Reviewed by Rama Gaind.
By Alan Atkinson, NewSouth, $39.99.
This engrossing dual biography gives us John and Elizabeth Macarthur as they saw themselves. Historian Alan Atkinson observes them as they defined and defended themselves.
The family at the heart of this book — the Macarthurs — had a strong sense of their own historical importance. Atkinson argues the two colonial figures are more important, and more complex, than is often acknowledged.
He has been able to tell their story in this way, primarily, because they kept a vast amount of their own records including letters and account books.
Elizabeth and John Macarthur were the first married couple to travel voluntarily from Europe to Australia, arriving in 1790, both aged 23, within three years of the initial invasion. John Macarthur soon became famous in NSW and beyond a politician and a builder of farms at Parramatta and Camden. For a long time, Elizabeth’s life was regarded as contingent on John’s and, more recently, John’s on Elizabeth’s.
The Macarthurs were pioneers of the Australian wool industry, which, even before John Macarthur died in 1834, was bringing enormous wealth to NSW. They were a careful and persevering couple, both adept in self-awareness, self-assessment and self-dramatisation.
They “deserve a voice in their own story,” however, wool was only a part of their story told here. According to Atkinson, there are “larger and deeper questions, s they knew very well themselves.”
“For one thing, the wool industry was part of the process of invasion and occupation. It was thanks to sheep and cattle that so much of the country was overrun so quickly, with devastating impact on Australia’s First Nations.”
The Macarthurs family papers are like a “great forest of voices.”
