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... Lachlan Macquarie is circulating among the merry throng, exchanging greetings and badinage with boyhood friends now grown men in a Gaelic made fluent by the national spirit. But this is merely a foretaste of what is to come – soon it is time to go back to the castle for the main part of the festivities. This passage comes from an unpublished work on Lachlan Macquarie, fifth governor of New South...
In December 1812, Governor Lachlan Macquarie announced the inception of a weekly market at Parramatta ‘for the Sale of the various Produce of the Country’. He also launched a ‘Public Fair’ for the ‘Sale of Horses, Horned Cattle, Sheep &c.’ to be held each March and October in Parramatta. These initiatives were typical of Macquarie’s 1812-21 governorship, during which agricultural improvements...
The mortal remains of Lachlan Macquarie, fifth governor of New South Wales, and his family rest in a mausoleum at Gruline, on the Isle of Mull in the Scottish Inner Hebrides. Australian visitors are often surprised to find this stone structure, about the size of a single carport, and are unaware that the surrounding land was once within Macquarie’s estate. While serving abroad as an officer in...
Crossing from Mull to the Isle of Ulva, in the Inner Hebrides of Scotland, is a tenuous undertaking in the cold depths of winter. During warmer months, people regularly venture in a small ferry across the narrow strait between the two islands, but at other times the service is sporadic. On a bleak morning in January this year, I phoned in advance and waited for half an hour or so in the cold wind...
A clutch of tumbledown ruins on a remote hillside marks the humble origins of Australia’s founding father, Lachlan Macquarie. In Ormaig, on the misty Isle of Ulva off Scotland’s west coast, Macquarie’s farming family eked out a threadbare existence in a harsh landscape. Lachlan’s upbringing in the Inner Hebrides during the 1760s and ‘ 70s was good training for his later role in the struggling...
