Astrologers should thank their lucky stars for Australia\u2019s first power couple \u2013 the Macarthurs.<\/p>\n
Born a day apart in August 1766, their differences were complementary: he combatively self-righteous \u2013 the protagonist of three duels in the so-called Age of Reason; she bright as a button, inquisitive about the world and, if anything, his superior when it came to business. Theirs was a union fated for success.<\/p>\n
As books about consequential figures from history proliferate, it is becoming increasingly difficult to categorise them \u2013 even more so in the specialised field of joint biography, where added to the problems of writing from inside their subjects\u2019 worlds (and heads) is the difficulty of accurately estimating the contribution made by each member of the partnership. The late Hazel Rowley\u2019s landmark study of the Roosevelts (Franklin & Eleanor<\/em>) masters this challenge as does T. Ryle Dwyer\u2019s double study of Michael Collins and Eamon de Valera,\u00a0Big Fellow, Long Fellow<\/em>.<\/p>\n Distinguished Australian academic Alan Atkinson has also achieved success in this paperback edition of his dual biography (first released as a hardback in 2022) which \u2013 recurring to my point about mutable categories \u2013 is equally a work of history, psychology, politics and cultural studies.<\/p>\n At his most insightful, Atkinson is brilliantly reductive \u2013 as with the most fateful disagreement of the couple\u2019s lives \u2013 over whether John should return to the remote colony of New South Wales after seven years back in England or whether his wife would submit to his wishes.<\/p>\n In passages highlighting the risk that \u201cthe family would be permanently split between two hemispheres\u201d, he lists the lures of London that outweighed an Australian destiny. In John\u2019s mind, \u201cits concentration of power, clever and powerful friends, to watch the achievements of all four sons, the pride of his life\u201d.<\/p>\n And then, in a single illuminating line, he explains the ultimate decision to base their future 17,000km away from London by reference to their respective backgrounds:\u00a0 \u201cThe cloth-dealer\u2019s son argued with the farmer\u2019s daughter.\u201d<\/p>\n The basis of their future income lay in farming. John\u2019s lifelong interest in fabrics was also relevant, as befits the founder of the Australian wool industry, the staple of the country\u2019s prosperity for a full century and a half. Still, another Macarthur specialist, Michelle Scott Tucker, has argued it was Elizabeth who established the industry while her husband took all the credit.<\/p>\n Atkinson\u2019s work, while acknowledging the patriarchal world they inhabited, stands as a mild corrective to that view. Unstinting in his praise of Elizabeth, he demonstrates that, in their happiest years together, each was essential to the other\u2019s mission in life.<\/p>\n Or, put more simply, love was the force that drew them together and drove them on.<\/p>\n Over almost 500 pages the professor sustains a kind of literary high-wire act, based on a method that sometimes relies inescapably on guesswork. Over five pages in Chapter 27,\u00a0Variegated Truths<\/em>, he falters with a series of meditative paragraphs beginning: \u201cAm I just?\u201d, once varied to \u201cAm I not just?\u201d These longueurs \u2013 an attempt at interiority descending from plausible surmise to pure speculation \u2013 form the weakest part of an otherwise impressive tale.<\/p>\n Better than most of the standard works on early colonial history, Atkinson conveys the mixed motives that actuated the Macarthurs. We see the Calvinist in John \u2013 a military officer with a strict sense of honour \u2013 goad successive colonial governors into branding him a troublemaker. Philip Gidley King had him arrested following his second duel and demanded a court-martial, to be held in London. \u201cAs the jokers put it, John Macarthur was to be \u2018transported to England\u2019,\u201d writes Atkinson.<\/p>\n While both were products of a society steeped in the concept of Christian virtues, they were also children of the Enlightenment. Having joined the colony-rescuing Second Fleet and taken up a 100-acre (40ha)\u00a0 land grant at Parramatta, Elizabeth busied herself studying \u2013 music, the stars, algebra and botany. She wrote to an English friend: \u201cSince I have had the powers of reason and reflection, I never was more\u00a0sincerely\u00a0<\/em>happy\u00a0than at this time<\/em>.\u201d<\/p>\n Bringing up their children single-handed as John tried to secure stable sources of funding on the other side of the world, it was Elizabeth who made the farm named after her a going concern. Until 1812, when he received assurances regarding the future supply of fine wool, the farm\u2019s main income source was mutton, and she became the first NSW settler to make hay for sale.<\/p>\n The ambivalent relations between the Macarthurs and the country\u2019s original inhabitants are skilfully depicted in this work. Up on the Hawkesbury, Macarthur played a part in the 1795 massacre known as the Battle of Richmond Hill \u2013 part of the warfare triggered by invasion (and the author isn\u2019t shy about calling it that). Yet he and Elizabeth always cultivated the friendship of the Burramattagal people nearer to their Parramatta) home, and Atkinson makes it clear that Tjedboro, the Dharug man who came to live with them, was not kidnapped but did so enthusiastically.<\/p>\n The \u201chouse guests\u201d who robbed them before absconding were Irishmen, who became among the first practitioners of two pursuits new to Australia \u2013 cattle duffing and bushranging.<\/p>\n Atkinson evokes the full gamut of emotions that governed the Macarthurs\u2019 adventurous life, from the joys of communion, intellectual stimulation and productive enterprise to the sorrow of permanent parting (Elizabeth never again set eyes on their son John after he returned to England at age seven).<\/p>\n At no point \u2013 not even when recounting their approaching deaths \u2013 does the pathos reach a higher pitch than in the pages where John\u2019s mental collapse, retrospectively diagnosed as a bipolar disorder, is recorded, and he is declared insane.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Astrologers should thank their lucky stars for Australia\u2019s first power couple \u2013 the Macarthurs.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1134,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,57],"tags":[19],"class_list":["post-1133","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-books","category-ultimate-reading-lists","tag-featured"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/futuredesignteam.in\/client\/politicus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1133","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/futuredesignteam.in\/client\/politicus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/futuredesignteam.in\/client\/politicus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/futuredesignteam.in\/client\/politicus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/futuredesignteam.in\/client\/politicus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1133"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/futuredesignteam.in\/client\/politicus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1133\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1135,"href":"https:\/\/futuredesignteam.in\/client\/politicus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1133\/revisions\/1135"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/futuredesignteam.in\/client\/politicus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1134"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/futuredesignteam.in\/client\/politicus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1133"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/futuredesignteam.in\/client\/politicus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1133"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/futuredesignteam.in\/client\/politicus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1133"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}