Australian History For Dummies. Alex McDermott

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      Macquarie was keen to get the colony of NSW moving even faster, pushing the expansion of both settlement and the economy. Declaring new townships at the drop of hat, he was also big on road construction and public buildings. This was the Macquarie vision: To not simply cut costs and keep things quiet, but to build the place up.

      Expanding settlement

      Macquarie encouraged expansion of settlement by establishing new peripheral settlements in the colony, such as Windsor, Wilberforce and Liverpool. But the biggest challenge to expansion was the Blue Mountains, which essentially lay in a ring around the settlement. Various attempts had been made to penetrate the forbidding range since the first few months of the First Fleet’s arrival at Port Jackson, but so far none had been successful. The arable land available in the settlement was by now nearing exhaustion and Sydney was in danger of becoming a permanent ‘limpet port’ — a small-scale settlement that clung to the side of an unknown continent, depending solely on its maritime flow, ready for abandonment if and when the British Government decided to give up the project as a bad exercise. People didn’t even know what lay on the other side of the mountains. Desert? An inland sea? Or, as some convicts continued to believe, China?

      

In June 1813, three settlers — Gregory Blaxland, William Lawson and William Wentworth — and their convict servants finally found a way over the Blue Mountains, discovering enough grassland on the other side to ‘feed all the stock in the colony for thirty years’. Macquarie sent his surveyor, George Evans, to investigate and Evans returned greatly impressed with what he had found: ‘I cannot speak too much of the country. The increase of stock for some 100 years cannot overrun it’.

      A new vista of what Australia might become opened up, and Macquarie set to work building a road out along the route through the mountains and proclaimed a new township — Bathurst.

      GETTING THROUGH THE BLUE MOUNTAINS BLUES

      For the first 25 years of white settlement, the Blue Mountains were a big problem. They formed a ring around the NSW settlements at Sydney, Parramatta and on the Hawkesbury River. If a way wasn’t found through the mountains, the colony would never reach its full potential.

      The Blue Mountains weren’t like the regular ‘ordinary’ mountains the European settlers were used to. In order to cross European mountains, you found the valleys that went between the peaks and followed them. But this wouldn’t work with the Blue Mountains because their geological formation had been completely different. Rather than being peaks of land that had been thrust up by subterranean forces, the Blue Mountains formed part of a range that had originally been a plateau. Formed from sandstone rock, countless aeons had worn down most of the plateau, forming gorges and gaps between other parts that had retained their height. This meant that if you followed the valleys you wouldn’t go between the peaks, but would just find yourself running into walls and dead ends.

      Between 1793 and 1804, numerous attempts were made to cross the Blue Mountains, with no success. The attempt in 1804 was made by George Cayley, a young protégé of Sir Joseph Banks (refer to Chapter 3 for more on this rich botanist who had fingers in just about every Australian pie). Cayley reported back to the governor at the time, Governor King, that it was useless to try to cross such a ‘confused and barren assemblage of mountains’.

      King agreed with Cayley. Moreover, he was worried about the rumours that kept inspiring convicts to run away: The distant view of the purple-blue mountains (which, of course, is how they got their name) was so inviting that convicts kept running away, believing that on the other side was a land where everything was perfectly lovely. King said this was stupid, and forbade people to try any further mountain crossings. And there, for the next ten years or so, is where the matter rested.

      However, in 1813, Governor Macquarie, who liked the idea of pushing the settlement outward, hopefully discovering more fertile land and finding new outlets for the increasing population, encouraged a new attempt. Gregory Blaxland, a gentleman settler, William Wentworth, native-born youth, and Lieutenant Lawson set off from near Penrith. They tried a different strategy to the other explorers — rather than follow the valleys and try to hoist themselves over the ridges, they climbed up onto a ridge and kept following it. This way they got past and through the mountains, and happily reported on the fertile land on the other side.

The group hadn’t actually managed to get all the way through the bigger Great Dividing Range — that happened a year later with surveyor G W Evans — but they penetrated far enough to show how it could be done, and got a fair share of public acclaim for doing it. Finally, the colony could begin to properly expand into the Australian continent.

      Expanding the economy

      Massive economic expansion went with settlement expansion, as Macquarie ordered the building of roads, public buildings and even parks to be commenced.

Shortly after arriving in the colony, Macquarie wrote to Britain, asking for more convicts to be sent out. Previous governors had asked for specific trades (for example, ‘Send more carpenters!’) but Macquarie was the first to ask for more, full stop, arguing, ‘The prosperity of the Country depends on their numbers’. He also abandoned government farming, thinking economic improvement was more likely with private settlers. (He would be forced to bring government farming back later in his administration, due to circumstances outside his control; see ‘Coping with the deluge following Waterloo’ later in this chapter.)

      

Under this scheme of rapid economic expansion, the skilled manual labourers — masons, builders, blacksmiths, sawyers, splitters, fencers and carpenters — continued to be the worker ‘aristocracy’, earning exceedingly good wages. The unskilled variously became house servants, wharfies, quarry-workers, farmhands, assistants in offices and warehouses, or workers in the small manufacturing workshops that were proliferating.

      Conciliating (and pursuing) Indigenous Australians

      Macquarie was keen to make his mark with the Aboriginal community as well.

      In October 1814, Macquarie wrote to Lord Bathurst in the Colonial Office, suggesting an Aboriginal school be established in Parramatta as part of an endeavour to win the hearts and minds of the younger Aboriginal generation, and to persuade the parents to allow their children to learn some of the European ways, of cultivation, literacy and sedentary ‘civilised’ society. On receiving Bathurst’s approval, the school was soon in place. (Parents, however, removed children from the school after they realised its aim was to distance the children from their culture and families.)

      Macquarie’s attempt to conciliate Aboriginal peoples was also manifested a few months later, when he held the first of what would become an annual ‘gathering of tribes’ in Parramatta. Here, Macquarie played the ‘big chief’ (he fancied himself as a bit of a Scottish Highland chieftain), handing out gifts and good humour to Indigenous Australians who travelled up to three hundred kilometres to attend the gathering.

Macquarie wanted all those beneath him to prosper — both convicts and Aboriginal people — as long as they acknowledged they were beneath him in rank and authority. Macquarie wasted little time mounting punitive military expeditions when some СКАЧАТЬ