The company was a joint venture floated in London and funded by British and colonial interests. Its main aim was to breed and profit from sheep, although olive groves and vineyards were also envisaged. Essentially the company sought to replicate the successful model of Camden Park and, in an early example of overt corporate citizenship, the company’s plans spoke of strengthening the local economy by introducing innovative methods and industries to the colony—while profiting the shareholders, of course. All was conceived on a grand scale. Shares were offered to the value of one million pounds and land grants of a million acres were promised, on the outskirts of the settled districts.
It was no surprise that Camden Park should be the model—the man behind the establishment of the Australian Agricultural Company was Elizabeth’s son John. Investors included eight Macarthur family members, twenty-seven members of the British parliament and others in London and New South Wales. The first Board of Directors included several of young John’s friends; and a committee of management established in New South Wales included his brother James, his cousin Hannibal and his brother-in-law James Bowman.
The company would eventually prosper—it still exists today—but it got off to a decidedly shaky start. James Macarthur foresaw many of the likely problems from the beginning and was only induced to join the company because of a sense of duty towards his father and older brother. Bitter feelings were directed towards the family when Macarthur and Bowman sheep were sold to the company at premium rates, with some describing it as fraud. In 1827 James visited the company lands at Port Stephens, about 200 kilometres north of Sydney, and was dismayed by the swampy ground, the mismanagement, and the agent’s ‘disgusting’ familiarity with the local Aboriginal women.22 The man was soon dismissed and was replaced, to the amazement of the colonial newspapers, by John Macarthur himself. Nobody in the family was able to dissuade him.
Early in 1828, James set sail for England to explain the company’s precarious financial situation to the directors there, while his father set off for Port Stephens. ‘The energy of his measures,’ reported the Sydney Gazette, ‘produced an electrical shock and acted medicinally for the settlement.’23 According to the paper, ‘The old gentleman’—as they referred to John—‘rises before the sun and continues actively employed till between two and three the next morning.’24 But while the settlement at Port Stephens may have improved, the fortunes of the Australian Agricultural Company did not.
Throughout the colony, sheep were at this time afflicted by drought and disease and John’s frenzied efforts made little difference. By 1829 the directors in England sent out their own agent to take control, and the Macarthurs largely stepped back, and away.25 James tried to counteract the monopoly effect of the company, by ensuring, for example, that not all the best Macarthur sheep were sold to it and that enough were kept back for at least some to be sold to other farmers. He argued about it with his father, writing that ‘it is better we should suffer in a pecuniary point of view than save money at the expense of reputation, and of friends’.26 John Macarthur’s reputation, despite his brief efforts at Port Stephens, fell further still and the Sydney Gazette opined that James was already ‘much more esteemed’ than his father.27
In the late 1820s John succumbed ‘to the most gloomy apprehensions’ and suffered the ‘peculiar and sudden disturbances’ to which the family were becoming accustomed. Elizabeth wrote: ‘He suffers excessively and even more than we can well judge is certain, but it is the mind preying upon the body, and disturbing its proper functions.’ Elizabeth’s attentions, however, were fully focused on her daughter Mary, who had more to contend with than the demands of her small, firstborn son. Mary’s husband, Principal Surgeon James Bowman, was a man who made an excellent first impression. Governor Macquarie had at first praised Bowman for his ‘assiduous and humane attention’ to the convicts and for his ‘mild, gentleman-like manners and accomplishments’.28 But by the time of his departure, Macquarie gauged Bowman as an arrogant man of whom his successor should beware. His medical practices were sound, but his personal practices were not. Shortly after his first son’s birth (if not before) James Bowman began an affair with a former convict woman, Mrs Hart. He was found out, and Mary was distraught, but then things got even worse.
Mrs Hart had fallen pregnant with Bowman’s child, and her husband, Thomas Henry Hart, who had been in prison in Port Macquarie for nearly three years, sued Bowman for criminal conversation (adultery) and compensation of £2000. The case ‘excited a vast interest’, and in December 1828 it seemed like the whole of Sydney turned out for the trial.29 Hart’s lawyer had the crowd eating from his hand right from his opening statement. He made much of the salaciousness of the case, freely using terms like ‘aged sinner’, ‘guilty’ and ‘debauch’. The courtroom crowd was delighted. When the witnesses were called, the show got even better. One after another Mrs Hart’s servants and lodgers lined up to testify about how often, and how regularly, Doctor Bowman visited with Mrs Hart. How Mrs Hart stepped out on Doctor Bowman’s arm—‘up Pitt Street towards the race course together’. How the two would disappear into an upstairs room and not re-emerge for an hour. Mrs Hart’s sister-in-law was particularly damning, relating a vivid tale of marching upstairs to bang on and kick the locked door, loudly demanding that the guilty pair emerge. Bowman’s lawyer, Miss Elizabeth Macarthur’s former suitor Mr William Wentworth no less, was hard pressed to make a cogent argument in his client’s defence. He tried to undermine the witnesses; he clutched at technicalities; he contradicted himself; and finally, he took the time-honoured route of maligning Mrs Hart. None of it worked.
Bowman was found guilty and Mr Hart was awarded damages of £50 and costs. Mary Bowman’s marriage never recovered, although the couple went on to have four more children. They remained unhappily together for twenty years, until Bowman’s sudden death in 1846. The excruciatingly embarrassing exposure of the trial was no doubt hard on Elizabeth, but perhaps even more so on John, that proud and haughty man. However, the family simply closed ranks and carried on. Elizabeth’s letters, before and after the trial, don’t mention it at all. Just days after the trial there was further bad news: James and William’s former tutor, Huon de Kerrillieu, was missing, apparently lost on the way to visit his son’s property at Campbelltown. He was never seen again. It was surely a quiet Christmas at Elizabeth Farm.
The government census of 1828 lists thirteen servants at Elizabeth Farm: a Scottish gardener, a coachman, a butler (improbably named James Butler, aged twenty-seven), two grooms, a cook, four labourers (three of them Irish Catholics), two maidservants (Jane Mead, thirty-eight, and Margaret Shepherd, sixty-one) and a Muslim footman called John Bono, from southern India.30 The gardener and the footman had both arrived in the colony as free men but all the others were ex-convicts or were still serving their time, and all reflect, albeit within the class-conscious context of the times, the family’s open-minded approach to employees. Penelope Lucas was also listed on the Macarthurs’ census paper but, like each of the family members, there was no employment descriptor beside her name. The newspapers of the day would report that the Macarthur family was exemplary for its ‘kindness and liberality to servants and dependants’.31 The same census records the Macarthurs as owning, in total, about 43,000 acres (17,000 hectares). Theirs was the largest single holding in New South Wales, except for that of the Australian Agricultural Company.32
The Macarthurs held grazing land at Camden and Argyle, Elizabeth Farm, a town allotment in Parramatta and several in Sydney, and the Pyrmont estate consisting of twenty-two hectares of unimproved land on Darling Harbour. Their livestock included nearly 14,000 sheep, 172 horses and some 200 cattle. John worried about the family’s financial position, yet throughout the 1820s Macarthur wool regularly sold at prices their agent described as ‘extraordinary’.33 Even when the ‘high dry, blighting winds’34 of drought struck again in the late 1820s, the family was making a net profit from the wool of £2000 a year. In the 1830s they would m
ake more than twice that amount annually. And that’s without adding in the profits from the sale of wheat, cattle, rams and horses. But while John complained of the poor prices fetched by his livestock, he would, in the next breath, begin some new and expensive building campaign. His ups and his downs, his manias and his depressions point towards the condition that a modern-day psychiatrist would call bipolar disorder.35 Yet John continued to engage in business, public and social events while his increasingly worried family watched on.
Around this time, John and Elizabeth attended a ball at Government House, to celebrate the king’s birthday. The Sydney Gazette reported with glee (and not a little malice) that John Macarthur ‘was attended by his body-guard of aboriginal natives, whose uniform consists of scarlet shirts, blue trowsers, and yellow handkerchiefs. This guard of honour was armed with long spears…we scarcely know the day when he looked so cheerful.’36 Mrs Phillip Parker King, Hannibal’s sister-in-law, reported the spectacle somewhat differently: ‘Mrs Darling gave a most splendid Ball…to which Mr M’Arthur made all his family go, Hannibal was also there…The dresses of some of the ladies were magnificent. Mr M’Arthur astounded everyone by bringing in three natives from Port Stephens, dressed in red shirts and white trousers, they staid a little while and when their curiosity was gratified, departed. Mr M’Arthur had only returned from Port Stephens the night before’.37 No honour guard, no uniform. Just John Macarthur showing his friends from Port Macquarie the curious customs of the colonists in Sydney. It seems that John Macarthur had sunk so low in the regard of the colony’s first newspaper that the editors felt free to mock him.
All Elizabeth could do was carry on in the face of John’s ever declining mental health, distracting herself with her children and grandsons. Mary’s second son, James, was born in 1829, and her eldest child, Edward Macarthur Bowman, was then almost three. In one letter to Edward in London, Elizabeth noted that ‘young Edward MacArthur, [is] no inconsiderable personage amongst us, I assure you. He really is a very fine boy and just now is at a very engaging age.’38 Little Edward’s Bowman heritage was thus, if only for a moment, completely erased. But Uncle Edward in London had some news of his own.
In 1830 Lord Cholmondeley appointed his good friend Edward Macarthur as a secretary in the Lord Great Chamberlain’s office, a position that came with much prestige and an apartment in the House of Lords. George Horatio Cholmondeley and Edward Macarthur had first met eighteen years earlier in Sicily, in 1812. Edward, then twenty-three, was there as a soldier and George, twenty, was holidaying his way around the continent on his grand tour. There was much gossip about George being homosexual. One contemporary diarist described him as ‘a young man of effeminate manners, not promising much manliness of character’.39 No one seemed surprised that his two marriages (his first wife died) were childless. George’s aristocratic father loathed him, and did everything he could to disinherit him. It’s possible that Edward and George were lovers. They were certainly good friends, and Edward regularly visited George at his estate in Cheshire. Elizabeth, on hearing of Edward’s new job, was delighted and like mothers throughout time, thought well of the people who thought well of her son. ‘We congratulate you on your appointment,’ wrote Elizabeth. ‘Your friend the Marquis certainly has shown you very marked attention. I should think him a kind and good man.’40 Edward obviously thought him so, too. He would later send his mother a portrait of Cholmondeley.
When she wrote those lines, Elizabeth was staying at Belgenny Farm, within the wider Camden Park estate. She’d been there for two weeks already and planned to stay for two or three weeks more. Away from Parramatta (and John, who ‘was low and complaining’), Elizabeth remarked that she felt better than she had in some time and she was delighted with all the improvements to the farm. ‘William [is] very busy with sheep shearing and harvesting’, which had been delayed due to rainy weather. The river had previously run too high to wash the sheep safely but at least there was ‘an abundance of grass’. James, still overseas, had sent out a new wool classer from Germany, the ‘unobtrusive and modest’ Mr Koeltz, who seemed ‘very much pleased with the wool and very much surprised at its uniform good character’. Elizabeth painted a glowing picture of the wool house she had ordered built more than a decade earlier, with ‘every bin full up to the beams with fleeces even to crowding, all evenly and neatly piled and covered with cloths to prevent dust from soiling its present purity of appearance’.41 No wonder the wool house was full—in 1830 they sheared 17,000 sheep at Camden and would export 40,000 pounds (18,000 kilograms) of wool.42 The ‘very manifest improvement in the wool’ was a ‘source of solid satisfaction to us all’ wrote Elizabeth, and she paused for a moment to count her blessings. ‘My heart dilates with thankfulness to Almighty God, the Giver of all Good.’43 She didn’t give a jot for the fine house her husband planned to build at Camden Park but was happy in the ‘little cottage… neatly kept’.44
Elizabeth wrote glowingly of William’s industry: ‘[He] has so beneficially devoted his time and been so successful in planting and propagating to a very great extent trees, plants, and flowers from almost every part of the world.’ Together, mother and son, her hand tucked in the crook of his arm, took delight in walking through William’s extensive gardens. Voluble and erudite, William, now thirty years old, could identify each plant by its common and Latin names and its place of origin, and could discuss with his mother the ease—or otherwise—by which the specimen had been propagated. Elizabeth’s responding questions and prompts reflected her own passion for gardening.
Many of the plants had been sent over by her sons in England ‘and it is with sweet recollections as we pass each tree or flower of yours that we converse of you [Edward], of John and the other dear absentee [James].’ Practical Elizabeth also noted her satisfaction with the various garden pathways which were ‘so well drained and gravelled that you may walk in the garden immediately after very heavy rain without soiling your shoes—something rare in this new country’. Aware that James was about to sail home, Elizabeth expressed her sadness that Edward wasn’t coming home too: ‘we should have rejoiced to welcome you home again.’45
She thought often of her absent sons. Writing to her husband in Parramatta from their Belgenny Farm in her only surviving letter to him, Elizabeth remembered ‘Our dear and beloved sons—their images seemed to hover around me, when I retired to rest. God bless them—and strengthen them in those virtuous dispositions and honourable qualities, which you have at an early age impressed upon their minds and imparted to them, by example.’46 She seems to write this without any sense of irony, given John’s often less than honourable and virtuous disposition. She goes on in a companionable tone. ‘I hope you have recovered from the oppression you were suffering from yesterday’, she writes, and then, ‘I had something of it myself’.47 The stoic Elizabeth was also, it appears, subject to feeling low. Typically pragmatic though, she blames it on a change in the weather. She ends the short note in the standard salutation of the day: ‘Believe me to be, my dearest Macarthur, Ever your affectionate wife, E. Macarthur.’48 She signed off her letters to her sons in a similar way. If Elizabeth found peace in her absences from John it is also clear that he, as difficult as she knew him to be, always remained in her heart.
Back in England James spent time with his brother John, and travelled with him to Paris, sending back books, parasols, bonnets and other articles for his sisters. Then in early 1831 James farewelled his older brothers Edward and John, and set sail once more for New South Wales and home. He had a swift voyage and arrived in New South Wales in April. On 23 April, Elizabeth wrote to her son John, whom she hadn’t seen since he went to England to school, aged seven. James’s return, full of news about his brothers, had clearly reminded Elizabeth how much she longed to see them both, and John especially. ‘I need not tell you how happy the return of dear James, after a three year absence, made us.’ She thanked John warmly for the gifts he had sent for her, bracelets ‘and other ornaments…I shall think
of you when I wear them, not that I needed these emblems, to help you live in my remembrance’. John had also sent out a small portrait of himself. ‘I cannot recognise the boy I parted with in 1801,’ wrote Elizabeth poignantly, but several people confirmed to her that it was indeed a good likeness ‘so that I must suppose it to be so and I am very glad to have it.’49
John would never read his mother’s words. Two months after James’s departure John died—probably following a stroke—in London, aged thirty-seven, four days before his mother wrote her final letter to him.
20
The End of a Marriage
The fountain of my Eyes, which I believed to have been nearly dry, have been opened anew.
ELIZABETH MACARTHUR TO EDWARD MACARTHUR, 17 MAY 1834
When Edward’s grief-stricken letters arrived, in September 1831, Elizabeth was in Sydney, caring for her daughter Mary, who had just given birth to her third child. Elizabeth bore the terrible news of her son’s death with a resigned fortitude, but everyone was deeply worried about how John would take it. He was confined again to bed with an attack of gout so severe that he needed assistance to dress. James and Emmeline, also in Sydney, drove with their mother back to Parramatta, and William joined them there from Camden. Emmeline had never met her brother John, and his sisters barely knew him, but the whole family entered into a long period of mourning.
John confounded his family’s expectations by accepting the news with ‘manly fortitude, blended with tenderness’ and ‘tempered with such Christian resignation to God’s dispensation’ that William, writing about the scene to Edward, said that ‘no words of mine can express how much I revered him’.1 John tried to hide the depths of his sorrow from Elizabeth and, as he recovered from his gout, he was once again out and about, attending meetings of the Legislative Council and making new plans for a grand family home at the Camden Estate. ‘Poor dear John,’ he wrote to Edward. ‘How often do I suffer when alone, indulge in a bitterness of grief no language can describe and this is perhaps more intense because I find it necessary to conceal from your dear mother what I feel.’2
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