Family
John and Elizabeth Macarthur, with their frail son Edward, arrived in Sydney, two years after their wedding, in 1790. It was another three years before a house was built at Parramatta, 23 kilometres upstream from Port Jackson. From nine births, seven children survived infancy. In coming decades, the family's trading and farming interests, along with John’s political conflicts, ambitions and affairs, came to dominate colonial society. Elizabeth Macarthur, not always content, remained in Australia for the rest of her life, while John returned twice to England forging contacts and patronage and directing his sons' education. Towards the end of his life, John Macarthur devoted himself entirely to the development and promotion of trade in colonial wool – the backbone of Australia’s economy for the next century. As a result, Elizabeth Farm is stamped on the national consciousness. By the 1830s, having enlarged and refined his Regency Bungalow, Macarthur's health was in serious decline, along with his grasp on politics, business and family affairs. His death in 1834 brought renovations to a halt, leaving the homestead unfinished. His handsome library, drawing and dining rooms, though newly plastered, were still unpainted. Cedar joinery was yet to be fitted. A much needed wing of bedrooms was never built. Elizabeth Macarthur lived at Elizabeth Farm, against the wishes of her children, until her death in 1850.
Read more about this topic: Elizabeth Farm, History
Famous quotes containing the word family:
“I am the family face;
Flesh perishes, I live on,
Projecting trait and trace
Through time to times anon,
And leaping from place to place
Over oblivion.”
—Thomas Hardy (1840–1928)
“With a new familiarity and a flesh-creeping “homeliness” entirely of this unreal, materialistic world, where all “sentiment” is coarsely manufactured and advertised in colossal sickly captions, disguised for the sweet tooth of a monstrous baby called “the Public,” the family as it is, broken up on all hands by the agency of feminist and economic propaganda, reconstitutes itself in the image of the state.”
—Percy Wyndham Lewis (1882–1957)
“A poem is like a person. Though it has a family tree, it is important not because of its ancestors but because of its individuality. The poem, like any human being, is something more than its most complete analysis. Like any human being, it gives a sense of unified individuality which no summary of its qualities can reproduce; and at the same time a sense of variety which is beyond satisfactory final analysis.”
—Donald Stauffer (b. 1930)