Macquarie’s detractors
Exclusives such as John Macarthur and Samuel Marsden were particularly hostile to Macquarie’s appointment of emancipists to positions of power and influence. In New South Wales the exclusives had had the opportunity to establish themselves at the apex of a social system – a privileged position compromised, in their view, by association with former criminals.
John Macarthur was an ambitious entrepreneur and advocate of pastoralism over agriculture, and firmly ‘exclusive’ in politics. He was the son of a draper, who joined the New South Wales Corps and, as the Corps’ Purser, was a key architect behind the rum trade. He was absent from the colony when Macquarie arrived because he was in London defending himself for his part in the overthrow of Governor Bligh. He returned in 1817, and when Macquarie refused to grant him more land, Macarthur added his voice to the rising criticism.
A blacksmith’s son from Yorkshire, Samuel Marsden refused to share offices with former convicts from the beginning of Macquarie’s administration. ‘As to Mr Marsden’s troubles of mind, and pathetic display of sensibility and humanity’, Macquarie wrote, ‘they must be so deeply seated and so far removed from the surface, as to escape all possible observation’