Remembered in Australian history, his origins somewhat fudged, as father of the better-known W.C. Wentworth, D’Arey turns out to be a complex and significant character. All his life he was an outsider. Born in Ireland in 1762, he was the youngest son of a Protestant innkeeper whose family had come down in the world. D’Arey qualified as an assistant surgeon in London, but then gravitated to vice and crime; through flash arrogance, Ritchie thinks, rather than a self-destructive urge.

Once in Australia, Wentworth spent his first six years on Norfolk Island, the margin of marginalised New South Wales. Back in Sydney, he still seemed too raffish for intimacy with the New South Wales Corps clique, the Macarthurs and their like. Because of his professional skills and an economic clout built up through trade, notably in rum, Wentworth could not be ignored. Walking alone, he trod delicately through the feuds and alliances which culminated in Governor Bligh’s overthrow in 1808.

Bligh had suspended Wentworth for allegedly using government prisoners on his own private projects; so it was not surprising that Wentworth sided with Macarthur and the men of property who made the Rum Rebellion. But he did not draw too close to them, and when Governor Macquarie arrived in 1810 Wentworth soon won favour with him.

By the end of 1810, the erstwhile outcast was principal surgeon, justice of the peace, commissioner for turnpike roads, and superintendent of police – the last appointment beginning a venerable New South Wales tradition of contentious appointments. Not surprisingly in one who learned his political ethics in eighteenth-century Ireland, Wentworth tended to be a lax and negligent administrator, happy to leave the work to subordinates while he got on with the serious business of enriching himself. Except when his business interests brought out the bully in him he was a humane justice who punished leniently. He weathered the criticisms following Commissioner Bigge’s reports in the early 1820s. When a court of quarter session was set up in 1824 he would have been its chairman but for failing health. Not bad for an ex-highwayman.

Success in the cut-throat business and factional politics of early New South Wales often depended on the quality of aristocratic influence which could be brought to bear in London. Where Macarthur had to exert himself in courting Lord Camden or Sir Joseph Banks, Wentworth had the inside running through his shadowy kinship with Lord Fitzwilliam. In addition to direct patronage, Wentworth had access to the earl’s London agent, the long-suffering and trustworthy Charles Cookney, who looked after commercial matters and fostered Wentworth’s sons when they were sent to England for education.

These sons were the children of the convict Catherine Crowley, Wentworth’s common law wife until her death in 1800. He never married, but through serial monogamy produced at least twelve children, the last born some months after his death, aged sixty-five, in 1827. The eldest son, William Charles, was the apple of D’Arcy’s eye, and some of Ritchie’s subtlest and most telling insights chart the changing relationship between father and son.

Where D’Arey was cool, diplomatic, and rationally self-interested – a gentleman of the road, maybe, but still a gentleman – William was roughshod, Byronic, and passionate. The father compartmentalised his life with almost chilling efficiency. He never wrote to his Irish family and seldom allowed personal rancour to interfere with business. In William’s character private and public motives fused stormily. He fought the Macarthurs not just because they were powerful, but because they snubbed his courtship of their sister.

William came early to prominence through his membership of the 1813 expedition which publicised a route across the Blue Mountains. But – and this is one of the few points where Ritchie leaves a reader asking for more comment – he was a slow developer, unsure of his path forward in the world. He spent most of his twenties knocking about London, Paris, and Switzerland, unable to settle to any aim.

It took the stimulus of attacks on his father to galvanise him into publishing the first significant book on Australia by ‘a native of the colony’ in London 1819. He urged trial by jury and parliamentary government, and saw himself as the agent of change.

Having qualified in law, and spent a year as an elderly undergraduate at Cambridge, he returned to Sydney in 1824 eager to overthrow the exclusives who had denied the Wentworths their due recognition. Injured family pride and democratic aspiration fed one another, and his father lived to see him leader of the emancipist party who challenged the ‘autocracy’ of Governor Darling.

In choosing his ‘father and son, theme Ritchie is enabled to explore several illuminating aspects of the early decades of Anglo-Australian relations: in particular the export of political ideology, the resilience of concepts of family, and the shaping force of the Australian social and physical environment. He also shows that the first generation of Australian entrepreneurs had nothing to learn from the late twentieth century when it came to the interplay of business and political interests.

Most of all it is in the thoroughness of his scholarship and the elegance of his prose – an elegance well reflected in Miegunyah Press’ layout – that Ritchie consolidates his strong standing as historian of Australia’s early decades. In a field already distinguished by the work of Shaw, the early Manning Clark, Frost, and Atkinson, he is one of the leaders.