John Macarthur (wool pioneer)

John Macarthur (1767 – 10 April 1834) was a British army officer, entrepreneur, politician, architect and pioneer of settlement in Australia. Macarthur is recognised as the pioneer of the wool industry that was to boom in Australia in the early 19th century and become a trademark of the nation. He is noted as the architect of Elizabeth Farm House, his own residence in Parramatta, and as the man who commissioned architect John Verge to design Camden Park Estate in Camden, in New South Wales.

Macarthur was born near Plymouth, England the second son of Alexander Macarthur, who had fled to the West Indies after the Jacobite rising of 1745 before returning and working as a linen draper and 'seller of slops', according to some accounts. His exact date of birth is unknown, but it is known that his birth was registered on 3 September 1767.

He spelled his surname "M'Arthur" for most of his life. He occasionally varied it to "MacArthur". The spelling "Macarthur" (with a lower case "a") became established only very late in his life.

John and Elizabeth Macarthur married on October 1788 and they subsequently sailed to the new colony after John joined the New South Wales Corps in 1789. Elizabeth gave birth to a daughter on the voyage to the new colony but the baby did not survive. John and Elizabeth Macarthur parented four sons: John, Edward, James (1798) and William (1800), the later two being born at Elizabeth Farm.

In 1782, John Macarthur was commissioned as an ensign in Fish's Corps, a regiment of the British Army formed to serve in the American War of Independence. The war ended before the regiment was ready to sail and was disbanded in 1783. On half-pay, Macarthur went to live on a farm near Holsworthy in Devon, where he evidently pursued a program of self-education and became interested in 'rural occupations'. During the next five years Macarthur used his spare time to travel, read, and perhaps contemplate a future at the bar. Instead, in April 1788, Macarthur returned to full-pay army duties, securing a commission as an ensign in the 68th Regiment of Foot (later Durham Light Infantry), a regiment which had been stationed at Gibraltar since 1785. Ensuing negotiations with the War Office resulted in an alternative posting to far-away Sydney, with the New South Wales Corps in 1789. He sailed on the Neptune in the Second Fleet, the 'worst ship in the worst of Australian fleets'. Before the Neptune had even departed the British Isles, Macarthur became involved in disputations with various personnel, including fighting a duel with Captain Gilbert, the Master of the Neptune. The cramped and squalid accommodation provided for his wife and infant son on board the Neptune provoked further disputes. This eventually resulted in his family being transferred mid-voyage and on the high seas, to the Scarborough, another Second Fleet ship.

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