The First Dismissal

How Governor Macquarie invented an idea of Australia, a convict built it—and how Britain tried to tear it down. While violent revolution and social upheaval rocked Europe, far away in New South Wales, Governor Lachlan Macquarie was sowing the seeds for the Australian idea of the "fair go." Macquarie was a reformer and an emancipator. He believed that a person's worth—be they gentry, infantry, or convict – lay in what they were capable of doing, not what they had done in the past. He freed the brilliant, mercurial convict Francis Greenway and appointed him government architect for the buildings that would shape a new nation. But to the Tory British government of 1820, Macquarie and Greenway's unconventional alliance threatened NSW's very legitimacy as a penal colony.  Here Luke Slattery breathes dramatic life into Australia's first political dismissal and, along the way, maps Macquarie and Greenway's bold collaborations and extraordinary architectural—and cultural—legacy.

Luke Slattery is a Sydney-based journalist and editor. He has served as higher education editor at the Age, Australian, and Financial Review, and has been the recipient of the Higher Education Journalist of the Year Award, the European Union journalist award, and the Australia Council's Keesing writing fellowship in Paris. His journalism and writing have been published in the main Australian metropolitan newspapers and internationally at the International Herald Tribune, Spectator, Scotsman, and US Chronicle of Higher Education; a number of his articles have been republished online at the Arts & Letters Daily web portal. He is the author of Crisis in the Clever Country: Why Our Universities are Failing (with Geoffrey Maslen), Dating Aphrodite: Modern Adventures in the Ancient World, and Reclaiming Epicurus: Could an Ancient Philosophy of Happiness Save the World?