In contrast to the Kings, the Macarthur family which was generously provided with sons in the first generation produced only a granddaughter in the next. One can’t help wondering whether James Macarthur’s grasp of New South Wales politics in the fifties might not have been surer or stronger if there had been a few Macarthur sons and nephews strategically placed to act as additional eyes and ears in pursuit of the family interest. Such speculation, however, is far from Professor John Manning Ward’s study, which is a very difficult book. It is neither biography nor political history, nor either an intellectual or philosophical life and times. It contains most of the materials for a life of James Macarthur, but Ward’s stated intention is to rescue the history of conservatism from the neglect of historians with progressive or other axes to grind.

James Macarthur as a ‘sophisticated political theorist’ – the judgement of Geoffrey Serle, though not a judgement sustained by the evidence of the book – occupies a central place in Ward’s account of conservatism, and the main part of the book is based on Macarthur’s education in his father’s shadow, his early experience as an advocate for his family’s interests in London, his considerable correspondence with them and later with his brother-in-law G.W. Norman, a director of the Bank of England, and his speeches and political manoeuvrings.

It cannot be shown that Macarthur was either the leader of the conservatives in New South Wales or their chief inspiration. If anything, he was a little remote and feared or respected for his name and the size of the family land holdings. His own views seem to have been mainly reactions against any proposed changes. Terms such as ‘feared’ or ‘distrusted’ recur. His seems to have been a defensive and pessimistic personality. Having had change forced upon him, however, he usually managed to make the best of it. For example, having opposed the idea of. squatting licences, when the system came into operation, he and his brother quickly made for fresh pasture themselves on the Murrumbidgee. Underlying these anxious reactions there seems to have been a set of general principles to which James Macarthur held – a belief in the ownership of land as a guarantee of earnest worth, in inherited rights and responsibilities, in a hierarchical ordering of society, and in stability. His views on the relative responsibilities of individuals and the state in relation to matters of economics and morals are less clear. Alan Atkinson of the University of New England, who has also made a detailed study of the political career of James Macarthur, has claimed for example that Ward is quite wrong in his interpretation of Macarthur’s views on state aid.

The explanatory context we are given in which to understand Macarthur’s political ideas is a mixture of contemporary developments in Canada, the writings of de Tocqueville on America and of Sismondi on economics, and the contemporary quarterlies. There is no discussion of what might be thought relevant developments in Britain, for example the parliamentary reforms of the 1830s, the rise of philosophical radicalism, the growth of political economy, or penology.

By the 1860s, New South Wales had been made safe for conservatism, but through the democratisation of all the things Macarthur had hoped to preserve in exclusive hands. Land ownership, respectability, family, stable government all became the anxious concern of the new immigrant middle classes, composed in essence of people very like Macarthur’s parents in their reasons for emigrating. Somehow it is hard to see that Macarthur and his few friends were more significant in the creation of this climate of conservatism than the usually recognized forces in the colonial office in London and the self-proclaimed enthusiasts for democracy in the colony.

It may be that a better key to Australian conservatism in this period is not James Macarthur, who was already an eighteenth-century anachronism, but W.C. Wentworth who struts and stamps his way like a shadow-puppet across the background of Ward’s book. That James Macarthur was a conservative is beyond doubt, but his conservatism seems to have more in common with the rural England of the Black Acts, and England which knew little about industrialisation and less about the revolutionary pressures in France. He was an old-fashioned squire. His immense and carefully extended land holdings (of which this book has very little to say) were the real source of his status, wealth, and power in the eyes of his contemporaries. Unlike the squatters he was in a position to sell should he so desire. In his land he controlled a resource as rare after the Ripon Regulations and as desirable as gold. Those early land grants which formed the basis of the Macarthur estates were almost the equivalent of William the Conqueror’s grants of baronies to his faithful followers.

One of the more poignant tales of Philip Gidley King’s retirement concerns his attempt to secure a grant of land for himself in New South Wales. The tale is not well told here as the authors are both puzzled and embarrassed by apparent indignities and

inconsistencies of behaviour. Here as elsewhere in their book they lack the skilful and knowledgeable exposition and interpretation of evidence which would be the mark of a professional historian. Surprisingly, similar deficiencies are apparent also in James Macarthur. On the surface this is the epitome of scholarly history. Whereas King comes in an easy format with good and lively illustrations and sixteen pages in full colour, its endnotes and odd bibliography seem a caricature, perhaps intentional, of scholarly apparatus. Macarthur, however, is heavy with expensive footnotes and twenty-two pages of bibliography. It makes no concessions to the reader who is not already an expert in the period and the literature. There is not so much as a picture of James Macarthur, nor even the standard acknowledgement of assistance from librarians, archivists, typists or other scholars or permission to quote from original manuscripts. Yet beneath all this weight, and despite the intellectual fascination of Ward’s basic proposition, it must be said that the evidence is treated sometimes casually, and the case argued neither skilfully nor persuasively.