A Trip to Australia and New Zealand
Sydney - Hyde Park Barracks Museum
The upper floor of the barracks has been restored to the period when the building served as convict housing.
The displays are simplicity personified and very powerfully capture the spirit of difficult days long gone.
Governor Macquarie was another one of many fascinating personalities in the pages of Australian history. He saw service in the British Army during the American War of Independence where he was assigned as a junior officer in New York and North Carolina. Following the British defeat at York Town, he went on to serve in Scotland, India, and Egypt, before being appointed Governor of New South Wales in 1809. Prior to his appointment, the position of governor had always been filled with a naval officer, but London felt that the politics then in play in Sydney required an army officer. Governor William Bligh had just been deposed by the Rum Rebellion.
The leaders of the rebellion had already taken their case to London by the time Macquarie landed in Sydney. He immediately took firm charge of the political situation and established himself as the sole political and military authority in the country. In 1812, the Select Committee on Transportation generally confirmed Macquarie's view that the convict system in place in Australia should be liberalized. A system of parole was put into place that permitted convicts to escape most of the restrictions on their freedom and live a normal life as long as they followed the rules that were imposed. (Greenway's emancipation was part of this policy.)
Macquarie was interested in exploring the hinterland of the continent and it was he who sent Blaxland, Wentworth, and Lawson through the Blue Mountains to the vast interior plains. He was also the first governor to establish a city (Bathurst) in the interior. Macquarie personally laid out the grid of streets that still exists in Sydney proper and understandably made Macquarie Street one of the most important.
Macquarie was the first governor to use "Australia" in dispatches instead of New South Wales to describe the colony that he governed. In 1817, he recommended that the name be officially changed. The Colonial Office officially changed the colony's name in 1824.
