The man to whom I have entrusted this letter — the boatman, your friend — will move south to Loch Fyne. He is of an age when the work wearies him, and desires to return to the place of his birth. There he will continue to enjoy the Campbell’s excellent patronage. He and his wife move from the boathouse tonight. Everything has been arranged.
I send his fond farewells through this letter. He would have farewelled you himself but he thought — we both thought — it for the best if you read of these arrangements in privacy. He alone has been entrusted with the secret of our lives at Sydney Cove, and a friendship has sprung up between us. He has spoken of you often, without once mentioning your name. Instead he calls you ‘Mrs M’.
So you see Mrs M — I am to be the new boatman. At least for a time.
You will find me much altered.
I am now a man of settled rhythms — the physical work has helped — and a modest degree of self-mastery. Over time I have prevailed over the chaos that put me in chains and sent me into exile. I am too old for another banishment. Though not too old for another journey.
If you truly mean to sell some portion of the estate — and a decent price can be got for it — well, yes, let us away to Rome!
In the meantime I will be there, on the Ulva side of the channel, waiting for you. You need only call for the boatman, and I will come.
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
Ah, there it is. The footman returns from his revels. He makes himself supper — at this hour! I believe the lad tries to be quiet — he tries. But in his state! It sounds as if the buck has bounded into the larder and upended everything — pots and pans, cups and saucers — with his antlers. The footman’s time has come, I think. It is time.
The wind outside is a mere sigh. Another fair day beckons. It has been a long wakeful night, and my thoughts grow ragged. But this I know: I will go back to tiny Ulva, to Ulva facing the sea. I will call again to the boatman. And he will come to me.
We will walk together to the high point of the island. There we will catch the echoes between the New World so very old, and the Old World made new to us.
POSTSCRIPT
Lachlan Macquarie, Ulva born, served as the Governor of New South Wales from 1810 to 1821. He left the colony in February 1822, never to return. Commissioner John Thomas Bigge arrived to review the state of the colony in September 1819; two months before, a French corvette Uranie, commanded by Louis Freycinet, arrived at Port Jackson. The French were sympathetic to Macquarie, as their journals reveal. Bigge was hostile. The most damaging findings of Bigge’s three-volume report — a report highly critical of Macquarie’s ‘pro-emancipist’ policy, his building program and his leniency towards convicts — were made public in stages from 1822. Bigge also recommended that Macquarie’s architect, Francis Greenway, be sacked. Macquarie’s successor, Governor Darling, dutifully had Greenway dismissed. The Bigge report has been described as a ‘political disaster’ for Macquarie, who was forced to fight, in failing health, for his reputation. The ageing Macquarie regarded it as ‘vile’ and ‘insidious’. In July 1824, a year after Bigge’s final report was tabled, he died, a broken man, in London. His wife, Elizabeth, took his body back to his estate on Mull, where it lies today behind the moving eulogy reproduced in the previous pages.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
Early one morning in the winter of 2015, an hour or so before dawn, I stirred from a fitful jet-lagged sleep, prodded by a clear and high-toned voice: a woman’s voice.
‘I paid the boatman with a bag of fresh cherries this morning,’ she said. ‘I picked them myself from the sloping orchard beside Loch Bà.’ I woke suddenly, half expecting the owner of the voice to be standing beside me. But she had vanished with my dreams.
I went downstairs and made coffee with her words — the tone a little mournful, yet sensible and matter-of-fact — in my head. Then I went to my computer, turned on my desk lamp, and began to listen again, in the expectant mode of a fisherman awaiting a bite, as the dawn came on. What more, I wondered, might she have to say?
The voice belonged, I realised soon enough, to Elizabeth Macquarie. Mrs Macquarie’s famous ‘chair’ is a stone bench crafted from a sandstone outcrop on a promontory offering fine views of Sydney Opera House, with the cheering single arch of the Harbour Bridge behind it. It’s the spot from which untold wedding shots are taken. I had never, naturally, heard Mrs Macquarie’s voice, and I never would hear it, and yet I felt, somehow, that I knew it.
Only days earlier I’d returned from the Isle of Mull, in the Inner Hebrides of Scotland, and there I’d visited the small slate-roofed stone mausoleum erected to Elizabeth’s husband, Governor Lachlan Macquarie, Australia’s fifth — and most progressive — colonial ruler. Afterwards I’d stolen a peek at their former home. The next day I took a boat to Lachlan’s birthplace of Ulva, further to the west of Mull, barely a hundred metres across a narrow channel. In glorious spring weather I walked the islet alone.
I knew the story of the Macquaries, their journey to Australia, and the pained circumstances of their return — Macquarie sick and dying, his reputation in tatters. I’d already written a small book about the drama of their last years in Sydney (The First Dismissal, Penguin Specials 2014). And I’d been thinking, my entire time on Mull, about their lives. Tragic lives, if we are to judge them by Sophocles’s injunction: ‘Call no man happy until he is dead.’ I felt these melancholic notes acutely on the island, for it is, despite its rugged beauty, an elegiac kind of place. Stand on one of its high points, look down upon the folds of forest, pasture and gorse tumbling to the vivid white sand beaches that border the boisterous Atlantic and you will, if you have an ear for such things, catch the mournful strains of a Celtic lament.
When I returned to Sydney I was struck, with a contrary kind of power, by the triumph of the Macquaries. It was as if the tragedy had burnt away under the piercing Sydney sun. Hyde Park Barracks, the inner city church of St James and the suburban church of St Matthew; the lighthouse at South Head; the castellated Government House stables (now Sydney Conservatorium of Music), so out of place in their own time, and even, a little, in ours; the small obelisk and fountain at Macquarie Place — these foundation stones of a civilisation built from a prison at the end of the Earth, and many more Macquarie-era buildings lost to the wrecking ball of time, were designed and built by the convict architect Francis Greenway.
The defining policy of Macquarie’s term as Governor was the emancipation of convicts, like Greenway, with talent and promise; and the elevation, by extension, of the convict community. Greenway was the emblem of Macquarie’s ideals. And they were revolutionary, by world standards, in both intent and effect. They are not, however, of mere historical importance. In a world where the gap between rich and poor is widening almost everywhere, the idea of a society founded on the twin principles of redemption and elevation, a society established by a criminal underclass banished to an unknown land as far as it was possible to travel from home, hearth and kin — well, that is an idea worth reflecting upon. It was not always the dominant idea in the colony’s early years, but it was rarely out of mind. Macquarie made it his guiding principle. There was nothing in his previous life as a career soldier, so far as I can see, to suggest that he would take what was, for the times, a radical turn; if there had been, he would most assuredly not have been appointed. He was the first colonial governor to popularise the word ‘Australia’ — in many ways he invented the idea of Australia.
Australians have largely failed to appreciate the moral force of their society’s creation, so blinkered are they by the shame of it, by the convict stain. It is a peculiar Australian condition — let’s call it Australgia — to belong to a society that does not truly belong to itself. France knew Liberty as a slogan. Early Australia experienced it as a lived and felt reality, as a release, en masse, into freedom from penal servitude. Lachlan Macquarie was the great liberator of the colony’s early years.
Elizabeth Macquarie’s story, backlit by this politica
l tale, began to take shape, to unspool from her spectral voice with its mysterious incantation about a sloping orchard, a boatman and a loch named Bà. The story could not be told, I soon realised, without braiding it together with the voices of both Macquarie and Greenway. All three, in fact, share the same tragic parabola of rising and falling fortunes. And so, I resolved, on the morning I woke with the voice of Mrs Macquarie sharper than anything else in my drowsy pre-caffeinated mind — ringing, quite literally, in my ears — to write this story. It is Elizabeth Macquarie’s story. And it is Lachlan Macquarie’s. And that of the man I call the Architect: Francis Greenway. It is also, in many ways, mine. This needs a word or two of explanation.
A work of fiction, as anyone who has ever laboured over this exacting literary form will understand, is a big undertaking. Poetry is no longer written over an epic span. Literary fiction remains the only truly epic art, outdistancing — at least textually — even long-arc television. From its lone practitioners it requires, at the end of the day, a touch of obsession, or at least obsessive drive. There are no collaborative writers’ rooms to spur the novelist along. It is lonely work. Mrs M would probably not have been written if I hadn’t, in my early twenties, found myself ensnared in a love triangle that echoed the predicament of my three main fictional protagonists. The relationship was an obsessive attraction that burst into flame during a process of creative collaboration, and the memory of it latched onto the story of Elizabeth, Macquarie and the Architect at an early stage of its gestation.
Perhaps this attempt to graft a personal story onto a public one could be considered the quintessential authorial vanity. But I think this criticism, which I have naturally anticipated, misunderstands the creative compulsion that sends its charge through the art of fiction and brings it to life. The drive to create and shape fictional narrative is more often than not autobiographical at heart. The voice that spoke to me that morning was merely a key turning in a lock; in order to push that door open and step forward, I needed something else to propel me. My own memories — or perhaps more the feelings provoked by those memories — gave me that impetus. They got me moving, and kept me going. This is how I came to write about real historical figures, with emotional lives that kept time with the rhythm of my own heart.
But there is another story here, the essential truth of which has not been sacrificed to the fancies of fiction: it is the political, perhaps even philosophical, story, foreshadowed earlier. Lachlan Macquarie’s rule was marked by what came to be seen as a ‘pro-emancipist’ policy favourable to convicts. The Governor responded to what he felt was the convict settlement’s innate desire for freedom, and he felt just as deeply its inherent human worth. The Tory administration of Robert Jenkinson, 2nd Earl of Liverpool, saw this as a dangerous path, at odds with the punitive purpose of the original colony, and it dispatched a commissioner, John Thomas Bigge, to inquire into Macquarie’s governorship. It wanted a hostile report, and a hostile report — in fact three reports — it received. It did not need to make these reports public. But it did. Macquarie was shamed.
Commissioner Bigge’s stay in Sydney was marked by one telling exchange with Macquarie, in which the Governor counselled the man who would be his judge and jury in language bearing the unmistakable stamp of the age of revolution. ‘Avert the blow you appear to be too much inclined to inflict on these unhappy beings,’ Macquarie pleaded with Bigge, ‘and let the souls now in being, as well as millions yet unborn, bless the day on which you landed on their shores and gave them (when they deserve it) what you so much admire — Freedom!’ The Governor’s plea went unheeded. Bigge’s reports crushed Macquarie. He died a year after the last volume was published, still fighting to clear his name.
That this is an unhappy true story should be obvious from my brief telling of it. I hope the reader will forgive me for wishing — and giving — a much happier ending to the story than Elizabeth and the Architect enjoyed in life. Greenway died on poor mosquito-infested land in the Hunter Valley and was buried in an unmarked grave. I’ve searched for his remains; they cannot be found. Most probably they never will be. I could do nothing much for the Governor, at least not within the confines of my story; but I could at least celebrate, though not without some equivocation, his memory.
In many ways what I have done with Mrs M, though I did not set out with this intention, is to transplant a story that was true to me — that I had experienced — into history. I have threaded this story into a historical tale that accords, in its broad outlines, with the records. The personal, in this way, animates the political; the political fixes and deepens the personal. The real Elizabeth Macquarie had a son, Lachlan, who died on Mull. The Architect, Francis Greenway, was married with children. There is no evidence of a relationship between Elizabeth and the Architect that crossed the boundary of a pragmatic alliance, nor did they come out on the same ship. Greenway designed and built the lighthouse at South Head, but he was never exiled there. He was lashed by a Captain Sanderson, whom he took to court, but in less dramatic circumstances than are told in Mrs M; certainly, with less profound consequences. For in my story this is the event that crystalises the affection Elizabeth Macquarie feels for her architect. Every writer of historical fiction makes his own pact with the written record. Tolstoy’s War and Peace is, as its author confessed, ‘what the author wished to express and was able to express in that form in which it is expressed’. Of course Mrs M is no War and Peace, but it is similarly unbound by convention. It is less a work of historical fiction, I like to think, and more an imagined history.
There are two other works in the shadows that deserve to be spotlit and introduced. The first, from the classical age, is Euripides’ Helen. This play, which obeys none of the conventions of its time — it is neither tragedy nor comedy but a curious mixture of the two — subverts the famous story of Helen of Troy as told in Homer’s Iliad. In Euripides’ retelling a kind of body double ventures to Troy with the pretty Trojan prince named Paris. The real Helen washes up in Egypt, where she sits out the war. To the Greeks of the classical period this upending of myth would have had an almost sacrilegious quality: the Homeric myths had the force of history and religion combined. The subversion, for Euripides, has a point: he is out to challenge the glorious myths of war and he starts by messing with the most glorious martial myth of all: the siege of Troy. As my Elizabeth began to develop, and to take on a form clearly at odds with the historical record, I returned to Euripides’ Helen time and again for sustenance. My subversion of the real also has a political point: to draw attention to the idealism of the Macquarie years and the reaction these ideals of criminal redemption and sub-proletarian betterment provoked from a quite vicious Tory Government.
The other work is Robert Hughes’s The Fatal Shore and it played a very different role. As a youngish reporter I wrote a lengthy magazine profile on Hughes, and came for a period within his orbit. His talent was enormous, his cultural contribution, too. But I’m not sure that he felt himself obliged, when writing that work of popular history, to present a vision of early colonial Australia in accord with historical reality. His notion of the prison settlement at Sydney Cove as the world’s first ‘gulag’ was informed, I sometimes think, by an imagination fed on the Satanic visions of Francisco Goya (Hughes would later write a splendid book about the artist). It is certainly at odds with the reality of the earliest years, when convicts were told after the first muster at Sydney Cove that they could find their own lodgings and fare for themselves as long as they turned up for work at the appointed hour. Afterwards they were permitted to work for piece rates, or goods in kind. Only the worst — and particularly repeat offenders — manned the iron gangs. The sites of secondary punishment, such as Port Arthur and Moreton Island, might have been a truer reflection of the book’s title. But Sydney Cove, for the vast majority of convicts who landed there — 160,000 in all — offered a path out of poverty, pollution, oppression and the bleakness of a European winter. It wasn’t so much a benighted as a blesse
d shore.
By Macquarie’s time, 1810, the policy of liberating convicts with the capacity to aid the administration almost as soon as they had set foot at Port Jackson had become so deeply entrenched that it troubled the authorities at home, so anxious were they about the potency of transportation as a deterrent. It had also begun to destabilise the military hierarchy of the colony. As a rule the men of the garrison despised the emancipated convicts, as did many of the free settlers.
When I met Hughes, in Manhattan, he insisted on cooking for a gathering of young Australian artists. I joined them at the writer’s SoHo apartment. As I was the only one with an expense account, I went to buy the drinks. ‘There’s a little place on the corner where they have good Australian wine,’ Hughes said magisterially. ‘Tell them I sent you.’ The suggestion was that he, though based in Manhattan, was a rather patriotic — or nostalgic — drinker. But when I told the guy behind the counter that I was looking for Australian wine, and told him my reasons, he laughed. ‘Australian wine!’ he said. ‘Bob doesn’t drink a lot of that!’ There is something about this exchange that makes sense of The Fatal Shore; a wonderfully vivid story that is also, in some essential way, a lie.
In telling my story I learned a little about the mutability of historical fact. To portray the character of Joseph Foveaux, for example, I relied on Macquarie’s reading of him, and on his reputation during his own lifetime as a capable colonial administrator. Hughes, on the other hand, portrays Foveaux in an extended passage as a sadist and moral monster. And yet his sources are accounts of life at Norfolk Island that are now regarded as, in most crucial details, sensationalist fictions uncorroborated by the historical record. For the hundreds of thousands of readers of Hughes’s popular history, Foveaux is a kind of Antipodean Joseph Goebbels. It suited Hughes’s narrative strategy to retail this falsehood. He was not to know, at the time of writing The Fatal Shore, that it was false. But we know it now. History, in this way, has its own history. The certainties of one generation — one decade — are often destabilised by the discoveries of another.
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