Design and Art Australia Online

sketcher, landscape gardener, architectural designer, patron, diarist and philanthropist, was born on 13 June 1778, youngest daughter of the five children of John Campbell of Airds, Port Appin, Argyleshire, on the west coast of Scotland. Apart from some time at school in London (where she studied art, music and French), she spent most of her early life at Airds, living with her brother who had inherited this modest estate on their father’s death. Initially attracted to her in 1804 (possibly before they met) by the 'good taste’ evident in the 'very pretty new gravel walk’ she had designed for Airds House, then by her other practical virtues, in March 1805 Elizabeth’s distant cousin, the widowed Lachlan Macquarie, proposed marriage. He was accepted, he noted, with 'notable candour’. They were married in the parish church at Holsworthy, Devon, England, on 3 November 1807. In 1809, after the birth and death the previous year of a daughter named Jane Jarvis after Lachlan’s first wife, they left in the Dromedary for New South Wales where Lachlan had been appointed governor. Elizabeth’s lively diary of the voyage out (Mitchell Library [ML]) records an occasional modest sketch, but none is known to have survived.

In New South Wales she played an active role in all aspects of colonial life; Jane Franklin, wife of a later governor of Van Diemen’s Land, dryly noted when visiting Sydney in 1839 that Mrs Macquarie was said to have been governor for thirteen years (her husband officially served only twelve in the post). As well as showing a practical interest in the welfare of convict women, Aborigines, orphan children and the poor, Mrs Macquarie was an early, enthusiastic and important patron of the arts, although John Lewin , who received several commissions from her, complained that she was not willing to pay in the liberal manner the fine arts needed to encourage them. In fact Lewin, the only free professional artist the Macquaries are known to have employed, would have been one of the few paid (from colonial revenue) at anything like market rates. Most of the Macquaries’ artistic courtiers were either convicts or emancipists. Their official colonial architect was Francis Greenway ; their landscape painter and sometime architectural draughtsman was Joseph Lycett ; Richard Read senior painted their portraits and their unofficial Poet Laureate, Michael Massey Robinson, delivered loyal odes on royal birthdays and produced other occasional verse.

In Australia Elizabeth Macquarie’s major artistic interest continued to be picturesque landscape planning. 'Mrs Macquarie’s Chair’, an extant large inscribed rock, records and is part of the landscape improvements she made to Sydney’s Government Domain in 1816. As Lycett stated in his Views , this was 'an excellent Promenade , more than three miles and a half in circumference … laid out under the direction of Mrs. MACQUARIE ... whose fine taste has been wonderfully displayed and very generally admired, in the various parts of the Colony, but more particularly at the Government House and Gardens at Parramatta’, (The latter incorporated a classical 'Temple to Hymen’ and a rustic tea-house.) Even more ambitious were the extravagant Tudor-style Government House and stables in Sydney which Greenway drew up to her instructions, but because of the British Treasury’s reluctance to pay for such grandeur, only the stables were built (1820-21; now the Conservatorium of Music). She and her husband must also have played a major role in the design of Fort Macquarie, a charming Gothick building drawn up by Greenway with considerable reluctance since this and the Macquaries’ other fortifications, he stated in 1825 (well after his patrons had gone home), 'put me in mind of my Uncle Toby and Corporal Trim [from Sterne’s Tristram Shandy ] in the garden amusing themselves by laying out fortifications in miniature, of no manner of service with such ideas’.

Mrs Macquarie lent E. Gyfford’s pattern-book Designs for Elegant Cottages (London 1806/7) to 'a man named Pan’, from which D.D. Matthew erected the judge advocate’s and colonial secretary’s two-storeyed Georgian houses in Macquarie Place in 1810-12. Another print in her possession was redrawn by Lycett and given to the stonemason Edward Cureton, she told Commissioner Bigge in 1820, in order to erect a large, unidentified Sydney building (perhaps the unexecuted Anglican cathedral), Greenway’s design having been rejected as far too extravagant. Yet, although Elizabeth Macquarie’s influence on the architectural taste and development of the colony was undoubtedly major, her contribution has been almost totally obliterated by Greenway’s posthumous reputation.

She undoubtedly chose the design for the Orphan Asylum at Parramatta—a simplified version of the Palladian country-house at Airds, drawn up and erected by Greenway—as well as designing its gardens. As 'Patroness of the Institution’, she reminded Colonel Erskine in 1820, 'I shall take on myself as heretofore to direct the Improvement of the Land at Arthur’s Hill where the Orphans at present reside … The early habits of my Life, and the attention I have bestowed on the management of landed Property, emboldened me to communicate my thoughts to you on these matters’. Her frank views on the management of the orphan school led to its superintendent, Rev. Samuel Marsden, identifying himself with John the Baptist and his patroness with Herodias.

The rebuilding of St John’s Church of England at Parramatta in a twin-towered Romanesque style (1818-19; extant, altered) was another of her design initiatives, executed by her husband’s aide-de-camp, Lieutenant John Watts, whose daughter Mrs M.E. Bagot recollected in 1895: 'In the course of their consultations on the subject Mrs. Macquarie produced a water-colour sketch of the Reculvers, a ruined church on the coast of Kent, and giving this to Lieut. Watts she said, “Now, Mr. Watts if you can design two spires like those in this sketch, we might make that old barn at Parramatta look something like a church”’. Rough 'before’ and 'after’ views of the church were included in a later letter defending her husband’s building programme (Public Records Office, London). Pencil plans and elevations for the rebuilding (drawn by Watts) and the Reculver Church watercolour (possibly her own work) are in the Watts Papers (ML). She apparently also chose the design for the first church building at Newcastle, Christ Church of England (1817; demolished), a Scottish harled parish-church type redrawn by Lycett and erected under the superintendence of Captain James Wallis . She accompanied her husband to Newcastle (Coal River) for the church’s dedication in 1818.

Landscape sketches were made on the vice-regal tour across the newly-opened Blue Mountains in 1815. Major H.C. Antill, a member of the party, recorded that on 2 May they came upon an extensive view of Mt Blaxland and Evans’ Peak and both Mrs Macquarie and Lewin, the official expedition artist, 'took sketches’. She may also have drawn the occasional portrait. In a letter to her niece, Mary Maclaine of Lochbuy, dated 17 April 1817 (National Library of Australia), she wrote that she was enclosing a sketch of their only living child, a son Lachlan (1814-45), although this could have been by Read.

The Macquaries returned home in 1822 and in January 1824 settled on Lachlan’s estate, Jarvisfield, on the Isle of Mull. Forced to return to London to defend himself against Bigge’s allegations and fight for a pension, Lachlan died there on 1 July. Elizabeth, seventeen years younger than her husband, continued to live at Jarvisfield until her death on 11 March 1835, always keeping in touch with her Australian friends. Her annotated copy of Boswell’s Life of Johnson (ML) includes references to several colonial acquaintances—emancipists such as Dr William Redfern as well as free settlers. The Mitchell Library holds letters from her in their Antill, Piper, Wentworth and Macquarie Papers.

Writers:

Kerr, Joan

Date written:

1992

Last updated:

2011