Daley, Paul: Lachlan Macquarie was no humanitarian

Daley, Paul

Lachlan Macquarie was no humanitarian: his own words show he was a terrorist‘, Guardian Australia, 5 April 2016

Discusses the strategy employed towards Indigenous Australians by New South Wales Governor (1810-22) Lachlan Macquarie.

Macquarie is perhaps the most eulogised and memorialised of colonial governors, with a university, many buildings, a bank, a library and countless statues and plaques named in his honour. Since 2013 a statue of Macquarie, born in 1762 in Argyll, Scotland, has stood in Hyde Park, the open space he created in central Sydney for public recreation. Perhaps the statue should be paired with a monument to remember warriors Kanabygal and Durelle, who were among the Aboriginal men, women and children Macquarie ordered murdered at Appin in the NSW highlands 200 years ago this month.

The article gives details of the Appin massacre (14 Indigenous Australians killed at a time of lawlessness, involving killings of both whites and blacks) and the instructions Macquarie gave to his troops. It notes the presence of Indigenous remains in a holding room at the National Museum of Australia as well as a sanitised paragraph in the Australian Dictionary of Biography entry on Macquarie.

More on Macquarie’s policy from Michael Organ. Ellen Fanning on the ABC.

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