Lachlan Macquarie - Alex Buzo #
In 1971, Alex Buzo’s play Macquarie, took a new look at the state of Australia in 1810. After the Rum Rebellion, a new Governor with his own regiment attempted to restore law and order by reining in the haughty, entrenched and corrupt Rum Corps.
According to David Hunt:
Lachlan Macquarie was the last and greatest of the dictator-governors of the colony of pickpockets, rapists and Irishmen that Mother Britain birthed at the arse end of the world on January 26, 1788. During his 1810-1821 rule, the energetic Scotsman campaigned for the continent of New Holland to be renamed Australia and, for every prominent street, building or geographical feature on it to be renamed Macquarie. He expanded the boundaries of the colony beyond the Sydney Basin and the convict hellholes of Newcastle and Van Diemen’s Land (later renamed Tasmania for PR reasons) and championed the social and economic rights of freed convicts, watering the first seeds of Aussie egalitarianism.
Macquarie hosted lots of Government House dinner parties; one as Mrs Macquarie laboured in a neighbouring room while he politely ignored her screams as he passed the port.
Macquarie was an unusual choice of governor. At 47, he was the oldest lieutenant-colonel in the British Army. He’d been caught arranging dodgy commissions to feather the family nest and lying to the royal family. He was in poor health, with his skin yellowed from malaria and a liver that had spent decades being kicked by Johnny Walker. His face and limbs were blotched from the curative acids he applied to his syphilitic lesions and years of bathing “Wee Mister Mac” in mercury, the venereal treatment du jour, had left him with a disconcerting neurological twitch.
Yet this hard-drinking, clap-ridden fraudster became the most popular ruler Australia has ever known – probably because getting spannered, sleeping around and ripping off the government are regarded as Australian virtues.
Initially Macquarie had no intention of associating with former convicts, however he writes: “some of the more meritorious men of the few to be found, and who were more capable and most willing to exert themselves in the public service, were men who had been convicts”.
Respectable people; the military and legal officials were highly offended to be invited to dine with the Governor together with emancipists.
- David Hunt - Girt 2013 Black Inc.
Macquarie made some headway in liberal reforms; stamping out the trade in rum, improving morale by raising emancipists dignity and value through equality of opportunity and appointments to high office, ambitious programs of infrastructure of roads, bridges, and Government Buildings designed by a former convict Francis Greenaway. To keep currency in the colony he imaginatively had Spanish coins punched to create a holey dollar with the dump valued at five cents.
The reactionaries, led by the cynical “flogging parson” Samuel Marsden and others undermined his achievements claiming that man’s essential depravity could only be restrained with severe punishment and exclusion – once a convict; always a convict. They railed against his extravagant expenditure on government works, which they claimed would be better spent by the elite faux aristocrats.
Macquarie’s leadership in 2010. Australian playwriting’s great stylist illuminates the rise and fall of Governor Macquarie ‘The Father of Australia’, a remarkable man whose foresight and enlightened policies gave Sydney some of its finest buildings and whose humanitarian policies dared to give convicts ‘a fair go’, transforming the colony of New South Wales from an outdoor gaol into a prosperous and free society.
Buzo raises fundamental dialectical questions regarding the contest for power; is it for the betterment of society or for selfish private interests? In the political game, are the cards stacked against compassionate high - principled players? Do liberal idealists always lose to powerful reactionary forces?
Buzo also questions the unscrupulous tactics used by the privileged to manipulate and brain wash the masses through labelling, name calling and casuistry - turning vice into virtue, greed into patriotism. Ultimately the fickle and gullible masses were easy prey for the superior but specious propaganda of the upper classes. People side against their own best interest.
Eleven years later Macquarie was recalled in disgrace. History rewarded him as the “Father of Australia” even though lately, questions have been raised about his part in the the Appin Massacre of 1815.