Elizabeth Macarthur

by Michelle Scott Tucker

  An uneasy peace, of sorts, was maintained until February 1816. A party of thirty or forty Gandangarra mountain men raided a farm near Bringelly and stole servants’ possessions. The following day a reprisal party walked into an ambush, had their muskets wrenched away and were shot at and showered with spears. Four white men were killed, another was speared and the rest were chased back to where they had come from. The next day the Gandangarra warriors raided another farm (this time the frightened settlers reported their numbers at sixty) and again left with everything they could carry. A week later the Gandangarra headed south and attacked Elizabeth’s properties at Cow Pastures, killing three men and burning their huts. Once more the women and children living in the area were evacuated and once more a party went in search of retribution. Elizabeth retreated to the relative safety of her home at Parramatta.

  The colonist’s reprisal party was assisted by Budbury, a Dharawal man of the country south of Botany Bay. The white settlers understood that a fierce enmity existed between the people of the plains, the Dharawal, and the Gandangarra mountain people and they planned to use this to their advantage. As in all things, the reality was much more complex and there was substantial interaction between the two groups. Budbury either deliberately or unaware, led the settlers straight into another ambush: the waiting Gandangarra men rained spears and stones down on the reprisal party, and the settlers fled. It was, reported one man afterwards, a ‘wonder a great number of us was not killed, some even threw off their shoes to enable them to run fast…’25 The defeated white men crept home, terrified of finding their families speared to death although in fact the next few weeks were eerily quiet. But at the end of the month an English woman and her male servant were killed, their corpses ‘mangled’, and Macquarie felt forced to take action. A fraught situation was to be resolved with hideous and brutal simplicity.

  The governor sent out three detachments of soldiers, with orders to capture all Aborigines, and to kill any who failed to surrender. There was no distinction between ‘wild’ and ‘friendly’ although each detachment was accompanied by Aboriginal guides and each had a list of the names of Aboriginal men who were wanted for murder. The expeditioners were exhorted to ‘use every possible precaution to save the lives of Native Women and Children’,26 but Macquarie also ordered that Aboriginal men who were killed were to be strung up in trees, as a warning to survivors.

  One detachment headed north to the Hawkesbury region. Over the course of several raids and false leads they did not see a single Aborigine. A second detachment headed down to Elizabeth’s Belgenny Farm in the Cow Pastures region. This group’s Aboriginal guide was Tindale, and the colonists considered him a ‘Chief of the Cow Pastures Tribe’, the Muringong people. He also magnificently failed to lead the detachment to any Aboriginal campsites. A white stock-keeper from the Macarthur estates led the soldiers to an Aboriginal village of seventy huts near Bringelly, only to find the site deserted; the inhabitants had clearly been warned. Not so lucky was a group of Aboriginal people camping on the Macarthur estate itself. In a dawn raid, most of the people managed to flee in the nick of time but the soldiers shot one man, who later died of his wounds, and took a teenage boy prisoner.27

  Elizabeth’s attitude towards Aboriginal people seemed to harden. Like many others in the colony, she moved away from her original conciliatory view, which in the earliest days had seen her welcome the visits of Daringa and her baby. Now that there were substantial sums of money to be gained or lost, now that white people known to her personally had been killed, Elizabeth could only see the original inhabitants as a threat. She shared the colonists general lack of insight about Aboriginal culture, affording it no credence or legitimacy. ‘Attempts have been made to civilise the natives of this country,’ she wrote from Parramatta to her goddaughter in Bridgerule, ‘but they are complete savages, and are as lawless and troublesome as when the Colony was first established. Our out settlements are constantly subjected to their depredations.’28 That the same could equally be said by Aboriginal people, about the colonists, completely escaped her. Elizabeth, like most of the other white farmers, was far more concerned for her livestock than for the Aboriginal people of the area and felt herself to be ‘much oppressed with care on account of our stock establishments at our distant farms, at the Cow Pastures, having been disturbed by the incursions of the natives’.29

  After the promising beginnings of Governor Phillip’s interactions with the Eora people of Sydney Harbour, the Aboriginal people of New South Wales as a group were now, in the minds of the colonists, relegated to sub-human savages. Individuals could (and would) be befriended and respected—even loved—but collectively the Aboriginal people were feared and despised. The English colonists acted on their fear in the same way as colonial invaders had done the world over—with state-sanctioned murder.

  At the time Elizabeth wrote her letter, a third detachment of soldiers, marching due south of Sydney, spent frustrating weeks following false leads and finding no one. Finally they were led, in the middle of the night, to an Aboriginal campsite south of Appin. The campsite, which was on high ground not far from a steep rocky gorge through which the Cataract River flowed, was empty but the fire was still burning. In the subsequent search, the soldiers heard a child cry and the commanding officer immediately ‘formed line rank entire’ and the soldiers ‘pushed through a thick brush’ towards the noise. The advancing line of redcoats spotted the fleeing people and opened fire. Some Aboriginal people were killed; some were so badly wounded ‘death would…be a blessing’.30 Others, in their panic and fear, ran right off the cliffs, and fell more than fifty metres to their deaths on the rocks below. The soldiers took two women and three children prisoner and counted fourteen bodies—including women, children, two warriors and an old man. The corpses of the warriors were hauled for more than a mile to a hilltop, where their bodies were hung up in the trees. The men’s heads were later sent to the anatomy department of the University of Edinburgh.

  The Appin massacre failed to bring peace to the colonial frontier, although violence against Europeans on and around Elizabeth’s properties ceased to be reported. Attacks and reprisals continued apace, largely along the edge of white settlement, which at this point had moved to the far side of the Blue Mountains. Macquarie issued proclamations which, in practice, allowed settlers to shoot Aboriginal people with impunity, but in April 1817 he wrote to the colonial secretary in London to say that ‘all Hostility on both Sides has long since ceased’.31 In fact attacks would continue, in various forms, until well into the twentieth century. It seems unlikely that Elizabeth participated in any murderous raids, although other women farmers did. But even if Elizabeth did not herself kill anyone, even if she did not directly order her workers to kill, the killings still occurred on and around her land and to her benefit. She had to believe in the moral superiority of her own people, and her own cause, and conversely in the moral and inhuman degeneracy of Aboriginal people, in order to carry on in her colonial ventures.

  Any doubts Elizabeth felt about the family enterprise, any concerns she held as a devout Christian for her own immortal soul, any qualms about killing men, women and children so that her livestock might graze in peace could never, ever be discussed. Who could she tell? The ladies who gathered at Government House to take tea? It was one more coal to add to her smouldering resentment of John, whose actions were the sole reason she was forced to carry such burdens alone. Always and again, her thoughts turned to England and her absent husband and boys. When were they coming home?

  18

  Prosperity

  I cannot even now repress the ardent desire which I have once more to see the place of my birth. So many and so great have been the obstacles that I have never dared to cherish the hope.

  ELIZABETH MACARTHUR TO ELIZA KINGDON, DECEMBER 1817

  In 1816 Elizabeth turned fifty and the drought broke. John had been absent for seven years, and after the dark times of ceaseless work and dismay, Elizabeth seems to hav
e settled into a manageable, contented routine which included a social life. She wrote to her goddaughter Eliza Kingdon to say she visited and was visited by ‘a sufficiency of pleasant, agreeable persons’.1

  Elizabeth’s rapport with the Macquaries continued and her friends included the regimental commander and lieutenant-governor, Colonel Molle, and his wife. Colonel Molle was, according to Elizabeth, ‘a most accomplished charming man, who has seen much of the world’, and Mrs Molle was ‘friendly and affectionate, and pretty conversant with the same sort of knowledge’.2 Elizabeth’s older daughters turned twenty-four and twenty-one in October of that year—more than old enough to manage the household. There are hints in John’s letters that daughter Elizabeth still wasn’t always entirely well, but he praises Mary for taking on household tasks. John was convinced, he wrote, that such employment was ‘better calculated to promote the happiness of the female sex than all the refinements of modern education.’3 Mary’s views on the subject are not recorded, and nor are her hardworking mother’s. Little Emmeline was now seven, going on eight, and her supervision and schooling likely fell largely to Mrs Lucas—companion, governess and much-loved family member. She never married, it seems, but instead quietly graduated from Miss to Mrs Lucas as she grew older.

  Four years since her ill-fated engagement to John Oxley, Elizabeth’s eldest daughter managed to catch the eye of another potential suitor—William Charles Wentworth, son of Darcy Wentworth and convict woman Catherine Crowely. Darcy and Catherine had sailed out to New South Wales in the Neptune, along with John and Elizabeth Macarthur, and during that journey had conceived young William. The relationship between the families was uneasy, to say the least. Elizabeth could hardly have been on visiting terms with a convict woman. It is also likely that young William was the author of that mocking poem about the Macarthur ladies and their emblazoned landau but it is almost certain, however, that the Macarthurs wouldn’t have known that.

  In 1816, while John Macarthur was still in England, William Charles Wentworth (also in England) wrote to his father in New South Wales about ‘the passion I have so long entertained’ for the oldest Macarthur daughter.4 In the same letter he also writes that ‘I have never confessed it to anyone but Mr McArthur’. It is entirely possible he never even mentioned his passion to the object of his affections. Wentworth, in his mid-twenties, writes movingly of his feelings and mentions the advantages of the match for both families. Again, as with the proposal from Oxley, there is no record of young Elizabeth’s thoughts on the matter, nor of her mother’s. Wentworth believed John Macarthur supported his suit, but it all fell through after Wentworth quarrelled over a money matter with the Macarthurs’ second eldest son, John. If Wentworth’s convict antecedents also told against him in the Macarthurs’ eyes, there is no record of it. There was a group of free settlers who refused to allow their children to marry the offspring of convicts but there is no evidence the Macarthurs belonged to it, and John Macarthur later, in a private letter, described the groups’ attitude as ‘illiberal’.5 Either way, Wentworth took the rejection very hard and the two families remained at arm’s length socially, despite regularly seeing each other at various business, political and social occasions.

  Knowing from John’s letters that the colonial office refused to budge on the matter of allowing him to come home, Elizabeth again suggested to her husband that their youngest sons might come home to Parramatta to help her. By the time John read her letter, though, James had finished school and was working in the counting house of a merchant trading in goods from ‘West and East India’.6 Much to James’s relief, he remained there for only a year and, as soon as William finished school too, John Macarthur set off with the two boys on a year-long agricultural tour through France and Switzerland.

  They inspected olive groves, vineyards and silk farms and made enquiries into the manufacture of rapeseed and poppy oils. They turned their attention to irrigation and to improving the boys’ French. In Paris they glimpsed Bonaparte, who had escaped from exile on Elba, at the window of the Tuileries. The European tour proved instructive, educational and a tonic to John’s ‘disorders of the nerves’.7 The fact that it was also very much cheaper for the three to live on the continent than in England no doubt also played a part in relieving some of John’s disquiet. At the age of sixteen James was, wrote John in a letter to Elizabeth from Geneva, growing ‘very fast and promises to be a very fine young man. William [now fourteen] continues a little lively fellow and I think will remain so’, although John added that William was ‘like his Father a little prone to be idle. James on the contrary is slow and persevering.’8 Elizabeth loved to read about her children, but the letters must have made her feel their absence all the more keenly.

  The remittances Elizabeth had been able to send through to John, despite the difficult economic state of the Colony, he gratefully received. ‘Edward,’ wrote John, ‘returned from [soldiering in] America wanting everything’, and son John, finished with university and looking to become a lawyer, had to be provided with the means to pursue his legal studies and to buy a place in the Temple (which then, and now, houses barristers’ chambers and solicitors’ offices). On their return to England in the northern spring of 1816, both younger boys were yearning for their home in Parramatta, but still their father was unable to return without facing, as he wrote to Elizabeth, ‘irretrievable ruin’.9 John was, again, despondent. He wrote candidly about how he might finagle his way home and then suggested Elizabeth should commit the letter ‘to the flames’.10 She obviously did not.

  The tide was, however, on the turn. Within a few months John and the boys were quite sure the government was more receptive to the idea of John returning to New South Wales, and James was ‘almost crazy with joy at the idea of returning to his home’.11 John began to plan for his return. He wrote to Elizabeth:

  Will you have the goodness to prepare in the most careful manner you can, a few acres of the Cow Pastures for Seeds, on land out of reach of floods, and likewise eight or ten acres at Parramatta, for the same purpose. We shall find room somewhere for the Vines and Olives I hope to bring out alive.12

  Elizabeth, familiar with her husband’s grand plans and, after all this time, not inclined to believe in his return until it was formally confirmed perhaps did not leap up and immediately order a team to be yoked to the plough.

  The wheels of bureaucracy turned slowly for several months before finally one of John’s patrons managed to convince the colonial office that the colony of New South Wales would be better off for John’s presence in it. Macarthur was allowed to return on one condition: he must concede to the ‘impropriety of conduct which led to your departure from the Colony’.13 John, in spite of everything, would concede no such thing. With his typical stubbornness, he made it more difficult for the colonial office to let him home than should have been the case. More months and letters passed between Macarthur and the colonial office until finally it must have seemed easier for the government to draw a line under the whole sorry episode than to continue the endless obfuscation.

  In February 1817 the government offered John Macarthur, along with his sons James and William, free passage home on a convict transport ship. Additional tonnage for implements, stores and a greenhouse full of the cuttings collected during the European tour was also to be provided. Not only had John persuaded the colonial office to let him go home, but he got them to pay for it! He gloated to Elizabeth that ‘neither concession nor retraction shall be insisted upon’,14 and he looked forward to telling her all the details in person, when she could ‘reward me with those endearments to which I have so long been a stranger’.15 To complete John’s victory, his nemesis, Bligh, died later in 1817 in the knowledge that Macarthur would return to New South Wales without charge.

  Elizabeth’s second son, John, stayed in England to pursue his legal career. Her husband wrote candidly to her about him:

  For altho’ I think him as free from vice, or even irregularity, as any Young Man I ever knew, he is
unfortunately very careless, very good natured, and perhaps a little too proud for one who has but little money, and few connections to advance and promote him in Life. From whom he derives these qualities you will be under no difficulty to discover.16

  These words echo the views of the Bridgerule villagers about John Macarthur himself, when he was a young man wooing Elizabeth. But in this case John was being overly modest about his son, who was probably the brightest of the Macarthur sons and certainly the apple of his father’s eye. As John, James and William prepared to set sail for home, young John was, according to his father, working on legislative changes and was engaged ‘in passing an Act of Parliament to open the trade of the Colony and to exempt wool and several articles that I hope to introduce from the payment of duties for a limited time’.17 Given that young John was still, at the time, studying law rather than fully practising it, perhaps his fond father overstated his son’s role, but the fact remains that young John was actively pursuing his family’s business interests in England, and playing no small role in their financial success.

  Father and younger sons set sail for Sydney via Rio aboard the Lord Eldon and arrived in New South Wales on the morning of Tuesday 30 September 1817. John’s first question to the pilot, who came aboard to see Lord Eldon safely to anchorage, was about his wife. Was she well? Upon hearing that she was, John relaxed a little and had more patience for ‘a most annoying adverse wind’ which was preventing the ship from moving into the harbour. John sent a brief note, via another boat that met the ship, to his ‘dearest best beloved Elizabeth’ about his happy exchange with the pilot and flagging that his severe gout would prevent him from rushing home with the boys. But he felt sure the gout would soon pass and ‘Home will do more for me than the Doctor—How many dear associations does that word Home create!’18 Captain Piper also went out to the ship, and James, overjoyed to be back, penned a hasty postscript to the note his father had written.