In 1813 Hannibal and Maria, expecting their first child, paid £160 for a property on the opposite bank of the Parramatta River from Elizabeth Farm. Hannibal confessed to his uncle that he was not suited to be a merchant and that farming was, anyway, much more profitable and a less expensive way to live.28 In a nice piece of historic coincidence the property was purchased from Captain Henry Waterhouse, who had imported the first Spanish sheep from Cape Town nearly two decades earlier. Hannibal and Maria called their new home the Vineyard because, back in the 1790s, it had been the site of the colony’s first grapevines.29 While Maria established her own household, Hannibal continued to help Elizabeth. There was no shortage of work for them both.
Elizabeth started keeping records in an old book that John had used for keeping accounts in the long-ago days when he was the regimental paymaster. Now that she was working with Hannibal there was a need to share information. Elizabeth used the old register to make fortnightly reckonings: how many sheep in each flock; how many killed, sold or butchered; how many new arrivals at lambing time; which rams were joined to which ewes. In effect, Elizabeth was establishing Australia’s first merino stud book. But her management skills did not end there.
She also seems to have learnt from her previous experience to be firmer about collecting debts. There was still very little currency circulating in New South Wales and so it was impossible for Elizabeth to run her businesses on a cash basis. After John left for England in 1809 she essentially became a sole trader, and in 1814 she was in court several times, suing for debt—not only on her husband’s behalf, but also in her own name. Elizabeth Macarthur was the only married woman of the period who is recorded as suing in her name alone. It is possible that there were others, but the incomplete marriage records leave the marital status of some female litigants unknown. In allowing Elizabeth’s suit, the magistrates of New South Wales had no single English standard to follow. There was great variation between the counties and boroughs, and even within London, on the right of a woman to trade and sue in her own name. Common law gave way to local practices and in New South Wales the legal system swung in Elizabeth’s favour.30
The precious Spanish rams and ewes, about one hundred of them, were kept close at Elizabeth Farm. The other crossbred sheep, which at the beginning of 1813 numbered 4033, lived with their shepherds on the outlying properties in flocks of about 300, each with four or five rams. With no fences surrounding the outlying pastures, shepherds were a necessary precaution against straying, dingoes and theft. The sheep at Elizabeth Farm were effectively inbred, to maintain purity, but surplus Spanish rams were taken to the properties at Cow Pastures to improve the flocks there. The relative isolation of Cow Pastures ensured that the Macarthur ewes were safe from stray, inferior rams.
As well as the flocks, Elizabeth was overseeing fifty-five horses (including a dozen quality broodmares) and two herds of horned cattle totalling 312.31 The livestock necessary to feed the household—the dairy animals, pigs and the poultry—were so numerous and so unremarkable as to be not worth including in the record book. But they still needed to be managed, as did the extensive orchards and vegetable gardens. Elizabeth also grew wheat, barley and oats and made hay, not a common practice then but another indication of Elizabeth’s forward thinking and farm management acumen. Elizabeth’s friend Elizabeth Macquarie (the governor’s wife) also cut hay, and the two women seem to have been among the first in the colony to do so.
‘We feed hogs,’ wrote Elizabeth in 1816, to her goddaughter in England, ‘we have cattle, keep a dairy, fatten beef and mutton and export fine wool. A variety of avocations arising from these pursuits keeps the mind pretty busily employed.’32 Elizabeth was a master of the modest understatement. She travelled so far and so often to oversee her numerous properties that she wore out her barouche (a light, four-wheeled carriage with a driver’s seat high in front, two double seats inside facing each other, and a folding top over the back seat). Elizabeth didn’t mention the worn-out barouche to John in her letters, but Hannibal wrote to tell him that his aunt was ‘much inconvenienced for want of it’ and suggested John send out a carriage.33
The only indication that John complied with the request lies in a lampooning poem that circulated in the colony at around this time. It described a landau—a carriage slightly larger than but similar to a barouche—with the Macarthur coat of arms (invented by John) emblazoned on the doors. ‘Three fair ladies’—Elizabeth and her two eldest daughters—were ridiculed in the poem for admiring those decorated carriage doors with ‘exalting pride’ despite being the ‘humblest, lowest, basest born’. The owners of the carriage were described as ‘An expert Staymaker once he, An humble Mantua Maker she’.34 This seems a sly reference to John’s father and brother, with their draper and mercer business in Plymouth. The description of Elizabeth as a mantua maker, or professional dressmaker, is mere slander. Clearly the Macarthur family’s successes were not appreciated by all in the colony. All Elizabeth could do was ignore it and, with Hannibal’s help, get on with her work.
Elizabeth and Hannibal were not working alone of course. In addition to the convict shepherds, they engaged various labourers, tradesmen and servants on a full-time or an as-required basis. They were also ably assisted by overseer Thomas Herbert, a horseman and ex-convict who worked for them from 1806 until his death in the 1840s.35 In 1811, Elizabeth had successfully requested the governor grant land to Herbert and to another of her workers. This was the first, but not the last, example of Elizabeth combining kindness with an intelligent view of a long-term advantage. It was in everyone’s interest—including Elizabeth’s—to reward her best and most enterprising servants. Other servants were encouraged to work hard that they might be similarly favoured and, because the grants were almost always awarded to family men and because their land grants adjoined her own, Elizabeth gained a loyal cohort of neighbours whose families could be drawn on for labour at busy times.36
With so many people to supervise, producing fine wool must have sometimes felt like the least of Elizabeth’s concerns, but the prices she could obtain locally for beef and mutton were consistently falling as more and more farms were established in the colony.37 ‘My cares are many and anxious’, wrote Elizabeth to Eliza Kingdon in Bridgerule.38 Wool now became critical to keeping her widely dispersed (and expensive) family financially afloat.
17
Frontier Bloodshed
The savages have burnt and destroyed the shepherds’ habitations, and I daily hear of some fresh calamity.
ELIZABETH MACARTHUR TO ELIZA KINGDON, MARCH 1816
The bulk of Elizabeth’s farming problems lay in getting the wool from the Australian sheep to the English shore.
The first bales of wool she sent to England for sale were well received, but the wool was considered very dirty, contaminated with ‘innumerable grass seeds’ and ‘particles of dead leaves and sticks’ as well as ‘minute portions of charred wood and bark with which the fleeces abound, especially in dry seasons’.1 In addition, the fleeces weighed more than they should have because of the quantity of sand they carried. Elizabeth was not satisfied with supplying a degraded product. She initiated a wool-cleaning process (which was further developed and refined by her sons) that rapidly became customary throughout the colonies. It was a sensible and ingenious response to the problem: the sheep were washed before they were shorn.
Almost thirty years later, the process was described in the diary of another woman farmer, Anne Drysdale, in the Barwon district of Victoria. Her washing place consisted of long logs (or spars) placed across a river between two trees. The logs formed two pens into which ‘the sheep are flung & allowed to swim & while they are there pushed by a forked stick under the middle spar & men with flat sticks rub off the dirt after which they swim out by an approach & go dripping & exhausted to join their companions.’2 After this ordeal the sheep had a day or two to recover, as they could still not be shorn ‘until the yolk rises, or the wool becomes greasy’.3 They also need
ed time to fully dry out and woolsheds were purpose-built with a ‘skilling or verandah along one side under which some sheep are to be placed all night, that they may be ready to shear in the morning, otherwise they would be so wet with dew that the men could not begin until 9 or 10’.4 Drysdale’s men, working with hand clippers (of which there were never enough), could together shear about 200 sheep in a day.
Elizabeth’s wool clip was stored on site, in ‘wool houses’ she had built for the purpose. The wool was baled in a press cobbled together by Hannibal from materials to hand. ‘I found a very fine screw among the Iron-work which came out in the Argo,’ he wrote to his uncle, and it ‘proves to be the best Press in the country’.5 After sorting, the poorest quality fleeces were sold to the government and sent to the female factory at Parramatta, to be spun and woven into coarse cloth by the convict women. The rest was baled, transported to Sydney and (if luck and the weather held) dispatched to England. The transport costs were high, but the high level of demand from the English manufacturers meant there was still a profit to be made.
John being in London to oversee the wool’s sale was just what Elizabeth needed. He talked it up, made the right contacts and was able to provide valuable feedback about how to obtain a better price. Hannibal seems to have been in charge of shipping the wool and John exhorted Elizabeth to ensure he took more care to ensure the wool was properly sorted because ‘the same Bale contained half a dozen different qualities of Wool’.6 This made it difficult to price the wool accurately without opening all the bales, at some expense, and thus the price they eventually received was lower than it might have been. John continued with his advice and suggestions in letters to Elizabeth, and despite Hannibal’s careful explanations kept sending instructions, such as: ‘When Wool is sent in future it should be washed as clean as possible’,7 noting that he ‘was much disappointed that the Wool should have come home in such a state’.8 As if the whole colony didn’t have to rely on the one man suitably qualified to sort wool; as if Elizabeth didn’t go to enormous trouble to ensure that the wool was presented as well as it could be—amidst the dust and dirt of a colony almost as far as it was possible to be from ‘England’s green and pleasant land’.9
From his exile in England, John suggested to Elizabeth that she cultivate Governor Macquarie. She should sound out his interest in schemes that involved his granting to Macarthur additional land and convict servants—presumably in return for a quiet share of the profits. It is unlikely Elizabeth did anything quite so unsubtle, but she was not above manoeuvring the colony’s bureaucracy to her own ends. In 1815 she managed to persuade Governor Macquarie to add an adjacent sixty acres to the Cow Pastures property because she had, as the Governor recorded, ‘by mistake built a small Cottage on it’.10 If it was a mistake, it was a profitable one.
When several of his wife’s letters finally arrived all together in 1814, John replied with a litany of his physical and mental complaints, writing ‘believe me my Elizabeth the period of my separation from you has been an almost uninterrupted scene of indescribable wretchedness’.11 He suffered from chronic indigestion, which regularly attacked him ‘with considerable violence, with an extraordinary irritation of nerves, and a sort of nervous Gout’. The gout was precipitated by many days of ‘such dreadful depression of spirits as no one can conceive’.12 John believed that he would only improve upon being reunited with his wife in New South Wales, but he wasn’t beyond being critical of her reports of their farms.
He ever so helpfully pointed out to his wife that ‘Many important things escape your memory at the moment of writing—do adopt the practice of making short memos when anything occurs worth repeating’.13 He went on to provide a list of the sorts of things he wanted to know, such as the terms of sale for a flock of sheep, or the prices received for horses, because ‘when I am asked the price of Stock which I frequently am I know not what to say’.14 At least he had the good grace to finish his letters with phrases full of love, for example: ‘it will be the study of my life to requite you for all that you have suffered on my account’.15 Did she roll a wry eye at such a letter, reading it twice or three times for comfort before folding it up, tucking it safely with the others and getting on with her work?
From 1813 to 1815, the colony suffered though drought, and Elizabeth’s work became harder and even less profitable. She asked if one or both of her sons could be sent home to help her but John prevaricated, noting that he would give the matter ‘the gravest consideration before I decide’.16 He evidently decided the boys should stay with him and instead sent out another cargo of goods for Elizabeth to sell. Groceries, straw bonnets and ‘Peace Printed Cottons’17 were hardly fair compensation for the boys she was longing to see. In his accompanying letter John frankly discusses the anticipated profit. That was all very well, but first the cargo had to be unloaded, examined, advertised, exhibited, sold, delivered and accounted for. John also asked for news about the renewal of the ‘lease of the Sydney cottage’ and noted with approval the additional land grant of swampland near Parramatta that Elizabeth had secured from Macquarie, which made ‘a desirable whole of the Farm to secure us from interruption’. He went on to suggest Elizabeth work with Macquarie to negotiate a swap of the Toongabbie farm for more land at Cow Pastures ‘but I leave the arrangement entirely to you’.18 Elizabeth was hard put to find enough hours in her day.
Hannibal helped when he could, but he was attempting to establish his own properties and Elizabeth felt the lack of support. She had, she wrote to her Bridgerule friends, been so long ‘deprived of any assistance from any male branch of my family that I cannot say I am comfortable or happy’.19 During the drought her flock numbers declined significantly, as sheep died or were culled. Once-lush pastures turned golden, then brown, then shrivelled to little more than dust in the face of fierce north winds. Elizabeth looked on in distress as her cattle starved.20 Rivers dried to a chain of puddles and stock died in the mud, stuck fast in their desperate bid for water. And fire, of course, was an ever-present threat. On hot, windy days all eyes scanned the horizon, checking again and again for any hint of smoke or haze. A fire front could arrive faster than a terrified messenger could ride to warn those in its path. Modern Australian farmers are familiar with the cyclical—although never quite predictable—nature of Australian droughts, fires and rains, but Elizabeth and her farming peers were still learning, and learning the hard way.
They were, of course, not the only ones doing it tough. The Aboriginal people of the Sydney basin had been dispossessed, attacked and terrorised for some twenty-five years, and now with the drought, many were probably hungry too. Tensions rose, and Elizabeth was soon to be surrounded by bloodshed and grief. In May 1814 soldiers shot and killed an Aboriginal boy who was part of a group ‘raiding’ a field of corn on a farm near Appin, about fifteen kilometres to the southeast of Elizabeth’s Cow Pastures properties, but much further by road. One of the soldiers was subsequently speared, and his body was mutilated. A vicious series of attacks and counter-attacks ensued.
English settlers ambushed a camp of sleeping Aboriginal people, killing three children and a woman and then mutilating the dead woman’s corpse. Aboriginal men were blamed for killing one of Elizabeth’s workers, a convict man described by Hannibal to John as ‘your old favourite William Baker’,21 who had been with them almost since they had arrived in New South Wales. Killed also was the wife of one of Elizabeth’s shepherds. So were three white children at Bringelly, about halfway between the Cow Pastures and Parramatta. Hannibal noted though, that ‘in addition to the Natives numbers of convicts are roving uncontrolled through the country committing all kinds of depredations and I have every reason to believe some of them were concerned with the Natives in the attack’.22 Anxieties among the settlers rose further with rumours that Aborigines planned an attack en masse at the next full moon, in early June. Terrified women and children were evacuated. In the end, nothing happened that night, but Elizabeth and her neighbours continued to live and w
ork with the worry of attack.
To the forefront of Elizabeth’s mind was the fact that these attacks mirrored earlier killings of her own workers. In 1805, a few weeks before John arrived back in New South Wales from his first trip to England, Aboriginal people ‘from the interior of the mountains’ used tomahawks to kill two stockmen working at one of the outlying Macarthur properties.23 The mountain Aborigines were considered ‘wild’, and dangerous, in comparison to the ‘friendly’ Aboriginal people of the lowlands south of Sydney. The latest rounds of reprisals were also said to have been undertaken by those Gandangarra mountain people.
Governor Macquarie visited the region to attempt an investigation. He learned of the rape of Aboriginal women and decided that Aboriginal payback justice had been satisfied. ‘Having had their Revenge in the way they always seek it,’ he wrote, ‘I am not at all apprehensive of their making any further attacks.’24 Governor Macquarie clearly knew about Aboriginal payback law and their justice system. He ordered both sides to refrain from further attacks, but even before the proclamation was published the white men who had attacked the sleeping campsite were speared and killed. Macquarie sent out a reprisal party of armed civilians but, after three weeks, the party returned empty-handed.
Elizabeth Macarthur Page 20
