If John Macarthur (1767-1834) is known as ‘Father of the Australian Wool Industry’, why is his wife Elizabeth (1766-1850) not known as its ‘Mother’? After all, she spent over a decade managing the family’s extensive farming concerns, while her husband was back in England dealing with both business and legal matters. During that time she dealt with convict workers, monitored the sheep breeding program the couple had instituted at Parramatta and Camden, plus kept the household affairs in order, including caring for their six children.

No small feat, you would think.
Yet until recent years, her husband’s story has been the one taught in schools and told in history books.

So I read Michelle Scott Tucker’s biography of this remarkable woman with pleasure and interest. Elizabeth arrived in NSW at a time when the fledgling colony was foundering, on the brink of starvation and failure. She was from a genteel and educated background in Devon, and wrote letters home to friends and family, many of which have survived and give a fascinating insight – a woman’s view – of the beginnings of what became Australia.

This was rare, as were women in those early years of NSW. The colony was heavily male-dominated and those (white) women who were here, were mostly convicts; few wrote letters to give insight into poorer women’s experiences of NSW in those times. Of course, Elizabeth’s own preoccupations tended to center on her own experiences: her family, her faith, her home and beloved garden, the farming concerns, the small settler social circles in which she mixed.

Though she lived at the time and in places where violence between white settlers and Aboriginal people was erupting, she seemed not to spend a lot of time reflecting on the reasons and ramifications of the conflict; nor did she appear to examine the reasons why a penal colony was needed by Britain in the first place. In this, she was not unusual.

She suffered her share of tragedies and setbacks: the death of her firstborn, a baby daughter, on the voyage to Sydney; the loss of other children later; facing those long periods managing on her own so far from home and family; dramas and difficulties affecting her adult children; and especially, watching the decline of her husband’s mental health. His behaviour became more erratic and volatile as he descended into full-blown mania and paranoia, which must have been excrutiating for her to witness.

A point of great interest to me personally was that the Macarthurs began their voyage aboard the ship Neptune – the very same convict transport ship that not one, but two of my own ancestors arrived on. True to form, John fought so bitterly with the ship’s master that they were transferred to another of the Second Fleet ships for the bulk of the journey. I’m pretty sure that the Macarthurs would not have laid eyes on either of my ancestors, both of whom (against all odds) survived the voyage below-decks on the ‘hell-ship’, as the Neptune was later dubbed.

Still, it makes for a fascinating ‘what if?’ scenario: an encounter between the gentrifed couple and the ragged, suffering convict men.

Scott Tucker’s book paints a vivid picture of a full life lived with dignity and verve. It is also a fascinating account of the world the Macarthurs inhabited: a fragile but growing colony ‘at the edge of the world’, as the book’s subtitle suggests.

Elizabeth Macarthur: A Life at the Edge of the World was published in 2018 by Text Publishing Australia.