Elizabeth Macarthur

by Michelle Scott Tucker

  Henry and Emmeline were forced to wait for nearly a year, until the family heard back from Edward. It seems little wonder that with Emmeline pining in Parramatta, Elizabeth spent much of her time in Sydney. Of course Elizabeth could consent to the wedding without Edward’s approval, but perhaps she privately hoped that in the time it took to receive Edward’s reply, Emmeline’s affection for Henry would wane. For once, though, Edward said the right thing and sided with his younger sister. Perhaps he hoped to annoy his brothers at the same time. He reminded his family that Emmeline had reached an age when she was fully capable ‘or ought at least to be of judging with discretion herself’.4 He then asked some pointed questions about whether James had allowed her annuity to fall into arrears.

  The family duly allowed the marriage to go ahead and in November 1843 the couple was wed. The governor and his wife travelled from Sydney especially to attend. James gave the bride away, Hannibal’s youngest daughters were bridesmaids (the family feud was obviously not so deep as to preclude them), and the church at Parramatta was crowded with spectators. Elizabeth did not attend the church service, although whether she was unwell or still unwilling to face so many strangers is unclear. She was certainly well enough to receive guests afterwards at an elegant breakfast at Elizabeth Farm. Governor Gipps and his wife did their best to mend bridges by making themselves very agreeable and assuring Elizabeth of the bridegroom’s ‘worth and integrity of character’.5 The vice-regal couple then returned immediately to Sydney, graciously allowing the newlyweds a brief honeymoon at the governor’s Parramatta residence.

  The Macarthur family now wondered how best to care for Elizabeth, who was in her late seventies. There was some pressure for her to move to Camden Park, where she would have the benefits of living with family. There would also be the financial benefit of not maintaining a second household at Elizabeth Farm. The Bank of Australia, of which John Macarthur had been a founder and where Hannibal was still a director, had just spectacularly failed. Elizabeth had become a shareholder on John’s death and she may have incurred a direct loss. And the family as a whole was still suffering financially. Another long drought had meant that both the quality and quantity of wool shipped to London declined during this period. An auction was held to disperse some seventy or so of the family’s horses but many failed to find buyers.6 Small-time suppliers to the family, like the miller who provided their flour, went bankrupt and, in a domino effect, hit the family with serious losses. Mary’s family continued to require support. And large loans from London—to fund the expansionary activities of James and William into the Argyle and Murrumbidgee regions—were incurring ever increasing rates of interest.

  Elizabeth voluntarily went without her annuity and in her will renounced all rights to arrears. She explained to Edward that although they could produce most of the necessities of life, as well as wine, fruit and dairy products, ‘still there is the lack of money to pay wages and to purchase tea, sugar and cloathing’.7 Meat and grain were selling so cheaply ‘that it does not pay the grower’.8 Without mentioning it to James and William, Elizabeth asked Edward to discreetly enquire about the allowance she paid to her half-sister Isabella Hacker in Bridgerule, and to find out whether it might be appropriate to allow it to lapse. After the death of her mother some seven years earlier, Elizabeth had ensured that her mother’s allowance flowed to Isabella, who had since emigrated to Prince Edward Island, Canada, with her husband and at least one of their seven daughters.9 Edward’s enquiries led to the allowance being gradually withdrawn. Elizabeth had hoped to continue the allowance for the rest of her sister’s life but, as she explained to Edward, ‘such has been the money embarrassments here that I have been fearful to incur any expense’.10

  A year later, much to Elizabeth’s surprise, Isabella sent a letter—the first and last Elizabeth ever received from her. Isabella thanked Elizabeth for all her help over the years, which had been of great assistance, and hoped the affairs of New South Wales would soon mend. In a letter to Edward, Elizabeth noted that Isabella’s letter was well expressed ‘but very ill spelt…much did your dear father lament that no education was bestowed upon her’.11 It was more than fifty years since Elizabeth had seen Isabella but she fell easily into the role of the finger-pointing elder sister.

  Although the Macarthurs remained asset-rich, their cash-flow problems continued, with William many years later vowing that he would never again wish to live through the events of the decade following 1842. The immediate problem of Elizabeth’s care was resolved by Emmeline and Henry. The couple moved into Elizabeth Farm, and Henry Parker—perhaps pointedly—paid all the farm’s upkeep costs. It was at first a temporary arrangement, but it would continue for the rest of Elizabeth’s life. Elizabeth became fond of Henry, and appreciative of his kindness.

  Emmeline and Elizabeth took ‘carriage exercise’ almost every day, and Elizabeth continued to take great pleasure from walking in her garden. Emmeline wrote to Edward in 1844, providing an intimate vignette:

  Our dear Mother goes regularly to church with us when the weather will permit—receives the Sacraments and joins us again at evening prayers which we have in the dining room—& sometimes the tradespeople employed by the family come & with the Servants Cottagers and their children we have quite a little congregation.12

  In late July of that year, Elizabeth’s old friend Anna King died at the Vineyard. She was a year older than Elizabeth, and about to turn eighty. Surely Elizabeth could not help but reflect on her mortality, and pray for a peaceful end when her own time came.

  In late 1844 Elizabeth went to Camden for two months, staying there for Christmas and, accompanied by her son William, returning to Parramatta in January. Within a few days of Elizabeth’s arrival home, her Bowman grandsons were brought up from Sydney by their Uncle Henry. A ‘very, very merry’ dinner ensued which Elizabeth and William obviously enjoyed. Two days later, Elizabeth and the Parkers attended church for the 26 January Anniversary Day celebrations—it was fifty-seven years since the First Fleet arrived at Sydney Cove, and, as Elizabeth remembered well, thirty-seven years since the overthrow of Governor Bligh. But he was long gone and, despite it all, Elizabeth’s family had persevered. It was with some satisfaction that she sat with Emmeline and Henry in a very full church, and made room for two young Marsdens, whom she described as ‘fine youths’.13 Hannibal and his many family members sat in a pew nearby, and all in the congregation could hear the distant Sydney guns, firing a salute.

  Elizabeth, even in her old age, retained a shrewd understanding of the world around her and continued an active interest in current affairs and the expanding colonial frontier. Her great-nephew James Macarthur, Hannibal’s son, had in 1840 explored the Australian alps and travelled south through Gippsland with Polish scientist Sir Paul Edmund de Strzelecki. It was Strzelecki who climbed Australia’s highest peak and named it—after the Polish democratic leader, Tadeusz Kosciuszko. Hannibal’s younger brother, Charles, a captain in the Royal Marines, established the first white settlement at Port Essington, in 1838, in what is now the Northern Territory. Ludwig Leichhardt, the Prussian naturalist and explorer, travelled with his party nearly 5000 kilometres overland from Moreton Bay (now Brisbane) to Port Essington in 1844–45. Leichhardt returned to Sydney where his long-time correspondent and friend, William Macarthur, welcomed him to Camden Park so he could work on preparing his journals for publication. Later, Leichhardt visited Elizabeth at Parramatta. He was ‘a very modest and most intelligent person,’ wrote Elizabeth to Edward, ‘and by no means spoilt by his being made so much of a Lion since his return’.14 Edward continued to send Elizabeth books and periodicals, so she could stay up to date, but now there was also a good library in Sydney.

  Edward, serving in the army once more and transferred to Ireland, sent his mother newspapers from Dublin as well as from London. Elizabeth duly scoured the library shelves for books about Ireland and, in line with Edward’s sympathies, was much distressed about the sufferings of the Irish peop
le. ‘What an unhappy and maybe ill-used country!!!’ she wrote. The plight of the Irish stayed on her mind for some time and, ever practical, she took ‘some solace in reflecting that the bitter cold of winter was then passed away and the season of harvest approaching’.15 This was, however, at the height of the potato blight and for many there would be no harvest.

  As happy and engaged as she was, Elizabeth was not immune to the pain of further loss. In 1845 Mary Bowman, again at Ravensworth, fell from a verandah and broke her leg. She couldn’t walk for many months and her family feared she may never regain the full use of her leg. She would later claim that her husband was ‘selfish and to me harsh and cruel’ and that the only respite she had from his bad temper was while a member of her family was visiting.16 Was that another reason Elizabeth stayed so often with her daughter in Sydney? She confessed that Mary’s ‘was not a happy married life at any period for any length of time’.17 Perhaps tellingly, no one mentions exactly how Mary fell from the verandah.

  One year later James Bowman suffered an apoplectic fit and died. Mary did not seem sorry, writing to her mother to say that ‘disappointments of many kinds, falsehood and ill-treatment have changed me’ and that she had not expected ‘to be left as I am, a beggar in all things’. She thought that if she took care of the children and behaved as a wife should, then surely her husband would fulfil his side of the bargain and take care of ‘worldly things’, only to discover too late that he had ‘gambled all away, so disgracefully’.18

  Elizabeth feared that Mary’s reaction to his death was not quite seemly. ‘I cannot arrive at any conclusions with respect to the feelings of poor Mary,’ Elizabeth wrote to Edward. ‘Let us hope they are such as becomes a Christian and erring Mortal.’19 Although Mary recovered and was able to walk again, she and her eldest son were unable to carry on with the farming ventures, and in 1848 Ravensworth was sold. Mary and her children moved to Camden Park to be supported by James and William.

  Elizabeth also worried about, and feared for, Emmeline. She and her husband, both aged thirty-five when they married, suffered enormously in the years following their wedding. A son was stillborn, and a daughter born prematurely died soon after birth.20 Elizabeth praised Henry’s care of his wife in these dark times, writing to Edward to say that ‘nothing can be more tender and affectionate than his conduct’.21 During at least one of Emmeline’s ‘painful disappointments’—probably a miscarriage—Elizabeth was herself unwell and unable to provide her daughter with care and support. Instead, Elizabeth found herself an invalid, although her recovery was ‘greatly accelerated by the use of a warm Bath placed near my bedside, into which I was assisted twice a day for several weeks and attended like an infant—nothing can have exceeded the affectionate attention of our dear Emmeline and her no less kind Husband’.22 In late1846, in the wake of Emmeline’s losses and Elizabeth’s unidentified illness, their doctor recommended a change of air. Hannibal was pleased to offer them the use of his marine villa at Watsons Bay. Hannibal had purchased the property from the original Robert Watson—pilot, harbourmaster and lighthouse keeper—a few years earlier.

  In January 1847 Henry Parker hired a steamship to take his precious passengers and their luggage direct from the Elizabeth Farm wharf on the Parramatta River right down through the long harbour past Sydney to Watsons Bay—a picturesque cove on the sheltered, Port Jackson side of the South Head peninsula. An Aboriginal community lived beside the lagoon at nearby Camp Cove, and the small European community at Watsons Bay was made up of fishermen, pilots, sailors and their families. Elizabeth noted with pleasure that there was ‘a goodly number of children and plenty of young voices’.23 Hannibal, for reasons Elizabeth could never discover, called his little villa Clovelly. The villa is long gone but Clovelly Street remains, as does Robertsons Park, which once formed the villa’s grounds. From the cove the ground rises gently towards the narrow spine of the peninsula. The house sat well up the hill, with one side facing Military Road. Elizabeth was able to sit at the other side of the house and look back across the harbour towards Sydney while ‘breathing in as much of the sea air as I conveniently can’24 and watching Emmeline swim.

  Elizabeth was soon going for walks again, with the aid of a stick and accompanied by Emmeline and Henry. They made their way around the point to Camp Cove, or climbed the short rise behind the villa. Elizabeth wrote that ‘by a singular Gap in these stupendous Rocks which form the South Head, you are at once open to the Ocean without’.25 It is indeed a spectacular view from that gap, with a tumble of rocks to the left leading to the South Head of the harbour, and to the right a long vista of sandstone cliffs falling to the surf below. And ahead are the open waters of the Pacific Ocean.

  What did Elizabeth think about while looking out to sea, that small elderly woman in whom love and ambition and sheer force of will had combined to create a dynasty? In a chair brought up for her especially, Elizabeth liked to sit and see the ships arrive at the heads, watch the pilot boats go out to meet them and then to follow their progress up the harbour. It was hard to believe that the mighty Port Jackson, now so full of comings and goings and so famously described by Elizabeth’s friend Governor Phillip as ‘the finest harbour in the world, in which a thousand sail of the line may ride in the most perfect security’, had ever, since the arrival of the First Fleet, lain empty of ships.26 But Elizabeth had seen it so.

  Throughout the summer Elizabeth and the Parkers entertained a string of visitors. All five of the young Bowmans came to stay, as did Doctor Anderson, who had treated John Macarthur at his worst. Anderson had remained a family friend and had for some years been living at Hambledon Cottage. William, who had been ill at Camden Park, arrived looking thin but cheerful, and his mother took pleasure in watching him regain his health through a steady diet of fresh fish, oysters and sea bathing. Many of the Watson Bay fish he caught himself, in company with Emmeline and Mr Parker, in a small boat from which he could see his mother sitting happily on the villa’s verandah. Occasionally Elizabeth ventured out with them on short excursions to various parts of the harbour. Then, in March 1847 she and the Parkers returned to Elizabeth Farm much refreshed by their holiday.

  Governor Gipps and his wife had returned to England the year before, to be replaced by Sir Charles Augustus Fitzroy and his wife Lady Mary. Elizabeth had yet another vice-regal couple to befriend. Lady Mary, adept with the needle and with a fine eye for design, amused herself by creating patchwork quilts. She employed a technique still in use today: paper piecing. Hundreds of paper templates were cut, then the fabric was basted on top of the paper, then each hexagon was whip-stitched to those adjacent. According to family lore, Elizabeth started making a hexagon quilt too and it’s entirely possible the women worked on their projects while they visited each other. In early December 1847, there was a wedding at the Vineyard, for yet another of Hannibal and Maria’s six daughters, and the vice-regal couple were pleased to attend. But four days later Lady Mary, aged fifty-seven, was killed.

  She had climbed into her carriage at Government House in Parramatta, ready to be driven to Sydney by her husband. But he had barely taken the reins when the horses bolted and charged along the driveway, which curved down a hill. The barouche overturned and smashed against a row of oaks that lined the drive. Lady Mary suffered a fractured skull and died almost immediately; her husband survived with only minor injuries. The Macarthurs were shocked, as was all of Sydney: thousands of people came to pay their respects and there were more than eight hundred mourners in the funeral procession.27 The patchwork coverlet Lady Fitzroy was working on remains unfinished to this day—the colours of her basted hexagons still quite bright, having spent a century and more tucked in her sewing bag. Elizabeth didn’t finish her own quilt either but at some time Emmeline, or perhaps her granddaughter Elizabeth, finished it for her. Every now and again Elizabeth Macarthur’s quilt is displayed as the rare and beautiful museum piece it has become.

  Lady Mary’s accident cast a pall over the Macarthur house
holds, but there was more bad news to bear. The liquidation of the Bank of Australia in 1843 had hit Hannibal, as one of the bank’s directors, particularly hard. In 1848 he was ‘obliged to bend to the storm and to pass through the Insolvent Court’.28 He was declared bankrupt, and he and Maria went first to their son-in-law’s home in Braidwood and then later to Moreton Bay, where one of their married daughters was living at a property called Newstead. Hannibal had kept up appearances so carefully that his financial failure came as a complete surprise to Elizabeth and her family. Even if they had wished to provide financial support, though, it was beyond them. They were so deep in debt that Elizabeth’s family hadn’t even been able to help Mary to retain Ravensworth. The Vineyard was sold to a Catholic archbishop and within a few years renamed Subiaco. It became a Benedictine convent and school for young ladies. Henry Parker managed to buy Hannibal’s villa, Clovelly, at Watsons Bay. Hannibal sold it to him for £450, having originally paid £1800 for it. Such were the effects of the economic crisis—or the bonds of family.

  Parker completely refurbished the house and planted the Moreton Bay figs and Norfolk Island pines that can still be seen today. In January 1849 he once again hired a steamship to collect his wife and mother-in-law from Parramatta and carry them to the harbour-side retreat. The family was worried enough about Elizabeth’s health and advancing years that their party included Doctor Anderson. The journey was quite a logistical exercise. They carried so much baggage that a luggage boat was towed behind the steamship, which left the wharf at Parramatta at noon. By three o’clock they called in at Sydney Cove, where William Macarthur and Captain Phillip Parker King joined the flotilla. At Watsons Bay the resident pilots and their boat crews were happy to lend a hand with the unloading, and so by six o’clock the villa’s residents were seated at dinner, while William and Captain King returned to Sydney on the steamer. By ten o’clock Elizabeth had retired for the night, in one of her son Edward’s comfortable old field beds. Unsurprisingly, she thought of him ‘not a little’.29