ABSTRACT

Chapter 3 concentrates on Lachlan Macquarie’s “civilising” measures. The chief contention of the chapter is that Macquarie’s personal advancement to the exalted post of Governor of New South Wales, combined with the rapid economic and social development of his native Scotland in the eighteenth century, had had a profound influence on the way he perceived and treated the Aborigines. The chapter also emphases Macquarie’s commitment to the “civilising” methodologies grounded in the assumptions of the stadial theory, according to which social progress was predicated on the abandonment of nomadism in favour of fixed settlement and the adoption of agriculture as the main mode of subsistence.