Why should Lachlan be remembered well?
Australia, despite its much bruited egalitarianism, has actually had an almost constant struggle for power between those who have little or nothing, and those who have much.
Of course this is a generalised and simplistic statement describing something that is often much more complex. Nonetheless, it can be supported by numerous examples for which this is not the place. Except, Macquarie stepped into and largely exacerbated one of these struggles.
In an on-going sense, Macquarie did two major things for Australia. First, he generated the idea that it is worth spending government money on the construction of essential and, indeed, non-essential infrastructure.
Second, by the time Macquarie arrived in Sydney there was a growing population of people who were not convicts or jailers or former jailers. Some of them were free people who had emigrated to this new colony. Some had been born in Australia. But the great majority were former convicts.
It suited the colony's wealthy, more particularly those who had been former jailers and their well-heeled friends, to believe that once one had been stained with crime, one was always stained with crime. And so were your children, for generations to come.
But, of course, this did not include any of the former jailers and their friends whenever they committed the many things that other financially less-well-endowed people might regard as crimes.
Imagine their horror, therefore, when Macquarie made it clear he regarded these former convicts as full members of the British family, having served their time, and therefore regaining the same rights as anyone else. That included the same rights to be appointed to important civil positions as people who had never been convicts.
After all, back in England, lower class scum were kept in a state of starvation and disease where they deserved, and only wealthy and ennobled people had the right to commit crimes and get away with it, usually, except for the occasional nob hanged with a silken rope for what even his fellow nobs saw as very seriously perverted sex crimes.
Considering Macquarie's predilection for fraud, it's not surprising he held former criminals in some regard. But there were two groups of criminals here. Those who had been caught, and those who hadn't because they dominated the administrative and judicial systems. One might perhaps have expected Macquarie to have sided with the latter. But this would be to greatly misread man.
For, rather surprisingly, perhaps, beneath Lachlan's booze-soaked, pox-ridden old hide beat a heart of gold. Or, rather, what counted for one in those days. We've seen this in Macquarie's powerful attachment to his clan and his chieftain when it seemed all others on Ulva had rejected them.
And perhaps the fact his chieftain had been reduced to virtual poverty by the English government and its carpetbagging mates made him rather more sympathetic with those that same government and its supporters would condemn.