A Forger's Progress

by Alasdair McGregor

  Contemporary illustrations indicate a building resplendent with the trappings of a mock medieval fort, with corner bartizans, corbelled battlements and so on, a visual trope that might not have looked out of place as a picturesque ruin by the chilly waters of some loch in Macquarie’s native Scotland rather than sitting there hard by sparkling Port Jackson. Broadbent and Hughes certainly thought as much, concluding that ‘the fragment of the redoubt was contrived as an eye-catcher on the further headland from the Governor’s domain’.15

  With the battery’s stage-set Gothic ornamental screen making little attempt to hide a pitched-roofed guardhouse behind, Henry Kitchen saw the Dawes Point fortifications as nothing more than a folly, and a badly built one at that: ‘This trifling toy has had its day [and] many of the stones of the Battlements are already displaced by the vibration produced by the firing of the Guns’.16 And of the form that made the building a target rather than an effective defensive installation, Kitchen wrote:

  Its prominent defects are that it is a raised edifice, and, from this circumstance and its exposed situation, ill-calculated for any of the purposes of its erection – This is another attempt in the style of the castellated gothic … ill adapted to the purposes of modern defence … miserably and contemptibly defective and irregular in itself.17

  Kitchen was not alone in his poor opinion of the worth of this landscape ornament. WC Wentworth expressed what many, including Greenway himself, felt about the siting and inadequacy of such installations close to Sydney Cove:

  A new battery has lately been commenced on Bennilong’s [sic] Point; but this and Dawe’s Battery are both too near the town to protect it from the most insignificant naval force. It is indeed a matter of surprise, that during the last American war, not one of the numberless privateers of that nation attempted to lay the town of Sydney under contribution, or to plunder it … that the inhabitants were not subjected to such an insulting humiliation could only have arisen from the enemy’s ignorance of the insufficiency of their means of defence.18

  As noted by Wentworth, the third in the trio of fortifications close by Sydney Town was commenced on Bennelong Point, and named ‘Fort Macquarie’ by a governor with his sense of civic swagger very much in the ascendant. Betraying Macquarie’s artistic rather than defensive intentions, it had been designed by Greenway ‘to correspond in style of architecture with the intended government house’.19

  Although the fort’s ostensible purpose was to protect the town from attack and deter or foil escape, it was also meant as a defining element in the landscape, an architectural leitmotif on the margin between land and sea, an aquatic gatehouse to Sydney Town. With the stables and the ‘intended government house’, wrapped in the same Romantic cloak, this architectural ensemble was to be the very expression of Lachlan and Elizabeth Macquarie’s aesthetic sensibilities.

  In early July 1817, Macquarie instructed Greenway:

  1st To draw out a Ground Plan and Elevation for a neat handsome Fort – intended to be erected, as soon as possible, on the lower parts of Bennelong’s Point with Ten Embrasures … The Fort is to be entirely built of the best stone that can be produced near the spot.20

  Greenway designed a square fort with circular bastions projecting from each corner and embrasures to the three seaward sides. On the fourth and south side facing back to the town was an octagonal castellated tower barrack for the occupying garrison of one officer and 18 men. A magazine holding 350 barrels of gunpowder was located under the tower. Access was to be via an arched bridge across a ditch separating the fort from Bennelong Point proper. Further castellated turrets on the mainland side of the ditch completed Greenway’s determinedly symmetrical composition.

  Macquarie delayed informing Lord Bathurst of the impending commencement of the fort until December 1817, just a few days before its foundation stone was laid. He may have thought there was safety in numbers, as the despatch also reflected just how active his building program was. The fort was the last on his list of current works: almost an addendum to the Macquarie Tower, the convict barracks at Hyde Park, his dismay over Bathurst’s reaction to the prospect of a new Government House, and so on. Macquarie wrote:

  I also intend Immediately to have a small Fort built on the Benne-long’s [sic] Point, which forms the Eastern Entrance of Sydney Cove, for the purpose of preventing Ships or Boats or Vessels of any Denomination leaving the Cove without permission, as well as to prevent Boats and Vessels from being Cut out of the Cove at Night, such Occurrences having heretofore frequently taken place.21

  And as he so frequently did, Macquarie was at pains to argue the case of convenient economy by using government labour. The ‘small fort’ would hardly plunder the public purse.

  On 25 June 1818, more than six months after the work was supposedly commenced, Macquarie recorded in his diary: ‘The foundation part of the Wall of one of the Bastions of Fort Macquarie was commenced upon this forenoon: – Mr. Greenway the Actg. Architect, says this Fort will be completed in 21 Months from this date. – L.M.’22 Macquarie, it seems, was becoming a little impatient, but this was nothing compared to his sense of urgency once Mr Bigge’s shadow crossed the dock at Sydney Cove. On 28 September 1819, two days after the commissioner’s arrival, the governor felt the need to inspect all six projects ‘in progress at present in the Town of Sydney’, including the fort, marketplace (see chapter 20), government stables and St James’ Church (see chapter 21). He was accompanied by Major Druitt and Surveyor Meehan as well as Greenway. Macquarie’s anxiety springs from his sprawling hand: ‘1st The New Fort – the Octagon Building of which – and every other thing as yet unfinished – Mr Greenway promises to have completed in Ten Weeks from this date’.23

  With the arrival of Mr Bigge, Macquarie’s freewheeling days of indulgent building were over. As Ellis concluded bleakly:

  All that was left for him and his architect to do was to drive hard and finish those works … before Mr Bigge could either force their destruction himself, or secure their destruction from England.

  This process was most uncomfortable for Mr Greenway; for the Governor was a determined man, his energy unflagging, his speed astonishing.

  Macquarie’s determination was all the more resolute considering his state of health. He spent most of December 1819 confined to Government House and his bed. At the end of the month he was still extremely weak, ‘reduced in Flesh, and very much debilitated’ and, had it not been for the ‘good and beloved Mrs M’ and the ministrations of his doctors, Wentworth and Redfern, Macquarie felt certain that he would have ‘fallen a Sacrifice to my Disease’.24

  While Macquarie languished on his sickbed, Greenway reported in a rather grumpy letter to his superior, Major Druitt, that ‘at Fort Macquarie the Masons and all have done much better than at any other place’.25 To his mind, progress was being made, but the architect obviously did not share Macquarie’s sense of urgency.

  In November 1820, a full eleven months later, the governor again made the short walk or ride from Government House to Bennelong Point, and again his frustration bleeds through his brief memorandum. Recording this latest meeting with Greenway, Macquarie scrawled: ‘4th Mr Greenway promises to have Fort Macquarie, including the Tower & Barrack, Magazine and Ditch-Wall &c completed in 5 Weeks from this date’.26 The fort was now about eight months behind the completion date promised back in 1818. Mr Bigge was taking a keen interest in progress, and Greenway’s performance was being dissected through the testimony before the commissioner of various workmen.

  Ralph Oakes was the site foreman at Bennelong Point and had previously clashed with Greenway at the turnpike gates. In his evidence, Oakes stated that Greenway never ‘gives a … plan of any Building’, leaving the masons to more or less figure the job out for themselves in between the architect’s site visits. ‘He some times comes Three times a week to look at the Building & sometimes he is away for a month’, the foreman told the commissioner. According to Oakes, Greenway would make arbitrary changes to work already co
mpleted, seemingly at a whim and not for any practical purpose. ‘In the fort … his plan at first had square Doors in the Tower’, Oakes testified:

  I had the stone cut & ready for them & when he saw them he ordered Doors with Gothic Heads to be made. I think that a week’s Labour of Four men was lost in this Change.

  He has never given any plan of the staircase in the entrance to the Tower, but has cut away one side of the wall to admit it …

  Such ad hoc decisions tell of the pressure Greenway was now under, not helped by his dilatory and disorganised ways. Too many buildings under construction, an agitated patron anxious to fortify his own position, and the gaze of critics everywhere – the ill informed, the unjust and the vindictive, as he judged them. As Fort Macquarie rose slowly in splendid isolation out on Bennelong Point, Greenway’s harshest critic took aim and fired the first of a number of well-targeted salvos.

  Writing to Commissioner Bigge at the end of January 1821, Henry Kitchen wondered if the building would ever be finished, judging ‘from the length of time that it has been in progress and the very large number of hands it has almost incessantly employed’. He thought it must be the most expensive of any of the public buildings then under construction. ‘This building is contemp’bly [sic] defective’, sneered Kitchen. ‘It has already been the butt and jest of every foreigner who has visited this part of the world.’ Greenway’s enemy then proceeded with a full-frontal assault on the weakness of the fort’s defences, analysing at length the finer points of its military engineering:

  This square fort with small circular bastions at each angle is so badly contrived that from four different directions it is of no defence to itself or to the harbour …The Tower at the entrance port is of itself so weak and ill-calculated for any good object that its only use appears to be, that, of heroically and disinterestedly affording assistance to the enemy by showering splinters upon the men within the fort of which it is part …27

  Kitchen then fired his most accurate and telling shot of all: ‘If this building has been erected for the mere purpose of adding a new ornament to the government domain it is at once a demonstration of much want of taste, and a most unfeeling and criminal disregard of the expenditure of the public purse’.

  Kitchen thought, as did others, that the Sow and Pigs fortified with a Martello tower would be far preferable. At a comparatively ‘trifling expense, [it] would serve the multiple purpose of a beacon to Mariners, a protection to the shipping from the attempts of the prisoners, and certainly a more effectual protection from an invading force’. Kitchen admitted that his suggestion was not perfect, ‘but this or any plan of defence is certainly superior to the very imbecile … one which has been selected’. Even Greenway doubted the sense of a fort on Bennelong Point. In evidence to the commission, he claimed to have recommended that the fort be taken out to the low-water mark and be built ‘upon a Larger scale’. He also maintained that fortifications at Georges Head and the Sow and Pigs were urged upon Macquarie but to no avail.

  Greenway, of course, may have been attempting to shore up his position by falling into line with popular opinion. He clearly stated his outlook in one of his 1825 Australian letters, where he dismissed the fort as being badly sited, ‘by the Governor’s command’, and no better than a plaything. He evokes Laurence Sterne’s popular 18th-century comic novel The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, where Tristram’s Uncle Toby, once wounded in battle, retires to a life obsessed with military engineering. With his sidekick Corporal Trim, he dabbles in outlandish experiments, including triggering multiple cannons with the use of a hookah. ‘I must confess’, wrote Greenway, ‘these fortification works put me in mind of my Uncle Toby and Corporal Trim in the garden amusing themselves by laying out fortifications in miniature … I recommended them to build effectually or not at all’.28

  For Commissioner Bigge, the fort on Bennelong Point was pretty much one of those toys – ‘fortifications in miniature’ – lumped in for censure in one of his three final reports with the stables, the fountain, the turnpike gates and the Dawes Point Battery. With all its medieval allusions, Fort Macquarie was ‘finished in a style of ornament and decoration little suited to the limited means of so young a colony … and very disproportioned to the natural progress of its population’.29 Bigge’s Report … into the State of Agriculture and Trade in … New South Wales was published in March 1823. Its findings, and those of its companion reports, would have a devastating impact on the remainder of Macquarie’s life.

  A year earlier, on Tuesday 12 February 1822, the Macquaries took their leave of New South Wales, bound directly for England on the Surry. The Sydney Gazette for the following Friday reported that ‘Unions [Jack] were seen flying as early as sun-rise on Fort Phillip, Dawes’ Battery and Fort Macquarie’. A 19-gun salute reverberated from the harbour’s north shore as ‘launches, barges, cutters, pinnaces and wherries, were seen crowded with those who appeared determined on catching a parting glimpse of the OBJECT of their profound veneration and fondest regard … Never did Sydney Cove look so attractive and gay’. As the Surry proceeded up the harbour, the forts of Sydney Cove, their battlements by midafternoon silhouetted against the western sky, were among the last sights Lachlan and Elizabeth Macquarie had of the town upon which they had made so profound an impact. Despite the rousing cheers for the object of the people’s ‘profound veneration’, Lachlan Macquarie sailed away on a sea of foreboding, knowing he would in time be defending his achievements with all the energy his tired soul could muster. Perhaps in future dreams and reminiscences, he would recall the three decorative forts in a distant land, and there take shelter from the assaults of Mr Bigge and an ungrateful government.

  Fort Macquarie stood for the next 80 years, and for the people of the ‘young colony’ and travellers to its shores, the towers, turrets and bastions were seen as objects of ridicule, puzzlement and delight, and every sentiment in between. In all those years, the guns never fired a shot in anger, but instead the fort, like the stables, became a landscape focus in the paintings of artists such as Conrad Martens, and in photographs from the prominent studio of Charles Kerry. In 1885, another well-known Sydney photographer, Henry King, took a photograph from Fort Macquarie looking back into Sydney Cove. By this time, the burgeoning port’s wharf buildings had crowded in on Macquarie and Greenway’s picturesque folly, and a clutter of pitched roofs and corrugated iron seemed about to swallow the two dreamers’ creation whole. In the middle distance of King’s photograph, cheering well-wishers crowd the dockside as lines of white-helmeted troops parade past. They were to be the first native-born Australian soldiers to serve overseas, with their embarking vessels bound for the colonial war in the Sudan. From sandstone fortifications built on the fear of invasion, to avenging soldiers of the Queen setting out for distant lands, much had changed in Sydney Cove in 60-odd years.

  Fort Macquarie’s western ramparts and bastions were demolished in the 1890s to accommodate wharf extensions. And as part of the electrification and expansion of the Sydney tram network, the rest of the fort was knocked down in 1901 to make way for a major tram depot. In homage to its defensive predecessor, the Fort Macquarie Depot came with castellated brick ramparts concealing an industrial sawtooth roof behind. To modern sensibilities it seems hard to believe that such a utilitarian function would be assigned to this sublime location, but with most of the tram services transferred elsewhere by the mid-1950s and the network in decline, the dreamers were again given their chance on Bennelong Point. One wonders what John Thomas Bigge might have made of the ‘style of ornament and decoration’ of the site’s present occupant, which, like its picturesque predecessor began life racked by delay, rising costs and controversy. Yet in the end, art triumphed over mediocrity, and one knows that the governor and his architect would be astonished by the ornament to the landscape, and to civilisation, that is Jørn Utzon’s Sydney Opera House.

  ‘… AN IDEA OF GRANDEUR’: THE HYDE PARK BARRACKS, 1816–19

  Ap
art from rough and ready communal huts built under official direction in the earliest days of settlement, there was no organised accommodation for convicts in the first 30 years of Sydney. Once landed in the colony, those who further transgressed did time in the town gaol in George Street or at some other grim place of secondary punishment, but the general labour force was left at liberty to provide its own shelter. They mostly built one- and two-roomed huts from wattle and daub, with thatched roofs of cabbage palm and no eaves; simple in arrangement and feel, they were much like the humble cottages that convicts of rural stock would have known from England or Ireland. They cleared rough plots of land around their huts, improved the soil and, in a bid for self-sufficiency, were encouraged to grow vegetables and plant fruit trees. Early each working day they reported for muster, and they turned out for a church parade on Sunday. But outside designated working hours (usually after 3 pm) convicts were generally left to their own devices.

  The town grew ‘riotously’, as Grace Karskens put it, ‘largely without order or regimentation’.1 Much of the land was held by permissive occupancy rather than official lease or grant. Huts became homes, and that home and the land on which it stood was considered the convict’s own. As the convict population increased and the demand for housing grew, home occupants became landlords, letting beds or rooms, building dosshouses, and providing board and lodgings for later arrivals. To, as Macquarie put it, ‘provide the Means of paying for their hired Lodgings, the Washing and Mending of their Clothes, and other necessary Expences [sic]’, convicts were free to find extra work outside prescribed hours, or when their allotted tasks were complete.2