A former convict as banker - who was a woman!
Yes, a woman. Good grief, what was the world coming to. They'll be appointing a woman as prime minister next. Holey moley. Mind you, she didn't always identify as such. A woman, I mean. Or, at least, at the age she then was, thirteen.
For this woman, Macquarie went right beyond the pale. Mary Reibey, a cross-dressing horse thief, who at the age of thirteen had run away from her middle-class family with another girl, was sentenced to death as a boy.
Fortunately for Australia, not to mention Mary, her execution was commuted to transportation, when upon being forced to take a bath prior to his/her trip into exile it was discovered he/she lacked the same bits and pieces as the other boys. Somebody recognised her as a girl and reported her to the authorities.
Perhaps she was lucky that's all they did. Or maybe we just don't know about the rest. We wonder what happened to the girl she ran away with. We hope they were happy for the short time they were together.
Anyway, a motion was put to the court asking for Mary to be let free, but judges of the time were known to hang cross-dressing girls. Mind you, cross-dressing blokes weren't in the same danger, otherwise most of the English private school boys, including the entire House of Lords and most of the House of Commons, would probably have been hanging on the end of a rope. Fortunately for Mary, her judge stuck with transportation. The worst of this was she had to have another bath, this time among the same genitalia.
Upon her arrival in Sydney, she winked her way into the marriage bed of a man in the process of building up a large fortune in land. When he died, Mary inherited what he had left and built it into a veritable treasure-trove. Mind you, don't get the impression Mary was a pleasant lady. She was charged once with personally beating up a bloke who owed her money!
Still, she had so much moolah, and the obvious nouse to make it and look after it, that when Macquarie, as part of the process of replacing rum with normal cash, decided to found the Bank of New South Wales, he appointed Mary as one of its directors, along with a swag of, mostly, other emancipists(freed convicts).
A woman! An emancipist woman!! A cross-dressing, horse-stealing emancipist woman who should have been hanged twice over!!! A cross-dressing, horse-stealing emancipist woman who was probably at heart a lesbian, if not bisexual, who should probably have been hanged thrice over. Or she would have been if lesbianism was a crime. As director of a bank, no less!!!!
No wonder Macquarie's enemies, who had a fine business lending money at disgusting rates of interest prior to the bank, were growing in number. Just remember the reaction of their moral descendants when Australia had its first female prime minister. No wonder the bank nearly went broke in the first few years.
But, of course, now we know the bank as Westpac. And, to be frank, we're not sure this particular leaving of Macquarie's is a blessing. The fact Lex's father and brother worked for competitors has nothing to do with this opinion. Rather, the unfortunate fact all our major banks are now in the hands of those self-same moral descendants of the Rum Corps officers and their ilk very strongly influences our thinking.