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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This passage comes from an unpublished work on Lachlan Macquarie, fifth governor of New South Wales and the most famous son of the Scottish isles of Mull and Ulva. If it had seen light of day, Lachlan Macquarie – The Father of Australia: A View from the Hebrides would have offered a uniquely Hebridean perspective.
The proposed book was a joint project of the late George Sassoon and David Howitt, two Mull residents who were inspired by Macquarie’s life. The writers had planned to launch the book during the 1988 bicentennial of the First Fleet landing in Sydney Cove but the project died, despite firm interest from a publisher.
I met David (pictured) during a recent visit to Mull and he was fascinated to learn that I was writing a Macquarie biography for general readers. He retrieved old research notes and draft chapters still stored at his home on Mull and I found that this material shed light on the influence of Lachlan’s Hebridean background on his style of governorship.
David regrets that the book never emerged to encourage interest in Macquarie among residents of Mull and tourist visitors. He also shares my view that Lachlan should have been knighted, instead of facing criticism because of policy differences with his political masters in London.
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 helped the New South Wales populace to finally feed itself adequately. Macquarie encouraged good farming, especially among ex-convict settlers, and keenly inspected farms during his vice regal tours.
Lachlan grew up amidst a subsistence farming community on Ulva, off Scotland’s west coast (Ulva is across the water in this photograph). As the Mull Historical Society’s Anne Cleave points out, Lachlan would have been well schooled in agriculture from his earliest days.
These days, visitors to Ulva and the neighbouring Isle of Mull can only marvel that their produce once supported thousands of people and even yielded cattle for export.
Macquarie’s early experience served him well in the fledgling New South Wales colony, where droughts, floods, insect plagues and shortage of good lands hindered early attempts at agriculture.good lands hindered early attempts at agriculture.
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 the British army, Lachlan built his personal wealth and splurged on landholdings on Mull.
After nearly 12 years in Sydney, Macquarie in 1822 returned to Gruline with his wife Elizabeth and son Lachlan Junior, to live briefly in a modest cottage. Following his 1824 death in London, Lachlan was interred near the cottage and later the mausoleum was built, with the inscription ‘The Father of Australia’.
This is a fitting memorial for Australia’s most important colonial-era governor, who maintained his strong 
connections with the Scottish Highlands during long years abroad.
This year’s bicentenary of his governorship is making Macquarie’s story better known, so the prominence of the mausoleum should grow in the future.
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 to get a boat ride to the ancestral home of Clan Macquarie. Later I returned from Ulva to Mull the same way, having seen no-one but the boatman all day. The accompanying photograph, taken from the Mull foreshore, shows the volcanic heap of Ulva across the water.
Ulva was home territory for Australia’s founding father, Governor Lachlan Macquarie, and this scrap of remote land somehow supported hundreds of people in its heyday. Clan Macquarie’s hold on the island is long gone and these days the population is less than 20.
A restored ‘croft’ cottage on Ulva near the ferry crossing shows how people lived in the old days. Typically, several generations shared a tiny living space and their livestock were kept under the same roof during winter.
Trudging along sodden tracks, I found the ruins of some of Ulva’s 16 abandoned farming settlements and tried to envisage the lives they enclosed. Lachlan Macquarie’s rise from this remote community to the governorship of New South Wales is a great story that deserves to be celebrated in Australian popular culture.
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 British colony in New South Wales, where he became governor at the start of 1810. Lachlan’s 12-year term of office was so successful that two centuries later his governorship is being celebrated with events in and around Sydney.
Macquarie was the right man at the right time for the shambolic outdoor jail for exiled felons which, under his guidance, became a substantial, well-founded settlement with a bright future.
On a recent visit to Macquarie’s home ground of Ulva and the adjacent Isle of Mull, I was duly impressed that a poor Highlands farm lad from this region helped to found a nation in a ‘convict country’ on the other side of the world.
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