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Macquarie
- Narrated by: Peter Byrne
- Length: 18 hrs and 9 mins
- Categories: Biographies & Memoirs, Military & War
Non-member price: $42.54
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Publisher's Summary
Lachlan Macquarie is credited with shaping Australia's destiny, transforming a harsh, foreboding penal colony into an agricultural powerhouse and ultimately a prosperous society.
He also helped shape Australia's national character. An egalitarian at heart, Macquarie saw boundless potential in Britain's refuse, and under his rule many former convicts went on to become successful administrators, land owners and businesspeople.
However, the governor's ambitions for the colony brought him into conflict with the continent's original landowners, and he was responsible for the deaths of Aboriginal men, women and children brutally killed in a military operation intended to create terror among local Indigenous people.
So was Macquarie the man who sowed the seeds of a new nation or a tyrant who destroyed Aboriginal resistance?
In this, the most comprehensive biography yet of this fascinating colonial governor, acclaimed biographer Grantlee Kieza draws on Macquarie's rich and detailed journals. Ultimately, Macquarie laid the foundations for a new nation, but, in the process, he played a part in the dispossession of the continent's first nations.
Lover, fighter, egalitarian, autocrat, Lachlan Macquarie is a complex and engaging character who first envisaged the nation we call Australia.
What listeners say about Macquarie
Reviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Anonymous User
- 04-11-2020
A great read about a great man.
Without a doubt Australia would not be what it is today without the visionary of this man. A great insight to his efforts and his life.
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- PerryO
- 23-08-2020
The "Father of Australia" Indeed !!
Brilliant Man, Brilliant Book !! Not too often I finish a book with enough pent up emotion to shed a tear, I loved it and We All Live Here Because of there's Pioneers.
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- Amazon Customer
- 31-03-2020
Brilliant!
Brilliantly written. Brilliantly narrated. Brilliantly describes the foundations of a nation and national character. Just Brilliant!!!
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- Rodney Wetherell
- 04-03-2020
Fine portrait of a remarkable man
I found Grantlee Kieza's Macquarie extremely interesting and well-told. Macquarie is a famous name to me, but I knew nothing at all about his career before he arrived in Australia, nor of his growing up on a rocky island in the Hebrides, and all this was well worth hearing. The conflicts he had to deal with in Sydney almost made me weep - at such an early stage of the development of NSW, it is a great shame that so many people such as Marsden fought Macquarie every inch of the way. Many of his ideas were remarkably enlightened for the time, and he saw that NSW would not make progress unless many of the convicts were given tickets-of-leave to become part of the building process. I was not entirely happy with reader Peter Byrne, who has a strange habit of pausing before key words - not only when he is introducing quotes. But generally he is pretty good in making the story easy to follow. Grantlee Kieza is to be congratulated for his careful research and good narrative.
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- Amazon Customer
- 12-11-2019
Wonderful story
Thoroughly enjoyed learning about this extraordinary Governor of NSW. Very well read and very moving.
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