What reforms did Lachlan Macquarie implement?

Lachlan Macquarie's reforms transformed colonial New South Wales between 1810 and 1821. His main initiatives covered civil rights for emancipated convicts, public works and town planning, agricultural development, the creation of civic institutions, and the regularisation of currency and banking. His policies set the basis on which the colony grew through the rest of the nineteenth century.

Emancipist policy was Macquarie's most controversial reform. He insisted that emancipated convicts (those who had served their sentences) should enjoy the same civil rights as free settlers, with access to land grants, the right to give evidence in court, the right to hold public office, and the social respectability of the free. He appointed emancipists to senior positions including the surgeon William Redfern, the architect Francis Greenway, and the magistrate Andrew Thompson. This policy outraged the exclusivists (the free-born settler and officer class) who wanted convicts and their descendants permanently marked as a separate class.

Public works and town planning were extensive. Macquarie commissioned more than 75 public buildings designed by convict architect Francis Greenway, including Hyde Park Barracks (1817 to 1819, now a museum), the Conservatorium of Music (originally Government House Stables), St James' Church in Sydney (1820), St Matthew's Church in Windsor (1821), and Macquarie Lighthouse at South Head (1818, the first lighthouse in Australia). He laid out the towns of Bathurst, Liverpool, Campbelltown, Windsor, Richmond, Pitt Town, Castlereagh, Wilberforce, and Penrith as planned settlements with set street grids and central squares.

Other reforms covered agriculture, education, infrastructure, and currency. Macquarie established the first public schools (the Native Institution for Aboriginal children in 1814 and several others for European children), promoted agricultural settlement on the western plains after the 1813 Blue Mountains crossing, established the Bank of New South Wales (now Westpac) in 1817, and introduced the colony's first proper currency to replace the rum-based exchange of the early period. He also formalised diplomatic engagement with Aboriginal Australians through annual feasts at Parramatta, although his record on Aboriginal matters is mixed: his orders led to the Appin Massacre of April 1816, in which at least 14 Aboriginal people were killed by British soldiers. Macquarie's legacy is preserved in Macquarie University, Macquarie Street in Sydney, the Macquarie River, Macquarie Island, the federal electorate of Macquarie, and many other Australian places, alongside Mrs Macquarie's Chair in the Royal Botanic Gardens in Sydney named for his wife Elizabeth Macquarie.