- In short two or three page chapters, Elizabeth Macarthur, the unhappy wife of wool baron John Macarthur, describes in a memoir her life and experiences in the early colony of NSW. ‘What I am writing here are the pungent true words I was never able to write’.
- The memoir, recently discovered, is a fictitious construction by Grenville, but it is truly a magnificent and enlightening creation. Elizabeth is presented as an honest, insightful, highly intelligent and powerful woman. Her husband was a brutal, cold, unlovable man, who treated her as an insignificant chattel. He was a fundamentally weak and insipid, full of pretence and 'flummery', and subject to 'lunatic compulsion'. She sees right through him and masterfully manipulates him.
- Her words are eminently quotable. Here a few samples:
To stay always within the bounds laid down is to remain a child.
A flame had burned in me, to be bigger than those bounds. That should be no crime.
...he was a husband of mechanical courtesies...he was blind to me as a person.
Mr Macarthur was an importunate husband with an excess of animal spirits...I cried out against it, there could be no mistaking the word NO!
Grandiose schemes were as necessary to Mr Macarthur as food and drink.
He had to transmute suffering into a blade, to punish the world that made him suffer.
A man certain of his ground does not need to construct a sentence like a Turk’s head knot.
She’s very astute in her assessments of people. In distilled, simple prose, she describes the life and conditions of the earliest years of Sydney and the officers, marines and convicts trying to make a liveable place out of it. It was a harsh and brutal environment and crime and corruption defined it. But Elizabeth learns quickly how to navigate the social order and seek harmony. ‘...discourtesy, in this too-small society, would have had consequences'.
- After the early years of struggle, including giving birth to seven children, two of whom tragically die, her longing to return to Devon starts to fade. John Macarthur is granted land in Parramatta, and his intention is to raise beef. But the ‘attacks and depredations’ by the natives led by Pemulwuy were constant.
- Elizabeth begins to realise that another way to describe what is going on is to call it ‘defending a homeland.’ She shows empathy towards the natives and respects their insight and subtle humour. 'It was a shadow at the edge of my life, the consciousness that I was on land that other people knew was theirs’.
- A recluse Mr Dawes teaches her the basics of astronomy and botany, and introduces her to an Indigenous family. She relishes her growing enlightenment, becoming increasingly knowledgeable about the original inhabitants of the land and their languages and customs. And for a brief time she enjoys a warm and loving sexual relationship with Mr Dawes.
- Cruelly, her oldest child Edward is sent by her husband to England for his schooling. She’s not even allowed to say goodbye. ‘I had allowed a terrible wrong to be done.’
- John Macarthur in the meantime allows his infantile obsessions to get the better of him and is committed to two terms in jail in England - twelve years in all. Elizabeth successfully develops and grows the Merino wool business that history has credited to her failure of a husband. And it's his monuments that are littered throughout Australia.
Now, after so many years here, I know better than ever what has been done to the Gadigal, the Wangal, the Cameraygal, the Burramattagal, and all the others. Not just the turning-off from their lands and the damage to their old ways. Not just the cruelties inflicted. Not just the deaths. Behind all that is another, fundamental violence: the replacement of a true history by a false one.
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