Macquarie 2010: Prepared by: Marie Sullivan and Mary Gray

The 200th anniversary of Major-General Lachlan Macquarie’s swearing in as Governor of New South Wales will be celebrated on 1 January 2010. Lachlan Macquarie was the first military Governor of New South Wales. His predecessors were all naval men who did not have the experience he had gained, predominantly in India, in administration, military strategy, business, urban planning, road building, leadership and civics, social justice, community and reform, medicine, religion, land and people management.

Macquarie served NSW for 12 years. He, with his wife Elizabeth Henrietta Campbell Macquarie and Lachlan Macquarie Junior departed NSW on 12 February 1822. Elizabeth Macquarie was an intrepid traveller who accompanied her husband on all major journeys through NSW and Tasmania. She was a student of architecture and landscape design.

Macquarie, in 1822, in defending himself against the assertions made against him in the Bigge Report said:

“I found the Colony barely emerging from infantile imbecility and suffering the most severe privations and disabilities; the country was impenetrable beyond forty miles from Sydney: agriculture was languishing; commerce in its early dawn and revenue unknown. The population was threatened with acute famine; the public buildings in a state of dilapidation and the few roads formerly built almost impassable. People in general appeared to be depressed by poverty and neglect. There was no public credit no private confidence and, to cap it all, the morals of the great majority of the inhabitants were in the lowest state of debasement and religious worship almost totally neglected …”

H. of C. Papers (1828) Report of Governor Macquarie to Earl Bathurst,
7 July 1822, p.2 cited in MH Ellis,
Lachlan Macquarie His Life, Adventures and Times,
Angus and Robertson, 1978 ed, p.511

http://www.australiaday.com.au/whatson/australiadayaddress2.aspx?AddressID=18

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