Elizabeth Macarthur

by Michelle Scott Tucker

  Again, Elizabeth enjoyed her months beside the sea. Emily and James Macarthur came to visit, with their only child, Elizabeth, now almost nine years old, and her two youngest Bowman cousins. With their grandmother, they all set out on a long excursion by boat along Middle Harbour, then a remote reach of Port Jackson, and didn’t return to Watsons Bay until sunset. Elizabeth, now eighty-two, still relished her walks and sightseeing at the Gap. She enjoyed talking with the fishermen and pilot crews. She also befriended an elderly couple who lived in a cave, their home ‘built up a little in front and divided into two or three apartments kept orderly and very clean’.30 The couple were born in Devon, like Elizabeth, and she often walked over to their cave residence to reminisce with them. A newspaper article of 1903 featured Watsons Bay, describing the ‘bachelor camp’ of fishermen who still lived in that cave—really not much more than a deep overhang. Those men believed the earliest white inhabitants of the site had been ‘Billy Taylor and his old lady’.31

  When the holiday was over, Elizabeth was pleased to return to the familiar rhythms of Elizabeth Farm. In her beloved home she could comfortably receive her regular stream of visitors. Her own children and grandchildren, of course, but also the grown-up children of the many friends of her youth. During 1849, Mary’s daughter Isabella contracted scarlet fever and was sent from Camden Park to be cared for in isolation at Elizabeth Farm. Mary and her daughter stayed in a tiny spare room called the Oak Tree Room and, from a couch squeezed into the room for the purpose, Mary nursed her little girl through the illness.32 In the course of a day Elizabeth might stroll in her garden, discuss the state of the orchard with the head gardener, and then retire to write a letter or two while there was still daylight enough to do so. She still regularly wrote to Edward in Ireland, and to Emily, James and William at Camden Park—letters that confirm that her mind remained bright even as her body faded. Late each afternoon, as she had done her whole life, Elizabeth changed for dinner and joined her family in prayer before eating a meal made from the produce of her own gardens and farms.

  In the summer of 1850, aged eighty-three, Elizabeth was strong enough for a third stay at Watsons Bay, yet frail enough to ensure that she and the Parkers again travelled in the company of Doctor Anderson. As a young woman, Elizabeth had written from Sydney to her friend Bridget Kingdon about ‘a Bay near the Harbour’s mouth’ where she and her new Sydney acquaintances ‘passed the day in Walking among the Rocks, and upon the sands very agreeably’. Elizabeth spent time that long-ago day remembering her friend and ‘I looked carefully for some shells for you’,33 but she could find none better than Bridget might find herself on the English beaches near her father’s vicarage. Now, sixty years later at the same beach, Elizabeth’s thoughts still returned to Bridgerule. The scenes of her youth and childhood, Elizabeth remarked, could not ‘be easily forgotten, nor will the memory of dear friends departed, nor of those that still remain, once my young playfellows, be effaced from memory while it pleases God that I retain that faculty’.34

  Little is known of Elizabeth’s final illness beyond the bald fact that she suffered a stroke and, on 9 February 1850, in the company of her daughter Emmeline and her friend Doctor Anderson, she died.35

  Elizabeth’s death cannot have been unexpected but that it occurred at isolated Watsons Bay, in the summertime, presented an immediate and pressing problem. Perhaps, from among the Watsons Bay community, a ship’s carpenter was quickly able to build a simple coffin for her. With the roads in and out of Watsons Bay still rudimentary at best, Elizabeth’s body was most likely taken to Sydney by steamer, accompanied by Henry Parker and Doctor Anderson, and possibly by Emmeline too. From Sydney surely a swift messenger was dispatched to Camden Park to break the grim news and to confirm that Elizabeth would be buried beside her husband and eldest daughter, in the family graveyard on the rise opposite Camden Park House. In that hard hilltop soil, at the hottest time of the year, men laboured with picks and shovels to create a final resting place while a wagon bearing her little body made the slow journey from Sydney. There is no record of any kind of public funeral for Elizabeth, so we must merely assume that, in line with the customs of the day, Mary and Emmeline did not attend, and were instead represented by James and William, who listened to the local reverend intone the familiar words and watched as their mother’s coffin was lowered into the ground.

  William planted the graveyard with tall, exotic palms which in time could be seen from the grand house his father designed and where Elizabeth’s descendants still live. The woman who, with her arrival in the colony in 1790, represented all the complexity, optimism and pragmatism of the antipodean colonial experiment, died a mere year before the discovery of gold would change everything again.

  There was nothing inevitable about the Macarthurs’ success. Plenty of others with similar ambitions failed to do so well. The secret to their achievements was a combination of skill, good timing, and—mainly—the combined efforts of the family. Having first John, then their grown-up sons, as agents and catalysts in England proved a boon to the Macarthurs’ ability to sell wool, lobby for regulatory change and receive additional land grants. Having the capable Elizabeth on hand to oversee the family business ventures in New South Wales for a total of twelve years while her husband and sons were overseas was equally crucial to the subsequent success of their enterprise. The family fortune was then cemented by the efforts of the second and third generations.

  Months after Elizabeth’s death, her daughter-in-law Emily wrote to an aunt in England: ‘little can I tell you how much I have missed the dear old lady.’36 And that image of Elizabeth Macarthur, as genteel lady, as helpmeet to John Macarthur’s genius or—erroneously—as some sort of social-climbing society matron has somehow been the picture that has endured in the Australian imagination.

  Australian history has been, until recently, very much the history of white men working—as farmers, as soldiers, as miners, as explorers. Women and other outsiders were largely written out, as if they were merely peripheral to the real story. In the history of Australian farming, though, women very much were the real story. Elizabeth Macarthur is only one of many women who were—and are—crucial to the family farming enterprise. In her ambition, her fortitude and her love for her family she was just like many other strong and intelligent farm women.

  Elizabeth was a real-life Elizabeth Bennet who married a Wickham, instead of a Darcy—albeit a Wickham who loved her as much as he was able. She is interesting not because she was some sort of paragon, but because she was in fact so very typical. She was an ordinary English country woman who fell in love with a difficult man and, as a result of his decision to sail to New South Wales, she lived an extraordinarily interesting life.

  Her successes, and those of women farmers like her, truly deserve to be one of the iconic stories of Australian history.

  Epilogue

  Elizabeth Macarthur left a lasting legacy. Her children and their children continued the building of Australia’s agricultural industry and contributed to some of the key events in our history.

  Sir Edward Macarthur (1789–1872)

  A year after his mother’s death, and with international interest in the colony surging because of the 1851 discovery of gold, Edward returned to New South Wales as deputy adjutant-general of the army in Australia. In 1854 he was promoted to colonel and moved to Melbourne, just in time to have to deal with the protesting gold miners at Eureka. In the days following the short but bloody rebellion Edward and his commander-in-chief, Sir Robert Nickle, travelled up to Ballarat, talked with the miners and advised that martial law be withdrawn.

  In 1855 Edward took over command of the British forces in Australia. When Governor Hotham died, Edward, in 1856, became for almost a year the acting administrator of the newly formed colony of Victoria. Edward continued to disagree with his brothers’ farming and financial management practices, and in 1858 their partnership was dissolved. Elizabeth Farm now belonged entirely to Edward.

  I
n 1860 Edward returned to England, and in 1862 was knighted. In that year, at the age of seventy-three, he married Sarah Smith Neill, the daughter of one of his regimental colleagues. Edward died ten years later, leaving Elizabeth Farm to his brother William although stipulating that his wife Sarah should have a lifetime interest in it. Lady Sarah Macarthur, who in her widowhood regularly fired off letters to William Macarthur about the management of ‘her’ estate, died in 1891.

  Mary Bowman née Macarthur (1795–1852)

  Mary, widowed and penurious, died at Camden in April 1852 at the age of sixty-six. She had five children:

  Edward Bowman (1826–1872) became a botanical collector. He travelled Queensland sourcing specimens, for Baron Ferdinand von Mueller among others, and discovered several new plant species. He never married.

  James Bowman (1829–1871) also never married but seems to have spent his life at Camden. For a year or two in the mid 1860s he was Edward Macarthur’s agent at Elizabeth Farm.

  William Bowman (1831–1878) and Frederic Bowman (1836–1915) both married and had large families. With the assistance of their Macarthur uncles, they established themselves on properties in Queensland.

  Isabella Bowman (1843–1883) was married in 1858. Her husband, James Kinghorne Chisholm, was one of nine sons born to politician and pastoralist James Chisholm MLC. Isabella and James had seven children1 and properties at Narellan, near Camden Park.

  Sir William Macarthur (1800–1882)

  For the rest of his long life William lived at Camden Park, briefly with Mary and, after she died, with her children, and always with James and Emily and their daughter, Elizabeth. At the time of their mother’s death, William and James held eleven thousand hectares at Camden, with stock worth £47,500 and more than twenty thousand hectares elsewhere, including land on the Abercrombie River and leases along the Lachlan and Murrumbidgee rivers.

  William introduced dairying at Camden, continued to breed horses and cultivated extensive orchards. He was also a successful vigneron, and by 1850 the vineyard at Camden was producing over sixty thousand litres of red and white wines and brandies each year. He also became president of the New South Wales Vineyard Association. In 1855 he travelled to France as New South Wales commissioner at the International Exhibition in Paris, with a highly regarded display of Australian timbers. William was knighted in 1856, awarded the Légion d’honneur and in February 1861 was made an honorary member of the Société Impériale Zoologique d’Acclimatation.

  He was appointed to the New South Wales Legislative Council in 1864, where he would serve until the year he died. He was a trustee of the Free Public Library, vice-president of the Australia Club, president of the Agricultural Society of New South Wales, and a member of the senate of the University of Sydney. But William’s true passion was botany. The gardens at Camden Park were his extensive laboratory. He experimented with propagation, crops, irrigation systems and an ingeniously heated greenhouse. He developed more than sixty new camellia varieties. William died at Camden Park on 29 October 1882.

  James Macarthur (1798–1867) and his wife Emily Macarthur née Stone (1806–1880) also lived and worked at Camden Park for the rest of their lives. In the late 1840s and through the 1850s James was elected member for Camden in the various incarnations of the early New South Wales legislature. Emily took a lead role in managing the Camden estates. In 1859 James resigned from parliament and refused the knighthood offered to him by Governor Denison. From 1860 to 1864 James, with his wife and daughter, toured England and Europe, representing New South Wales at the International Exhibition in London in 1862. In 1866 he was nominated to the New South Wales Legislative Council. In March 1867 he became president of the Agricultural Society of New South Wales but died suddenly shortly afterwards at Camden Park on 21 April.

  Elizabeth Macarthur Onslow (1840–1911) was James and Emily’s only child. She enjoyed painting, and many of her watercolours of Elizabeth Farm survive to this day.2 In 1867, she married naval officer Captain Arthur Onslow. They had eight children, of whom five sons and one daughter survived to adulthood. In January 1882 Captain Onslow died unexpectedly, leaving Elizabeth a forty-one-year-old widow, her youngest child barely a year old. In October that same year her Uncle William, the last surviving and youngest of John and Elizabeth’s sons, died too. The newly widowed Elizabeth Onslow inherited all the Macarthur family properties (although by then Elizabeth Farm had been sold).

  Elizabeth Onslow became the active head of the estates. She established an innovative and award-winning dairying complex at Camden Park. Later she added a piggery and experimented in the production of silk. She was involved with local charities as a benefactor and patron, including the Camden School of Arts, the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, and the Camden Agricultural, Horticultural and Industrial Society, which held the first Camden Show in 1886. In 1897 she donated the clock and bells of St John’s Church, Camden. She is also credited with creating the St John’s Mothers’ Union, a precursor to the Camden Red Cross branch established in 1914.

  In 1899 Elizabeth converted Camden Park Estate into a private company, with her children as shareholders and directors, retaining Camden Park House and 390 hectares as her own private property. She compiled and curated a selection of family letters and records, a task that her daughter Sibella would eventually finish, culminating in a massive tome called The Macarthurs of Camden (first published in 1914).

  Elizabeth Macarthur Onslow died while visiting England, in April 1911. She was seventy-one years old. Her descendants own, and live at, Camden Park—still a productive dairy farm.

  Emmeline Emily Parker née Macarthur (1808–1888) and Henry Watson Parker (1808–1880)

  The Parkers continued to live at Elizabeth Farm until 1854 when, after a dispute with Emmeline’s brother, Edward, they moved permanently to their house at Watsons Bay. Henry was a member of the New South Wales Legislative Council and, in 1856, he was elected member for Parramatta in the Legislative Assembly. In October of that year he became premier of New South Wales, a position he held until September 1857. He was knighted in 1858.

  In 1862 the Parkers moved permanently to England, where Henry stood unsuccessfully against the man who became Prime Minister, William Gladstone, in the British elections of 1868. Henry Parker died in 1881, leaving an estate worth a whopping £140,000. Emmeline was almost eighty when she died and was buried in England, in May 1888. Her mother’s journal, recording John and Elizabeth’s voyage from England to New South Wales in 1790 and the only document we have today written in Elizabeth’s own hand, was found among Emmeline’s possessions and sent back to her Australian relatives at Camden Park.

  Hannibal Hawkins Macarthur (1788–1861) and Maria Macarthur née King (1793–1852)

  Following his bankruptcy in 1848, Hannibal and Maria lived in southern Queensland with one of their married daughters. In 1852, Hannibal was appointed police magistrate. Later that year, Maria died, aged fifty-nine. Hannibal was so affected by her death that he suffered a physical breakdown and resigned from the magistracy. He returned to England in 1853, where he died at Norwood on 21 October 1861. He was seventy-three years old.

  Elizabeth Farm

  After Emmeline and Henry Parker moved out of Elizabeth Farm in 1854, Edward’s agent William Allport and his family moved in. They stayed until 1863, when Allport was dismissed and Edward’s nephew, James Bowman, became the agent. By 1865 the property was quite dilapidated and Edward decided to lease it out, repainting and making a few minor repairs before doing so. For the next ten years and more, the various lessees also failed to maintain the farm’s thousand acres, resulting in broken fences, unkempt laneways and paths, and pasture full of weeds and scrub. The house was little better: termites were taking their toll. The badly leaking shingled wooden roof was covered with galvanised iron, which inadvertently but happily preserved the old roof for posterity.

  In 1881 the Macarthur family sold Elizabeth Farm for £50,000 to Septimus Alfred Stephen. He subdivided t
he thousand acres (400 hectares) into quarter- and half-acre blocks (leaving Hambledon Cottage and the original house on slightly larger blocks) and sold the lot. The first buyer paid £6000 for the original house but soon leased it out. Elizabeth Farm continued to deteriorate. Over the next twenty-five years the old house saw numerous owners and tenants and was, at various times, a boarding house and a glue factory.

  In 1903, the now-derelict house and its six acres (2.5 hectares) was sold to school teacher and headmaster William Swann for £550—effectively for the value of the land alone. Swann was well aware of the history of the house and convinced of its importance to Australia’s cultural heritage. He set about repairing it for his large family, who moved in during 1905. William Swann died a few years later, in 1909, but his wife, Elizabeth, and unmarried daughters continued to live in the house for the rest of their long lives. Believing themselves to be mere custodians, the Swann women cherished the house but did little to change the building. In 1968 the Swanns sold their house to a trust set up expressly for Elizabeth Farm’s preservation. The house and gardens have since been restored and remain in public hands.

  Camden Park House

  The Macarthur-Stanham family continue to live in Camden Park House, which is still surrounded by William Macarthur’s extensive garden; now the largest intact nineteenth century garden in New South Wales.

  Belgenny Farm

  Belgenny Farm remained the home farm of the Camden Park Estate until 1973. It was purchased by the New South Wales government in 1984, and it has the oldest collection of farm buildings in Australia.

  Macarthur memorials

  The Elizabeth Macarthur Agricultural Institute is the New South Wales state government’s quarantine and biosecurity facility. The institute also manages a flock of some 250 sheep—direct descendants of the Camden Park merinos. The flock has been maintained as an inbred, closed bloodline for 200 years.