John Mackenzie (colonial settler)
He did not follow family precedent and enter the legal profession, instead becoming a soldier, at sixteen years of age, in 1807.
Douglass unwisely had become involved in the political manoeuvres of the colony, and he had been forced to leave the colony—temporarily it transpired—by Governor Darling.
[2][19] Mackenzie took up 'Dangelong' station, a vast squatting run of 44 square miles (11,396 hectares), in the Monaro region near Cooma, but chose to reside with his family on the land that he owned at Nerriga.
Mackenzie and Wilson are notable as being among the main proponents and financial backers of The Wool Road and the new port of South Huskisson (now Vincentia).
[27] In 1838, he became a Police Magistrate,[28] at Braidwood, although in that judicial role he attracted serious criticism and controversy; it appears that he ran his courtroom, in an idiosyncratic and authoritarian manner, with regard neither for the rights of defendants nor the freedom of the press.
[29][30][31][32][33][34] Mackenzie was ruined financially, in the aftermath of the economic depression of the early 1840s, no doubt complicated by the failure of the privately-owned Wool Road and the port of South Huskisson.
[37] In 1853, he was reduced to asking permission to live in a house in South Huskisson that belonged to Edward Deas Thompson.
[44] Mackenzie's female descendants were members of important pastoral families, in New South Wales and Victoria.
[45] Another daughter, Ann (known as Annie), married Arthur Blomfield—son of another Peninsula War veteran and colonial landholder, Thomas Valentine Blomfield—at Denham Court in 1856, and then lived near Cooma.
[46][47] His eldest daughter, Elizabeth, married Alured Tasker Faunce, a Captain of the 4th Regiment, later a controversial colonial magistrate and a pioneer settler of Queanbeyan.
Most of his descendants lived in the Monaro, Shoalhaven, Southern Highlands, and Yass districts of New South Wales.
[38] with an inscription reading: "Corunna : Salamanca : Vittoria : St. Sebastian : Nive : Peninsula : Blenkensburgh [sic].
"[51][3][1] His wife Charlotte died at 'Coodra Vale', the home of her daughter Janet and son-in-law, Stewart Ryrie, Junior, at Wee Jasper, near Yass, in 1875.
One of his assigned convicts, Cornelius Flynn, bore on his back the scars of harsh corporal punishments carried out on Mackenzie's orders.
[56] In the 1860s and into the early 1870's, Andrew was a prominent citizen of the area around Tomerong, albeit one subjected to some public mockery by his opponents.
[57][58][59][60][61] Yet, despite his lands and his wealthy grazier sibling relatives, Andrew Mackenzie died, in August 1878, intestate and apparently in a state of near starvation, at North Huskisson.
The finding at his inquest was that he died four days after he had a fit—perhaps a stroke—and had fallen unconscious into a fireplace, where parts of his body received very serious burns.
