In January 1812, aged thirty-four, he presented for payment a forged promissory note. No one has been able to explain the reason for this. As he was bankrupt, any money he obtained would go to his creditors. Greenway had forged the hand of his solicitor, who could testify to this. He pleaded guilty. He would have known the punishment was death. This was commuted to transportation for fourteen years. Had he gambled on the fact that the sentence would be commuted and that this was a way of escaping to a better life, as others had done who had heard of the opportun-ities in New South Wales? A contemporary newspaper wrote that Greenway was helped by ‘the solicitations of ... several Gentlemen of the highest respectability’. Perhaps his was the key to his commutation. In any case, he now had a free passage to New South Wales courtesy of His Majesty.

Greenway arrived in Sydney in February 1814 clutching a copy of William Chambers’s A Treatise on Civil Architecture, first published in 1759, a portfolio of his drawings, and a letter of recommendation from Arthur Phillip, first governor of New South Wales. The latter may have been one of the ‘Gentlemen of the highest respectability’. So also may have been members of the Howard family, whose head was the duke of Norfolk. By the early 1800s Greenway was referring to himself as Francis Howard Greenway, a time-honoured way to flatter a patron. Perhaps the wealthy Harford family of bankers and merchants was also involved. One member lent him a rare book when he was in prison.

Lachlan Macquarie had been governor since 1810. Like Greenway, Macquarie profoundly believed in the civilising power of architecture and town planning but had hitherto lacked a competent architect. The two were soul mates in this regard and, within one month of his landing, Greenway was given his parole in the form of a ticket-of-leave. In 1817 he would be given a conditional pardon, a mere four years into his sentence. This was made absolute two years later.

Together, the governor and the architect planned and built and sometimes argued. Greenway could be high-handed and insolent, even to His Excellency; highly critical of the work of others when it did not meet his high standards; sure of his abilities; argumentative; a perfectionist. He described himself as ‘irritable’ – but also ‘fully first rate’, in the same sentence. This is pretty much a description of the highly creative personality. He was not corrupt, though corruption was even then well established in Sydney and prevalent in the building trade. He did not manage money well and does not seem to have been much interested in material possessions. Information on his private life, though, is skeletal. He was, as far as we know, happily married to Mary, whom he wed in England in 1809, and of whom everyone spoke highly. She bore him seven children and ran a school to make ends meet.

A flurry of public works issued from Greenway at the governor’s command. As often happens in these situations, though, the relationship between the ‘activist and at times impetuous’ governor and the ‘quixotic and querulous’ architect, to quote the author, soured and by early 1820 Greenway was subjected to closer supervision by the engineer, Major George Druitt. Macquarie had complained of Greenway’s dilatoriness. The author reasonably comments that ‘[w]hether Greenway was inefficient and disorganised, indolent, neglectful and erratic, or simply overwhelmed, is hard to determine’.

It appears Greenway never had any assistance with his work and the mounting number of commissions became impossible for one man to oversee. As the author writes: ‘He skilfully overcame paltry budgets, shortages and poor-quality materials, adapting his designs to a restricted palette and limited means. He fought with his convict labour force whose skills were patchy at best, but managed to cajole acceptable work from their unwilling bodies.’

Macquarie’s rule ended in November 1821 and his successor, Sir Thomas Brisbane, continued with Greenway’s services until November 1822, when he dismissed him. Greenway had some private clients, but these were not enough to relieve his financial hardship. He lived in rooms in a mouldering house in George Street until his last months, when he moved to a hut on the 800 acres Macquarie had granted him on the Hunter River which he had named Howard Farm. He died there in September 1837, aged fifty-nine, probably from typhoid.

Alasdair McGregor has written a well-researched and engrossing story with verve and panache. He is an accomplished writer with an inventive turn of phrase, and the book is a page-turner. However, McGregor sometimes goes further than I think the evidence will support. He refers to Greenway as a ‘doomed hero’ who ‘squanders his life on the altar of conceit’. Greenway did not squander his life; he produced an enviable body of work, eighty-two buildings in less than a decade. McGregor writes of Greenway’s ‘demons’, his ‘delusions’. There is no evidence that Greenway was plagued by demons or was delusional in the technical sense. The use of ‘paranoiac’ is extreme, and ‘bereft of reason, edging ever closer to disintegration’ is over-the-top unless there is some evidence I have missed.

Sometimes it is as if McGregor wishes to see the worst in his subject. For example, in 1818, Greenway criticised the contractor for the quality of the work in progress on the walls of St Matthew’s, Windsor. A committee, consisting of two representatives of the government and two of the contractor, concluded unanimously that the work was not sound and the walls were subsequently demolished. Henry Kitchen, a rival of Greenway, was the contractor and this ruined him financially. McGregor refers to this as ‘Greenway’s maliciousness’ and his ‘devilish handiwork’ yet it was Kitchen who had allowed shoddy work.

These criticisms, though, are minor compared to the achievement of this biography. The book will remind readers that, for a few years at least, New South Wales had a government passionately concerned with building and town planning as a means of creating a civilised environment. McGregor has encouraged me to look again at all Greenway’s work. If you are in Sydney, go out to Windsor and gaze at St Matthew’s. Allow your mind and soul to be refreshed and ponder what we have lost. Greenway would be worth writing about if this building alone had survived.