This episode we pause the story of Governor Lachlan Macquarie to take a panoramic tour of Australia’s near-abroad and Australia’s infant settlements in the early 1820s.
With the Napoleonic Wars finally over and Britannia ruling the waves, London was able to focus more attention to its continental claim in the south. We survey the remarkably benign geopolitical setting in this corner of the globe and see how that freed up the colonists to focus on building a civilisation.
We’ll travel clockwise around the map. First, the promising inland township of Bathurst, already hinting at the wool boom to come. Then the initially grim secondary-punishment outposts at Newcastle, Port Macquarie and Moreton Bay — soon to grow into Brisbane. We’ll also check in on Norfolk Island, abandoned only a few years earlier but already earmarked to reopen as one of the empire’s harshest penal stations.
Finally, we cross the Tasman to New Zealand — still officially part of New South Wales — on the eve of sustained European contact. We’ll relive the shock of the Boyd Massacre and the remarkable partnership between the Reverend Samuel Marsden and the Māori chief Ruatara — a friendship that led to the first permanent British presence in New Zealand on Christmas Day 1814.
What did this wider colonial world actually look like, and how did it shape the challenges Macquarie faced? That’s what we’re exploring in this episode.
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The Hon. John Ruddick MLC is a member of the NSW Legislative Council.
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Produced by Sean Masters
(All voices in this series are AI generated bar the narrator.)