In this episode we say farewell to Governor Lachlan Macquarie after twelve years in Sydney. He championed the name Australia, made 26 January an official public anniversary, and was the first leading figure to address the colony as a people — “Fellow Citizens of Australia.”

From first arrival to last days he backed emancipist rights, and that stance cost him the exclusives, the church, the courts and London. His last years were hard. In his farewell in Hyde Park he still said, “I anticipate the applause of posterity.” Classic Macquarie — arrogant, but accurate.

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Governor Lachlan Macquarie was on a sincere mission to lift up the former convicts known as emancipists. For years that project had gone his way — until the colonial establishment struck back and set out to put these “uppity” emancipists in their place.

In this episode the church, the courts and then London itself flip from supporting the Governor to becoming his trenchant critics. Macquarie never wavers from his pro-emancipist stance, but under pressure he begins to act foolishly act in anger. London’s answer is decisive: Commissioner John Bigge is sent with wide-ranging powers to audit the entire Australian experiment. Macquarie knows his time is up.

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In early New South Wales, more than four-fifths of the non-Aboriginal population were convicts, former convicts, or their children. Once free, these people — the emancipists — discovered that money and talent could not wash away the ex-convict stain. Wealthy exclusives still treated them as second-class subjects. This episode asks ‘what mobilised a scattered group of successful ex-prisoners into a political force?’

Governor Macquarie brought the best of them into the open. Architect Francis Greenway, merchant Mary Reibey, the “Botany Bay Rothschild” Samuel Terry, and Dr William Redfern all flourished under his protection. Then, in 1815, the new Supreme Court exploded over a simple question: could three emancipist solicitors appear before it? Judge Jeffrey Bent said no. Macquarie’s magistrates said yes. The court froze for two years, letters flew to London, and the colony split into two camps. Status, not class, was the issue.

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Produced by Sean Masters

(All voices in this series are AI generated bar the narrator.)

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Episode 38 follows John Macarthur after he slipped out of New South Wales just before Lachlan Macquarie arrived to restore order. Having masterminded the Rum Rebellion, Macarthur exploited a legal loophole in Lord Castlereagh’s arrest orders and spent more than eight years in England. After the Rum Rebellion trial, Macarthur was stuck in England because if he returned to NSW he faced immediate arrest.

So Macarthur waged a stubborn, years-long campaign against the Colonial Office to return home without having to admit to any “impropriety.”  When he finally sails back in 1817, the colony he left has changed: wealthy emancipists like Samuel Terry now rival the exclusives and a bitter struggle is underway over land, labour, and what kind of society New South Wales will become. Macarthur has won every political fight so far. This time the numbers and the spirit of the age are against him.

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In September 1803 Lieutenant John Bowen raised the Union Jack at Risdon Cove on the Derwent, founding the first European settlement in Van Diemen’s Land. The next year, Governor King in Sydney, under orders from London, sent Lieutenant-Colonel William Paterson to command the proposed second settlement on the island at Port Dalrymple along the north coast. By late 1804 the island was formally divided at the 42nd parallel: the southern County of Buckinghamshire under Collins and the northern County of Cornwall under Paterson. Two settlements, two very different commanders, and two rival experiments in colonial survival.

This episode traces the contrasting fortunes of those early settlements. We follow Paterson’s relatively liberal land grants that encouraged private farming. We contrast that with Collins’s more regimented approach, chronic supply shortages, reliance on hunting and fishing, and the slow, painful growth of Hobart Town until the influx of experienced colonial farmers from Norfolk Island transformed it. The story closes with Governor Macquarie’s first visit in 1811, his inspection of both settlements and his descriptions of a young colony that was rapidly getting on its feet.

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Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In 1803, Governor Philip Gidley King in Sydney sent two ships to near modern day Hobart. There had been multiple earlier European visits to Van Diemen’s Land but these ships were going to stay and build a permanent British settlement.

Governor King’s response was both reactive and decisive. By planting a permanent British presence on the Derwent — first through the small, improvised party under John Bowen and then through the far more substantial expedition led by David Collins — Britain converted a theoretical claim into effective occupation. The rapid establishment of settlements in both the south and the north of the island marked the moment Van Diemen’s Land ceased to be an unclaimed frontier and became the second major British colony in Australia.

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The Hon. John Ruddick MLC is a member of the NSW Legislative Council. 

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Produced by Sean Masters

(All voices in this series are AI generated bar the narrator.)

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Last week 'The Women's Pioneer Society of Australasia' invited me to speak about the Political History of Australia podcast.

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Produced by Sean Masters

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The people of what we now call Tasmania had lived in complete isolation since rising seas carved out Bass Strait around 10,000 BC, transforming their homeland from a southern peninsula of the Australian continent into the world’s most isolated island.

European contact began in 1642 when Dutch explorer Abel Tasman claimed the land for the Netherlands. It was not until the 1770s, however, that a rapid succession of French and British visitors began to recognise its strategic value. When Bass and Flinders confirmed Van Diemen’s Land was a separate island in the late 1790s, the news soon reached Europe and sharpened French interest. The Baudin Expedition’s extended presence in Australian waters only heightened British suspicions in Sydney. In a decisive pre-emptive move, the British bumped the French out, raised the Union Jack, and established the first permanent settlement at Risdon Cove in 1803. The scene was set for the colonial era.

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Produced by Sean Masters

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Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This episode we pause the story of Governor Lachlan Macquarie to take a panoramic tour of Australia’s near-abroad and Australia’s infant settlements in the early 1820s. 

With the Napoleonic Wars finally over and Britannia ruling the waves, London was able to focus more attention to its continental claim in the south. We survey the remarkably benign geopolitical setting in this corner of the globe and see how that freed up the colonists to focus on building a civilisation.

We’ll travel clockwise around the map. First, the promising inland township of Bathurst, already hinting at the wool boom to come. Then the initially grim secondary-punishment outposts at Newcastle, Port Macquarie and Moreton Bay — soon to grow into Brisbane. We’ll also check in on Norfolk Island, abandoned only a few years earlier but already earmarked to reopen as one of the empire’s harshest penal stations.

Finally, we cross the Tasman to New Zealand — still officially part of New South Wales — on the eve of sustained European contact. We’ll relive the shock of the Boyd Massacre and the remarkable partnership between the Reverend Samuel Marsden and the Māori chief Ruatara — a friendship that led to the first permanent British presence in New Zealand on Christmas Day 1814.

What did this wider colonial world actually look like, and how did it shape the challenges Macquarie faced? That’s what we’re exploring in this episode.

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The Hon. John Ruddick MLC is a member of the NSW Legislative Council. 

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Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In 1813 New South Wales was a fast-growing, optimistic society. The colony’s teenage growth spurt could no longer be contained by the rugged sandstone wall of the Blue Mountains just 50 kilometres west of Sydney.

There were multiple valiant efforts to cross the Blue Mountains but it took the determination of Gregory Blaxland, backed by William Lawson and William Wentworth, to finally crack the code by staying on the high ridges instead of following the valleys. Macquarie quickly capitalised on their breakthrough, commissioning a proper road and founding the inland settlement of Bathurst in 1815.

The 1813 expedition changed New South Wales from a confined coastal settlement into the gateway to a continent. In just a few years the colony’s horizons expanded dramatically, setting Australia on the path to rapid 19th-century growth.

Join us as we trace the drama and the personalities that finally punched through the Blue Mountains.

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The Hon. John Ruddick MLC is a member of the NSW Legislative Council. 

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Produced by Sean Masters

(All voices in this series are AI generated bar the narrator.)

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.