Elizabeth and John (The Macarthurs of Elizabeth Farm)

A landmark and revealing joint biography of Elizabeth and John Macarthur, from one of Australia’s most respected historians. Arriving in 1790, Elizabeth and John Macarthur, both aged 23, were the first married couple to travel voluntarily from Europe to Australia, within three years of the initial invasion. John Macarthur soon became famous in New South Wales and beyond as a wool pioneer, a politician, and a builder of farms at Parramatta and Camden. For a long time, Elizabeth’s life was regarded as contingent on John’s and, more recently, John’s on Elizabeth’s. In Elizabeth and John, Alan Atkinson, the prizewinning author of Europeans in Australia, draws on his work on the Macarthur family over the last 50 years to explore the dynamics of a strong and sinewy marriage, and family life over two generations. With the truth of John and Elizabeth Macarthur’s relationship much more complicated and more deeply human than other writers have suggested, Atkinson provides a finely drawn portrait of a powerful partnership.