Elizabeth Macarthur

by Michelle Scott Tucker

  8

  Elizabeth Farm

  Judge then my friend if I ought not to consider myself a happy woman.

  ELIZABETH MACARTHUR TO BRIDGET KINGDON, 1 SEPTEMBER 1798

  John, in his privileged position as inspector of public works, had chosen some of the best land in the colony for his grant. His hundred acres were adjacent to the original Experiment Farm, so the soil was already known to be fertile. A small creek, the Clay Cliff, provided fresh water. The land sloped gently to the north, down to the Parramatta River—then the main means of travelling to and from the Sydney Cove settlement.

  Presumably John chose the name: Elizabeth Farm. But he could hardly have done so without Elizabeth’s approval, even if she at first modestly demurred. Many settlers named their properties in memory of their English homes and villages; and landmarks and settlements were rapidly bestowed with the names of patrons (real or hoped-for) from the colonial office and Admiralty. But for the Macarthurs there was no looking back with names like Lodgeworthy or Bridgerule. Obtaining this land grant was the very reason they had endured so much, travelled so far. Naming the farm was a deliberate and public means for John to honour his wife, something he would continue to do privately in many letters in the years to come. Naming the farm may have helped to warm Elizabeth to the realisation that, with so much to do on their own granted lands, she and John would not be returning to England any time soon. And finally, the farm’s name was also a subtle marker of John’s special status as a married man—one in the eye for all those mistress-keeping gentlemen, John’s peers and superiors, without a genteel wife of their own to similarly honour. John Macarthur was never a man to let pass an opportunity for one-upmanship.

  Dated February 1793, the deed of grant ink was hardly dry before John started work. By November that same year he’d built, with all the convicts in Parramatta at his disposal, ‘a most excellent brick house’ for his family.1 That was gilding the lily—what he actually built was a sturdy cottage. Twenty-one metres wide and a little over five metres deep, the single-storey home had four rooms, a central hall, cellars and adjoining servants’ quarters, kitchen, scullery, laundry, bakehouse. The house was, perhaps deliberately, slightly larger than the house Governor Phillip had built at nearby Rose Hill. The steeply pitched roof was shingled, but at first there were no eaves or any shady overhang. At some point after the family’s first summer at Elizabeth Farm, an innovation called a verandah—new to the colony and eagerly embraced by the Macarthurs—was added to the front and sides of the house, with some sections enclosed to create additional rooms. This house was to serve Elizabeth and her family for the next thirty years.

  Set on a small rise, the flat, symmetrical façade of Elizabeth’s home faced north, and looked across the Clay Cliff Creek and over the Macarthurs’ land to the Parramatta River, less than a kilometre away. The position of the house was second to none. Visitors approached from in front and below, crossing the creek before travelling up the driveway to the northwest corner of the house. The Macarthurs were safe from floods and afforded a pleasant outlook. The regimental barracks were no more than a brisk five minute walk to the northwest, the fledgling township just beyond. The governor’s Parramatta house, often used as second seat of government, was another ten minutes further west—hardly worth harnessing a horse for.

  John, with his military expertise, may also have considered defence in choosing the site. It was hard to cross the creek and approach the house without being seen, and the slope of the land gave any defenders of the house an immediate advantage. Convicts were a potential threat, even though most of the household staff was drawn from convict ranks. But the convicts were dangerous—if they were dangerous—in predictable ways. Nothing a few soldiers couldn’t sort out quickly, without troubling the ladies. The real danger lay with the colonists’ inability to understand the Aboriginal people.

  Parramatta, or Burramatta, means ‘where the eels lie down’ or perhaps ‘place of the eels’. Elizabeth thought it meant ‘head of a river’.2 The Burramattagal were the people of the Parramatta area—the suffix ‘gal’ denoting ‘people of’ and a linguistic convention widely used by the Aboriginal peoples of the Sydney basin. The Burramattagal carefully managed and maintained the land, as did Aboriginal peoples throughout the Australian continent. The colonists could only think of the landscape in terms of what they knew, and Elizabeth’s description of it, in a letter to Bridget, is typical. ‘The greater part of the country is like an English Park, & the trees give to it the appearance of a Wilderness or shrubbery, commonly attached to the habitations of people of fortune.’3 However, the park-like landscapes described over and over by various colonists weren’t natural at all. The newcomers completely failed to understand that the Australian landscape was every bit as managed, via deliberate seeding and fire-stick farming as the parklands of the English gentry. The landscape encountered by those of the First Fleet in 1788 was the result of generation upon generation of systematic work to create the ideal living and breeding conditions for every component of the food chain.4 There was no wilderness.5 The result in Parramatta was plentiful wildlife and plant foods throughout the year, with Clay Cliff Creek as the Burramattagal’s primary source of fresh water—at least until the colonists came.

  A fundamental difference in seeing the world lay between the Europeans and the Aboriginal locals. The Europeans saw the carefully managed landscape of New South Wales as virgin bush and grasslands, untended and therefore not valued and saw Aboriginal people as shiftless wanderers who failed to lay claim to the land by working it. Yet the Aboriginal people weren’t nomads at all, but in the course of the year simply moved about within their own region to follow the seasonal harvest. In the same way, the Europeans almost completely failed to grasp the Aboriginal people’s relationship to the land, or to understand the locals’ deeply and daily lived experience of spirituality and family relationships.

  Men and women from both groups did attempt to reach an understanding, even to become friends. Eora man Bennelong famously had befriended Governor Phillip and, with his colleague Imeerawanyee, sailed to England. Gentle Daringa had brought her newborn baby to show Elizabeth. And Elizabeth’s friend and teacher Lieutenant Dawes befriended teenager Patyegarang and attempted to learn her language.6 At first the Eora were remarkably forbearing towards their boorish and greedy white guests but as the colonists encroached ever further upon their lands, produce and families, it became clear that these were guests who never intended to leave, and conflict became inevitable. Aboriginal men, women and children were, alone or in groups, in cold blood or in retribution, raped, tortured and killed. Aboriginal women and children were kidnapped. Family groups, excluded from their lands by the new colonial farmers, starved. Aboriginal people with an entrenched tradition of sharing resources were accused of theft when the white settlers refused to share theirs. The local people resorted to the tactics of guerrilla warfare and reprisal. The battlelines, though, were never clear.

  The various nations of Aboriginal peoples did not join together to fight against all the white invaders. There was no agreed line of battle, in the European sense. In those early days when the settlement was scarcely more than a small town, each clash was the talk of the colony, and Elizabeth could not help but be aware of the stories, of the increasing fear and tensions. Yet she never writes about it. Her letters focus on what she thinks her readers want to hear. In that, she was like the soldier who writes jolly letters home without ever mentioning the war.

  In May 1792, a convict digging wells along the road to Parramatta was killed. He had thirty spear wounds, his head was cut open and most of his teeth were knocked out.7 In December 1793, mere weeks after Elizabeth and her family had moved to Elizabeth Farm, a large group of Aboriginal men attacked settlers returning to Parramatta, stealing their provisions before fleeing back into the bush. Even at the time, though, many believed that most of the attacks were the result of the settlers’ own acts of violence. In October 1794 settlers along the
Hawkesbury seized an Aboriginal boy, who they claimed to be a spy. They tied him up, dragged him through a fire and threw him into the river, where they shot and killed him.8 In 1799 a colonist kidnapped an Eora woman. He and another colonist were subsequently killed by an Eora man while they sat around a fire one night. In a ghastly chain of retaliation five colonists grabbed three Eora youths who were working on a nearby farm. One teenager managed to flee, jumping into a river and swimming to safety despite his bound hands, but then the colonists turned to the other two boys, aged twelve and fifteen, and killed them with a sword. The five white men were tried and convicted of murder but the court was ‘unable to decide on the sentence, and they went unpunished’.9 And back and forth it went with attacks and counter-attacks.

  The Macarthur family were a perfect example of the dissonant relationship between the Aboriginal and European peoples. John and Elizabeth believed the land was there for the taking. They had no sense of their own ignorance of Aboriginal law, land management and custom. Yet John and Elizabeth were not unkind. With Governor Phillip, they had dined with Aboriginal men at Government House and would continue to do so in their own home. Son William would later recall that, as far back as he could remember, Aboriginal people used to ‘come about our house at Parramatta, generally a few families only, but occasionally in large parties’.10 William also recalled a scene, probably in 1817–18, where two local men emerged from the surrounding bush, seeking John Macarthur. John was dining at the time, so the two men were seated with him and given wine—later, one of the men made an eloquent speech complimenting the master of the house. Corroborees of more than a hundred people were held on Macarthur properties into the 1850s.11

  The Macarthurs moved into their new home in time for Edward, now almost five, and little Elizabeth, eighteen months, to celebrate Christmas 1793 at Elizabeth Farm. Elizabeth and John were in their late twenties, full of hopes and prepared to work hard. They had further cause to celebrate: Elizabeth was pregnant again. Baby John was born in May 1794 and over the next six years Mrs Macarthur ‘was happily brought to bed’ four more times.12 In general there was a gap of eighteen to twenty-four months (or longer) between each of Elizabeth’s children. This may have been due to the contraceptive effects of breastfeeding, but was more likely the result of deliberate abstinence. Contemporary opinion considered sex during lactation extremely undesirable. It was thought to affect the quality of the milk and was considered too tiring for a woman already reduced by the demands of nursing.13

  Elizabeth established her home with the help of convict staff. Officers with land grants were each allocated a certain number of convicts: at this time it was ten men for the fields and three for the house. But some officers were able to finagle more free convict workers than others, and it was a constant source of dissatisfaction and at times open warfare between the officers of the New South Wales Corps. By 1795 the Macarthurs employed up to forty people, depending on the season. ‘Eight are employed as stock keepers,’ wrote Elizabeth to her friends in England, ‘in the garden, stables and house; and five more, besides women servants; these we both feed and clothe, or, at least, we furnish them with the means of providing clothes for themselves. We have but two men fed at the expense of the Crown, altho’ there are persons who contrive to get twenty or more, which the governor does not or will not notice.’14

  Skilled or experienced emancipists or ticket-of-leave men often knew their own value in a colony where skilled workers were scarce, and they set their daily fees accordingly. And convicts still serving their time were permitted to work for pay in the afternoons, once their daily supervised labours were complete. Elizabeth considered their price enormous, ‘seldom less than 4s or 5s a day’. The Macarthurs had so many convicts working for them it was ‘necessary to keep on hand large supplies of such articles as are most needed by these people, for shops there are none’.15 A large number of pigs were fattened and killed to keep everyone fed. Elizabeth doesn’t say so, but it was likely that the cost of those necessary articles (brought into the colony by the officers), and possibly the cost of the food, was docked from the weekly wages.

  Just as they were among the ladies of England, discussions about the servant problem were commonplace. Elizabeth was accompanied from England by Edward’s never-named nursemaid who was still with the family in 1791 but then vanishes without a trace. She may have died, or married, or served the Macarthurs into her dotage. In these early years though, before free settlers began to arrive in any sort of numbers, Elizabeth’s servants were convicts or the children of convicts, drawn from London poverty (and likely unskilled) or rural poverty (with possibly some skills). Any exceptions to this rule were, to speculate, the widows of common soldiers. So Elizabeth, the farmer’s daughter brought up to run a country house but with little experience of being in charge, now had to train and manage a household of unskilled—and perhaps unwilling—staff. With small children and while pregnant. Her husband, meanwhile, had a day job which entailed overseeing all the inland settlements as ‘autocrat and adviser for several hundred souls, mostly small farmers’.16

  Many convicts were transported to New South Wales for crimes committed to assuage their poverty, but certainly not all. Each convict, each living breathing thinking person that staggered onto the shore at Sydney Cove after months at sea, had a separate story of their own. However, the typical female convict was unmarried, in her twenties and could probably read but not write, except perhaps for her own name. She was most likely English, from the slums of London or another port city, and she had most likely been convicted of robbery and transported for seven years. Her chances of ever returning home were negligible. A man could work in return for passage home but a woman had to save enough to pay for her own berth, or find a protector who would let her share his. The convict women, as a group, were routinely described as prostitutes—or damned whores. This doesn’t mean that they were all sex workers, in the modern sense, although many of them were. In the language of the day, it meant that they were unmarried women who had had sex. It made no difference if they had been raped, or sold, or obliged to co-habit with one man to escape the predations of all the others. On the ship out they were subject to the molestations of the sailors, soldiers and officers. When the women’s ships arrived the men of the colony (officers and administrators first, then the marines or soldiers, then the male convicts in positions of relative privilege, then the rest) were each allowed to select one newly arrived woman ‘at his pleasure, not only as servants but as avowed objects of intercourse…rendering the whole colony little better than an extensive brothel’.17 With far more men in the colony than women, even walking in daylight was a hazardous venture. A kind protector, a de facto husband, was often the least worst option.

  In total, some 87,500 convicts were transported to the colony of New South Wales but only just over 10 per cent of them were women.18 The minority status of convict women contributed to their exclusion from the history books, but the problem may have been exacerbated by the sense that the women were considered morally tainted. A man could, at least to some extent, leave his convict past behind, but it was far more difficult for women to do the same. John would happily do business with emancipists, the ex-convicts who flourished in the new colony, and Elizabeth quite literally rubbed shoulders with convicts in the kitchen and the pantry. But convict women were, by definition, fallen women who could never, ever have any social interaction with a woman like Elizabeth Macarthur. Given that many of John’s brother officers had convict mistresses of their own, awkward encounters could only have been inevitable.

  New South Wales offered commercial opportunities unavailable to the working poor of England. Some convicts made a go of it and prospered. Others continued to reoffend for the rest of their lives. Some returned to England as soon as they could, others never returned to the old country again. And some of them, fortunate ones hand-picked by John Macarthur, came to work at Elizabeth Farm. In the employ of the Macarthurs, convict workers ate better than e
ver they had back in England. Life as a servant in an officer’s household meant hard work but was a far cry from a cold and hungry life in a reeking slum. Anyone willing and able to work was in demand, and for once their background did not, could not, count against them.

  And there was a great deal of work to be done. The fine cow Elizabeth so gratefully received from Major Grose required the building of a dairy, to store the precious milk in the forms of butter, cheese and cream. The kitchens, pantries and sculleries, built separate from the house so as to minimise the risk of fire, had to serve the needs of the family as well as all the workers. Snug in winter but a summer inferno, the fires in the hearth and the ovens were stoked all day for cooking and heating. No simple jug of warm water could exist without chopping wood, starting a fire with tinder and flint, and putting a pot on to heat. The kitchens were also factories, preserving and storing the produce of the gardens, vineyard, orchards and fields to ensure seasonal gluts could be eaten later in the year. By the middle of 1794 John Macarthur could boast to his shopkeeping brother back in Plymouth about a bounty that even he had to admit was ‘scarcely credible’.

  Almost half the farm, which John had increased through additional grants and purchases to 250 acres (100 hectares), was under cultivation. ‘Of this year’s produce I have sold £400 worth & I have now remaining in my Granaries upwards of 1800 Bushels of Corn. I have at this moment 20 acres of very fine wheat growing—& 80 Acres prepared for Indian Corn and Potatoes.’19 John listed his livestock too: a horse (a stallion), two mares, two cows, one hundred and thirty goats and upwards of one hundred hogs. ‘Poultry of all kinds I have in the greatest abundance,’ he wrote, although Elizabeth probably had the management of them. Meat raised on the farm was supplemented with game. ‘With the assistance of one Man & half a dozen greyhounds, which I keep,’ continued John, ‘my table is constantly supplied with Wild Ducks or Kangaroos.’ On average the dogs killed two or three kangaroos a week, and dozens of ducks.20 All of it had to be plucked or skinned, gutted, and cleaned before being butchered and cooked or salted and stored for later.