Man of honour: John Macarthur - duellist, rebel, founding father. Michael Duffy. 2003.

AUTOGRAPHED BY AUTHOR

Early Sydney was a place in which powerful men were struggling with and against one another to create a nation. The most capable and effective of these founding fathers was John Maxarthur.

John and Elizabeth MacArthur were the first educated couple to choose to come to Australia. When they arrived in 1790, John was a penniless lieutenant. By the time he dies insane, he had created the wool industry, so important to Australia’s future, and a business empire and a dynasty. Yet this success was not without a price, either for him or for those whose paths crossed his own. He was a man of amazing aggressiveness who fought three duels, almost fought several more, and opposed a series of governors. 

This biography takes the reader into the intellectual and physical world of the late eighteenth century, and the fledgling society precariously establishing itself around Sydney Cove. It explores the first two thirds of John MacArthur’s full and dramatic life, which climaxed with the Rum Rebellion. Michael Duffy suggests this was caused not by rum but by the code of honour, which set out how gentlemen should behave. General William Bligh was overthrown by the powerful people of Sydney because he was no gentleman.

John Macarthur lived in a time of transition, when the democratic rule of law was battling to smother the aristocratic code of honour. This is the story of that death struggles, as revealed in the ice of an extruindi ideal and the early decades of the nation he did so much to create.