Major General Lachlan Macquarie, CB (/məˈkwɒrɪ/; Scottish Gaelic: Lachlann MacGuaire; 31 January 1762 – 1 July 1824)[1] was a British Army officer and colonial administrator from Scotland.

He is considered by historians to have had a crucial influence on the transition of New South Wales from a penal colony to a free settlement and therefore to have played a major role in the shaping of Australian society in the early nineteenth century.

He had a significant impact on the development of modern Sydney, establishing the layout upon which the modern city centre is based, establishing Hyde Park as Australia's first public park, overseeing the construction of various public buildings along Macquarie Street, and devising the layouts of a number of settlements which today are part of Western Sydney.

While seeking to promote morality and orderliness, Macquarie favoured the liberal treatment of ex-convicts, known as emancipists, appointing them to prominent government positions and providing generous land grants.

A year later Macquarie participated in the taking of Colombo and other Dutch possessions in Ceylon, and was made commander of the occupying garrison at Galle.

Employing guerilla tactics, Pazhassi inflicted sizable casualties on the 77th, killing a number of officers with Macquarie himself being wounded in the foot.

The British torched all the villages in the district but conceded defeat with the East India Company forced into a peace treaty with Pazhassi.

He described the "glorious" aftermath where the bodies of Tipu and his people "lay in such immense Heaps on the Ramparts...as well as in different Parts of the Town that no regular account of them could be taken".

His elevation to the social elite saw him meet several times with Jacob Bosanquet and the directors of the East India Company and he also had a personal introduction to King George III.

He served in London as Assistant Adjutant General to Lord Harrington and was able to purchase an estate on his native Isle of Mull, which he named Jarvisfield.

In 1805, Macquarie was ordered to return to India to take charge of the 86th Regiment of Foot and after arriving also became military secretary to Governor Duncan at Bombay.

[20][21] Macquarie's first task was to restore orderly, lawful government and discipline in the colony following the Rum Rebellion of 1808 against Governor William Bligh.

Macquarie was ordered by the British government to arrest two of the leaders of the Rum Rebellion, John Macarthur and Major George Johnston.

Macquarie himself chose to keep the peace with the remaining NSW Corps officers and maintained an ambivalent attitude to the rebellion against Bligh.

[24] Part of Macquarie's undertaking of bringing order to the colony was to refashion the convict settlement into an urban environment of organised towns with streets and parks.

[26] Other notable edifices built during Macquarie's tenure include the Parramatta Female Orphan School, St James Church, and the Hyde Park Barracks.

[28] In late 1810, Macquarie toured the regions around Sydney naming and marking out the sites and street plans of future towns such as Liverpool, Windsor and Richmond.

[43] Also, the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815 brought a renewed flood of both convicts and settlers to New South Wales, doubling the white population.

He himself participated in a number of expeditions around the Sydney Basin and to other regions including Jervis Bay, Port Stephens, the Hunter River, Bathurst and Van Diemen's Land.

[42] Macquarie appointed John Oxley as surveyor-general and sent him on expeditions in 1817–18 to further explore the Lachlan River, Liverpool Plains and the north coast of New South Wales and to find suitable lands for colonisation.

On arrival in the colony in 1810 Macquarie gave a speech expressing the wish that "Natives of this Country...may be always treated with kindness and attention", and for the next four years very little conflict occurred.

Around forty Aboriginal children, some of whom were 'decoyed away' from their parents and others taken during frontier conflict, became students and were taught in the British tradition by William and Elizabeth Shelley.

[53][54][12] Macquarie also developed a strategy of rewarding Aboriginals who assisted the British by declaring them 'chiefs of their tribe' and presenting them with a brass breast-plate (known as a gorget) engraved with their name and title even though it often did not reflect their actual clan status.

In 1816, gorgets and land parcels were given to Colebee and Nurragingy by Macquarie for their role in assisting the military operations against hostile Aboriginals along the Nepean River.

— I have directed as many Natives as possible to be made Prisoners, with the view of keeping them as Hostages until the real guilty ones have surrendered themselves, or have been given up by their Tribes to summary Justice.

[57]On 17 April, the detachment of 33 grenadiers led by Captain James Wallis managed to corner a large group of Gandangara and Tharawal people near the Cataract River gorge in the upper Nepean catchment.

Two surviving women and three children were taken prisoner and Macquarie rewarded Wallis for his efforts by appointing him Commandant of the Newcastle convict settlement.

[59] Bigge consulted with the 'exclusive' colonists such as John Macarthur, Samuel Marsden and Archibald Bell who were strongly against the social reforms of Macquarie.

Bigge concurred with these opinions and saw that government expediture could be significantly decreased and the British wool industry strengthened if large numbers of convicts were assigned to these 'men of capital' as cheap labour.

[65][66] A statue of Macquarie commissioned by the NSW Government and created by Terrance Plowright in 2012, stands at the north entrance to Hyde Park in the centre of Sydney.