A Forger's Progress

by Alasdair McGregor

  Later that year, news reached Sydney of the death of Lachlan Macquarie. The town was overcome by short-lived paroxysms of grief, as church bells tolled, eulogies were written and sombre processions took to the streets. Distilling the outpouring of feeling, the Gazette proclaimed that ‘to mention the name of this Personage is to bring to the remembrance of Australia all that was eminent – all that was endearing!’25 A subscription was mooted to raise funds for a commemorative bronze, but as the tears dried, so the urge for remembrance faded; with his name strewn across town and country, there were monuments enough to this ‘Grand Napoleon of these Austral Realms’.26 In any case, the colony was increasingly infused with new blood, recently arrived or too young to remember. The likes of Greenway and Macquarie would soon be regarded as relics of an old order, an era remembered with nostalgia by some, but regarded as outmoded by many.

  Increasingly out of touch with reality, Greenway was now stranded in a dark and hostile place. Until now he had never complained of, nor questioned, his living arrangements as a permissive occupant of the George Street house. Yet for the rest of his life he would assert what he had dared not broach before – legal title to the property. Numerous ‘memorials’ from Greenway, and countering or explanatory reports to Brisbane and his three successors – Darling, Bourke and Gipps – would stretch through the next decade and beyond, as each tortuous claim was given a thorough legal airing and firm rebuttal.

  According to the government, Greenway was ‘suffered under a benevolent consideration for his family to remain in the quarters’ following his dismissal in 1822. Moreover, it seems that such ‘consideration was repeatedly extended at the urgent entreaties of his wife’.27 Well might this tenuous status quo have prevailed, but at some time Greenway began making alterations to the ramshackle house, a move seen as tantamount to asserting a right over the property.

  As with the fees claim, Greenway pleaded compensation, insisting that Macquarie had promised him the land in lieu of adequate professional remuneration. Firstly he recalled, ‘if I paid for the materials of the house when taken down … the ground should remain mine’.28 As the details unfolded, Greenway argued that Macquarie had promised to compensate him for his services in 1815 – before his appointment as acting civil architect. A draft elevation duly surfaced of a building intended for the site, supposedly endorsed in 1820 with Macquarie’s approving signature; but as later commentary (from Sir George Gipps himself) noted, if Greenway’s occupation was unconditional, he would hardly have required the governor’s endorsement to build.29

  All was quiet for a while, but the argument flared again once Ralph Darling took over from Brisbane at the end of 1825. The new governor took a harder line than his predecessor, and in July 1826 Greenway and his family were ordered to quit.

  Thoughts of something akin to the Doolan forgery now reverberated ever more strongly through Greenway’s fevered mind. It seemed that an alleged original document supporting his right to the land had mysteriously disappeared during the change of administration from Brisbane to Darling. But of course, Greenway just happened to have a copy – in his own hand! The vital and undoubtedly fraudulent letter was from his erstwhile superior, Captain John Gill. Dated 25 November 1815, it read in part:

  Sir,

  I have His Excellency’s command to state to you that as renumeration [sic] for your services rendered he will give you the ground on which two surgeons [sic] quarters stand and if you can make the house tenantable for your family until you have built … it shall be put in repair for you …30

  For good measure, Gill also promised rations, a horse, and ‘a nominal salary and your percentage according to the practice of your profession’.

  Without official certification as a true copy, Greenway’s letter must have appeared suspect at the very least.31 Yet 1 September, the terrible day slated for their eviction, came and went with Francis, Mary and the children still in residence. In 1829 the government again took formal steps to evict the Greenways, and still it backed away, leaving the family to their mouldering abode. Mary’s pleas had probably yet again evoked compassion in the governor and his officers.

  As the difficult years ground on, glimpses of renewed hope served more to torment than to comfort. In March 1827, The Australian reported that a new Government House was finally to be built. A competition had been held, and unusually, but perhaps unsurprisingly, the winning entry was by Elizabeth Darling, the governor’s wife. The next edition of the paper reported that Greenway had declined to enter the competition unless, as the winner, he could be guaranteed supervision of the project, as ‘any other architect or builder would have bungled the plan’. Even in these most arduous of times, he had lost none of his stubborn pride. But Mrs Darling’s plan was another thing, and her building was to be ‘placed under the superintendence of Mr Greenway’. All it needed were some ‘very slight or trifling alterations’.32 On hearing the news, Greenway’s friend and fellow artist Edward Mason congratulated the architect on one of ‘Fortune’s Breaks’ but also wrote imploringly: ‘For God’s sake keep your temper – for my sake – for your own sake, for the sake of all born or un-born … of the country’.33 Perhaps after all Greenway’s alterations were a little more than ‘trifling’ for the governor’s lady, and as quickly as the story appeared, the project vanished.

  In June, Greenway attended the laying of the foundation stone for the new premises in George Street of the Jewish free settler, banker, merchant and Australia’s first theatre owner, Barnett Levey. Both he and Greenway were members of Masonic Lodge No. 206, and the elaborate ceremony was conducted with due pomp and ‘becoming solemnity’.34 An engraved copper plate was laid under the stone to record the lodge members present, with Greenway, as the building’s architect, doing the honours. ‘Rule Britannia’ was sung lustily, and corn, oil and wine poured on the freshly laid stone. Perhaps in his time of travail the fraternity of the lodge was of some comfort to Greenway. Several other clients were also members of Lodge No. 206. For Levey, Greenway designed a three-storey building on a raised basement that included a room for Masonic functions and a grand supper room.35 It would be his last clearly attributable work.

  From other events in 1827 there was no comfort to be had. Two weeks before Levey’s Masonic ritual, news came from Timor of the death of Francis and Mary’s eldest son, George, from a fever. The 20-year-old had gone to sea and at the time of his death was second mate on the brig Ann, plying the waters between Melville Island and Timor.36 Then in October, two ‘desperate ruffians’ assaulted Greenway around midnight in the street near his house. He spoke darkly of the ‘threats of certain individuals’ and warnings to ‘keep within doors at night’. He offered a reward of £50 – a rather generous sum for the impecunious architect – hoping for information that might lead to a conviction, but one is left with the bleak thought that it was all a ruse to explain away an injury more likely sustained ‘within doors at night’.37

  The gathering wave of debt was forever threatening to break over Greenway. In June 1828, nine lots he owned near the Market Wharf were forced to auction to clear a debt to a man named Kelly.38 Six months later, he again ‘advertised’ his services in the Gazette – part spruiking but more threatening. It was Greenway at his rambling and discursive best. He talked of ‘Many Persons having refused to pay him, resorting to mean subterfuges’ after he had placed ‘the utmost confidence in their liberality’. Names had been reluctantly ‘handed over to his Solicitor’, yet he (quoting 18th-century Irish dramatist Charles Macklin) was not in fear of the ‘glorious uncertainty of it’.39 After the good length of a column berating and threatening unnamed clients and tradesmen, he ended by once more outlining his fees. Perhaps it was again a ruse, and whether by 1829 he had creditors enough to meet his debts remains a moot point. He never advertised again.

  Towards the end of the decade the trickle of private commissions had almost ceased, with just two works attributable to Greenway under construction in 1828. At Richmond, an elegant country
house known as Hobartville was being built for William Cox junior, and in George Street a warehouse was under way for merchant John Paul. The architect’s close association with William Cox senior at the Windsor courthouse, St Matthew’s, and possibly its rectory as well, point to Hobartville being by his hand. After that, little can be attributed with confidence to Greenway.40

  His career was now in steep decline, and the shadows of obscurity were growing long and cold. Then, on 25 April 1832, came the worst blow of all – Mary died at home at the age of 53 ‘after a lingering illness’. Without exaggeration she had been ‘universally loved’, a woman of ‘fine sentiment and excellent principles’.41 If Francis Greenway were good for little by this time, without Mary, his bulwark, he would soon be beyond hope.

  Francis and Mary’s second son, William, had moved out of George Street before 1828 and spent much of his time at the family’s begrudgingly accepted 800-acre property at Tarro on the Hunter River. William’s father, despite his protestations at the ‘mere mockery’ of the grant, had five years before selected his lots and named the property Howard Farm.42 In 1827, the next brother, Francis junior (Frank), went to live with the trader TG Pitman, to whom he was articled. He was just 13 at the time. Three years later, Frank left Sydney with Pitman for the Sandwich Islands (Hawaii), and never saw his parents again. In a letter to William in 1839, he lamented having written home many times but only twice did anyone reply. ‘You cannot blame me for feeling annoyed’, Frank complained, ‘not once from Father’.43 Each of the three older boys was no doubt relieved when his turn came to be rid of their father’s overbearing company.

  Upon Mary’s death, the care of Charles aged 14, Henry 12 and Agnes 8, probably fell to 16-year-old Caroline. And with Mary gone, so too was the income from her school. Howard Farm was now Greenway’s only significant asset, and in its largely undeveloped state it was unlikely to offer much. Francis Greenway had no inclination to play the gentleman farmer or grow fat on the merino’s fleece. Nor had he ever had a mind for canny speculation in town or on the broad acre; the boom of the 1830s would leave him floundering and forever looking back.

  In yet another act of desperation, Greenway returned to his old habits and again tried to exploit his claim to the George Street land, this time by selling a portion of it to Frederic Unwin, solicitor. In offering the paltry price of £150, the cagey Unwin smelt the fear in Greenway but still proceeded ‘with a full knowledge that the Title was a doubtful one’. In 1829, Governor Darling had moved to regularise dubious titles in the colony, and ‘if Mr Greenway … had any confidence in his own claim’, noted Sir George Gipps, ‘this was certainly the time when he ought to have come forward and made good’.44

  And on the farce rolled. The Sheriff forced a sale on the remaining land ‘on the supposition that it was Greenaway’s [sic], and sold for £30 to a person, who again sold it to Unwin’. But the government refused to acknowledge Unwin’s title and in April 1834, it finally moved to evict Greenway and his children. There was now no Mary to stir the compassionate heart of Sydney. ‘Thus’, he wrote: ‘were my two daughters alarmed, distressed and driven from the house … and myself … exposed to the insults of a few unfeeling creditors who disposed of every household necessary and comfort in the most unfeeling manner … and reduced me to the deepest misery …’45

  The two girls, together with Charles and Henry, now went to live at Howard Farm with William. There they would eke out a life as ‘refined and honourable as they were poor’.46 The girls made all their own clothes, ‘even to the uppers of their slippers’, and reared chickens and turkeys which they sold to pay for their dress materials. While not fond of work, William was very careful with any money earned on the farm and, unlike his father, kept out of debt. After his first wife died within a year of moving to Howard Farm, William quit the property, going on be a thrifty investor, living off rents. Agnes and her husband John, as well as Caroline and Henry, would all eventually head for a life in England, while Charles farmed acres of his own on the Barwon River before taking holy orders in his thirties. At some time Frank returned from the sea and spent the remainder of his lonely life at Howard Farm, while from 1894 Charles lived out ten years of retirement on the farm.

  Back in George Street through the mid-1830s, their father clung to his decaying old hovel like an oyster to the rocks of Sydney Cove. Under sufferance he was allowed a few rooms and shared the house with a police constable and a gatekeeper among several others. In 1835, Unwin willingly paid the Crown £2820 for the land he had previously exchanged with Greenway for a total of £180. But still the legal arguments flowed, and as late as 1840 learned opinion was being sought. The matter went all the way to London and Attorney-General Sir John Campbell, who held that Greenway had had no title and consequently there was ‘no foundation in law or equity for Mr Unwin’s demand’.47

  In 1824, William Charles Wentworth and barrister Robert Wardell had launched The Australian, intent on championing free speech and the emancipist cause. Greenway was given free reign, and from January to July 1825 he took to the pages of the new paper with zest: ranting, rambling, grumbling and jeering, setting the record of the Macquarie years straight – often in a libellous tone, and all according to his impeccable memory. By then Macquarie was dead and Mr Bigge was off scratching around in the Cape Colony’s affairs, so with little fear of serious challenge, he told anyone with the stamina to penetrate his idiosyncratic prose just how badly he had been wronged. Whether anyone much cared was another matter.

  Ten years passed before the press again indulged Greenway’s obsessions. To please the ‘Old Hands’ of the colony, as editor Edward O’Shaughnessy described them, the Australian Almanack of 1835 allowed him full 22 pages of recollections. But it seems that Greenway had lost none of his fire as he restaged his battles of old, and O’Shaughnessy was ready with his disclaimer that ‘we cannot hold ourselves accountable for the fidelity of his statement’.48

  In the following two years Greenway was again prodded from his literary slumbers by news of lost causes – Government House and the Metropolitan Church – rising once more. Through column after column inch of The Australian in November 1836 and July 1837, Greenway expounded on the evils of ignoring the ‘improvements of Governor Macquarie’.49 In Greenway’s world the solution was always clear, and if Commissioner Bigge had ‘been a sound political economist he ought to have known that the riches and power of a nation originated and was [sic] secured by the works of an artist, mechanic and labourer’. But all hope was not lost; there was still time to cast aside the ‘vague and unaccountable ideas’ of Mr Bigge. It was time to make a start on Greenway’s castles and cathedrals in the sky, the grandest buildings in the great city of his imagination. The first of the letters was signed, with telling Greenway eccentricity, as ‘AN ANTIQUARIAN. Liberal Hall, City of the World’,50 while the second ended with a promise of more to come – a ‘history of the Court House … [and] other public buildings’. It was a promise he would never fulfil. In two months he was dead.

  At some time in those latter months, Greenway finally released his pathetic grip on George Street and reluctantly moved to Howard Farm. From there, in the rudest of buildings he ever knew, he gazed out on a garden of three ragged peach trees and thought of London and his mentor Mr Nash; he thought of the assembly rooms of his youth, of forts and towers and palaces grand, of fine churches adorning wide squares, and of broad streets running straight and true. It was here, in his imagined ‘City of the World’, that he probably cast his final words, telling all how foolish it was to spurn Minerva’s gift. Gone now were the stone and brick, the cedar and the lead, the plaster, iron, slate and shingle of his art. Words were all this architect had left with which to build – but defiant and proud, Francis Howard Greenway, despite all, would build until the end.

  MEASUREMENTS AND CURRENCY

  In keeping with the feel of Greenway and Macquarie’s time, weights and measures are given in the imperial form. Metric equivalents within the text wou
ld have been a clumsy distraction. Readers may readily make their own conversions to metric according to the following.

  Length

  1 inch (in) = 25.4 millimetres

  1 foot (ft) = 12 inches = 304.8 millimetres

  1 yard (yd) = 3 feet

  1 (statute) mile = 5280 feet = 1.61 kilometres

  Volume

  1 bushel (bus) = 0.0364 cubic metres

  Weight

  1 pound (lb) = 16 ounces (oz) = 0.454 kilograms

  1 ton = 2240 pounds (the metric tonne is virtually equal)

  Currency

  The British pound sterling was the currency standard in colonial Australia. It was divided into 20 shillings, each of 12 pence, and represented as £ s d (e.g. £10 5s 6d). In 1817, the year the Hyde Park Barracks were commenced, £1 had the equivalent purchasing power of roughly £83, or AU$149, in today’s values. On Greenway’s inflated estimate of £30 600, if the barracks had been completed under contract, they would have cost AU$4 559 400.

  To ease a dire shortage of hard currency in the colony, the Colonial Office organised the despatch of 40 000 Spanish dollars to Sydney in 1812. They were valued at £10 000. Upon their arrival, Governor Lachlan Macquarie had a small disc stamped out of the centre of each coin. This became the dump, with a face value of 15 pence. The parent holey dollar was worth five shillings. In one action, Macquarie increased the value of the Spanish dollars by 25 per cent, doubled the quantity of coin in circulation, and made them worthless as an export from the colony.