one or two more direct or recent experiences. Greenway would have been familiar with the obelisk erected in the Orange Grove in Bath by Beau Nash, while the landscape context of a pair of obelisks in Rio de Janeiro’s waterfront Pas
seio Público might have impressed the Macquaries during their stopover there on the passage to New South Wales.7 Whatever its inspiration, the obelisk was elegantly proportioned and adroitly crafted from fine-grained white sandstone ashlar blocks, the tapering shaft sitting atop a corniced pedestal.
Inscriptions were carved on two of the pedestal faces. Inevitably, the north face left no doubt as to the instigator of the monument, or his stated purpose:
THIS OBELISK
WAS ERECTED IN
MACQUARIE PLACE
A.D.1818.
TO RECORD THAT ALL THE
PUBLIC ROADS
LEADING TO THE INTERIOR
OF THE COLONY
ARE MEASURED FROM IT
L. MACQUARIE ESQr
GOVERNOR
The opposing southern face listed the principal roads in the colony – to Bathurst, Windsor, Parramatta, Liverpool, Macquarie Tower and Botany Bay – and their distances from Sydney. In his fascinatingly detailed Panoramic Views of Port Jackson of 1821, Major James Taylor shows the obelisk clearly, standing proud and erect before Government House and on open ground at the intersection of two paths crossing Macquarie Place. The obelisk was an emphatic imperial gesture on the part of the viceroy as he set about defining his estate. Just as ‘all roads lead to Rome’, all roads led to Sydney’s own Millarium Aureum, located at the seat of power in New South Wales.8 The obelisk was an affirmation of the positive progress and expansion made under his aegis – good roads radiating from a rejuvenated Sydney to towns newly created or improved by the hand of L. MACQUARIE ESQr.
Macquarie’s optimistic six months to completion of the obelisk would eventually run to two years. It was preferred practice for such small-scale though exacting tasks to be assigned to skilled craftsmen such as Cureton, rather than undertaken by government labourers of uneven ability. Such a non-essential project would therefore have been fitted around Cureton’s responsibilities as overseer to the stonemason’s gang on larger works – the governor could do naught but wait. A final payment of £45 was made to Cureton in February 1819. Greenway later estimated a total cost of £120, exceeding Macquarie’s noted contract figure by nearly a third.9
In his book Sydney in 1848, free settler and artist Joseph Fowles described a growing town and colony, in many parts hardly recognisable from Macquarie’s Sydney. The obelisk had survived the two decades since its completion, but Fowles was sure its remaining days were few: ‘It stands in a small grass plot, in front of Macquarie Place … but will doubtless be soon swept away by the tide of improvement, which in this as in every other part of the City is beginning to make great alterations’.10 To Fowles and his generation, the days of Macquarie were of the old order. Transportation to New South Wales had been suspended in 1840, and free and assisted immigration now held sway. In Fowles’s world, transportation was best forgotten. Conscious of image, he sought ‘to remove the erroneous and discreditable notions current in England concerning this city’.11 His publication did not mention any of the official houses or fine mercantile palaces of emancipated convicts that flanked Macquarie Place, and the old obelisk was included as more of an oddity than a symbol of imperial progress.
By way of good fortune if nothing else, Macquarie’s obelisk still stands today. The original mouldering Government House was swept aside in the mid-1840s and, with the development of Semicircular (now simply Circular) Quay from the late 1830s through to the 1850s, demands on the streets surrounding Macquarie Place changed. Extensions to Castlereagh Street north of Bridge (now Loftus) Street came within a few feet of fulfilling Fowles’s prediction. As a consequence, rather than being in the centre of Macquarie Place, the obelisk now stands on the eastern edge of a much smaller, though leafy, park. The original impact of its conspicuous and planned siting is now completely lost.
Yet despite its truncated size, and the press of the modern city, Macquarie Place still channels the old viceroy’s aspirations as potently as any of the other remnants of his civic vision. To Macquarie’s detractors, the obelisk was a mere artistic folly, but nearly 200 years since its erection, the obelisk, and the remnant of Australia’s first town square to which it clings, symbolise the very genesis of nation-building in this country. And in a model of continuity that would have much pleased Macquarie, his obelisk remains a designated survey marker, the zero point for the measurement of major roads in New South Wales to this day.
A second minor work in Macquarie Place earned similar opprobrium. At some time around 1817 or 1818, Elizabeth Macquarie gave Edward Cureton a drawing of a public fountain. It was to be built at the south-west corner of Macquarie Place, in Bent Street, and just outside the enclosing fence. In this location, surrounding residents could draw water from the fountain but not come too close to Government House or the houses of officials. As a typical Macquarie-era project, the fountain’s purpose was twofold. It was to be both utilitarian and ornamental, diverting water from the nearby Tank Stream while also striking an appropriately decorative ambience for those approaching Government House.
No formal agreement was entered into; Cureton was merely to be paid from the Police Fund on Greenway’s valuation. And, as for the obelisk, the job was to be fitted in around larger projects. Work was done on Saturdays, with the labourers and masons earning money on their day off from the government gangs. Because of its stop–start nature, progress was slow, but according to Cureton, Mrs Macquarie called a halt when the walls reached a height of 14 feet, just over halfway to a projected height of 24 feet – as high as a two-storey building. If Cureton was correct, Mrs Macquarie’s fountain was obviously meant to be some edifice, perhaps more like the fountains of Rome than of Sydney Town.
Cureton recalled that: ‘She sent to me & told me that there shd [sic] have been a niche in the Building & that she wished to have the Building done according to Mr Greenway’s plan & Direction’.12 It is not known whether Greenway supplied the original design (referred to as ‘Mrs Macquarie’s plan’ by Commissioner Bigge) or only this second one. Whatever the circumstances, the architect provided a ‘new Drawing’ and instructed that the original work be taken down and ‘the Foundation fresh laid’.
Commissioner Bigge soon got wind of this change of plans and, sniffing a flagrant extravagance, made enquiries of the governor’s consort. Elizabeth Macquarie’s haughty third-person reply leaves no doubt as to Mr Bigge’s lowly standing in her affections and estimation. She also deftly shifted the blame for any extravagance to Greenway:
Mrs Macquarie presents her compliments to the Commissioner of Enquiry, the plan he wishes to obtain cannot be found, nor does she recollect that it ever was in her possession.
The print from which the Design was taken, she now sends with Mr Lycett, who will make a Draught [sic] … if the Commissioner wishes it – Mrs M. also sends the sketch which Mr Greenway gave the Governor for this building, which she thought so extravagant, that he wish’d to obtain one more simple, & easy of accomplishment.13
According to Edward Cureton, the new, pared-back and economical fountain was nevertheless still to be ‘about fourteen feet to the top of the Dome’.
It is impossible to guess at the circumstances surrounding the fountain’s dramatic demolition and reconstruction in a more modest form. Had Greenway’s extravagant imagination at first got the better of Mrs Macquarie, only to be reined in as the fountain’s walls grew ever higher? Or did the usual chorus of Macquarie detractors successfully shake this supposed monument to excess to its foundations? Perhaps the change was even an anxious reaction to Mr Bigge’s earnest enquiries of the governor. Expressing ‘more pain than I can describe’ over the stables, the commissioner also despaired of ‘the construction & reconstruction of a Fountain in Macquarie Place at a moment while other buildings are waiting or indefinitely postponed’.14
Bigge’s letter was dated June 1820, though he was obviously not the first person in Sydney to make a fuss about Mrs Macquarie’s indulgence. By 1819 the fountain’s notoriety had spread to England, where Hen
ry Grey Bennet talked sneeringly of ‘temples round pumps’ in his inflammatory Letter to Lord Sidmouth denouncing Macquarie’s administration.15
A year later the fountain was still not finished. The Sydney Gazette for 6 May 1820 reported rather jocularly that:
On Thursday a well-dressed young man, being overtaken by a heavy shower near the handsome stone Enclosure of the pump in Macquarie-place, ran in for shelter, and was astonished to find himself wet through in a few minutes. Concluding that the little mansion must leak very much, he cast his eyes upwards, and to his surprise found that it was not roofed.
A typical Greenway dome finally covered the fountain. Fowles’s Sydney in 1848 depicts a rather stolid structure on a broad stone base, with unadorned arched openings and niches, and a bold Doric cornice and engaged corner pilasters – hardly a ‘temple’, but then hardly a modest water trough either.16 Greenway estimated a combined cost of the Macquarie Place obelisk and fountain at £332.17
By the mid-1820s the Tank Stream was reduced to little more than a sewer, and the fountain would then have relied on water carted in from Busby’s Bore in Hyde Park. Mrs Macquarie’s decorative Doric fountain, long since simply known as the ‘Old Pump’, was converted into a public urinal and drinking fountain in 1862, and finally demolished in 1883. It was replaced by a statue of Thomas Sutcliffe Mort, pioneer wool broker and builder of the greatest of the warehouses fronting nearby Circular Quay – a true palazzo founded on the wealth of the land. One suspects that Mary Reiby, Simeon Lord and Andrew Thompson might have been a little envious but not in the least surprised.
At the opposite end of the town at Brickfield Hill, past a series of inns that gloried in such names as the Old Black Swan and the famous Dog and Duck, Pitt Street curved to the south-west and merged with George Street to form Parramatta Road. In 1819, Macquarie instructed Greenway to erect new gates and a gatekeeper’s lodge at the start of Parramatta Road (at the Central Station end of what is now known as Broadway). By this time significant improvements had already been made to this vital thoroughfare between the colony’s two main settlements. Parramatta Road had previously been impassable in bad weather, so Macquarie had the road widened to 30 feet, with a drainage ditch run on each side, and for much of its length it was paved with stone and covered with gravel. The work was paid for by a levy on rum and a toll extracted from all road users. The Parramatta turnpike road was opened on 11 April 1811.
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