From Convicts to Founding Fathers—Three notable Sydney Doctors
Authors: Gillian Hull
Journal: Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine (2001)

1 January 2001 was the centenary of the Commonwealth of Australia. A federation of the colonies had first been considered in the 1840s but it was not until the end of the century that sufficient unity on such subjects as defence and trade was finally realized. The achievement seems even more remarkable if one goes back another 100 years and considers the state of the embryo colony in 1801. The small population, living in an alien environment, included large numbers of convicts; crime, corruption, disease and squalor were rife. By the end of transportation on the East Coast in the 1840s the Colony of New South Wales was well established. More and more free settlers were involved in trade and agriculture, helping to bring some success and stability. At the same time a number of former convicts were, through their ability and determination, making substantial contributions to the colony's development. By the 1850s 165 000 convicts had been transported to Australia while well over 200 000 free migrants arrived between 1825 and 1850.

The First Fleet, as it later came to be known, arrived on Australia's East Coast in 1788. It comprised eleven ships bearing around 1400 people, half of whom were convicts. Between 1788 and 1868, when the last convict ship docked in Fremantle, over a hundred medical men are known to have arrived as transportees1. With no standardization of medical qualification in the early nineteenth century, many would have been unqualified. Of those who came during this period three men, well known to each other in Sydney, are recognized for their medical abilities and as founding fathers of several respected institutions which developed as the settlement turned from a gaol into a colony. Many of those transported were not criminals in the true sense, but found themselves crossing the oceans as a result of some youthful, impetuous statement or action2.

William Redfern, who has been called the father of Australian medicine, arrived as a convict in 1801 and was given an absolute pardon three years later. D'Arcy Wentworth barely escaped conviction, and was forced to embark for Australia in 1790 aboard the Neptune, one of the three ships of the notorious Second Fleet, in which just under a third of the voyagers died during the journey3. William Bland arrived as a convict in 1814 and was pardoned a year later. All three were well known to Lachlan Macquarie, the longserving Governor who held office from 1810 until 18214. Macquarie, born on the Isle of Mull, governed as a paternalistic autocratic laird and brought discipline and some order to the chaos he found in New South Wales. His predecessor, William Bligh, already known for his bravery after the mutiny on HMS Bounty, had attempted to control the import of large quantities of rum, traded by the New South Wales Corps. Furious with Bligh, members of the ‘Rum Corps’, as they were known, arrested him, and wielded considerable power until the arrival of Macquarie. The new Governor was not popular with those who had come as free men, among whom was the arrogant pastoralist John Macarthur. They were known as the ‘exclusives’ while ex-convicts, however successful they became, never lost the stigma of being ‘emancipists’. The latter were considered beyond hope by many, but Macquarie felt they might have talents which could be of great use to the colony5. He employed the ex-convict Francis Greenway, a former pupil of Nash, to design distinguished buildings in the growing town of Sydney, and he chose Redfern as his family doctor.