Penguin Special: The First Dismissal

While violent revolution and social upheaval rocked Europe, far away in New South Wales, Governor Lachlan Macquarie was sowing the seeds for the Australian idea of the 'fair go' Macquarie was a reformer and an emancipator. He believed that a person's worth – be they gentry, infantry or convict – lay in what they were capable of doing, not what they had done in the past. He freed the brilliant, mercurial convict Francis Greenway and appointed him government architect for the buildings that would shape a new nation. But to the Tory British government of 1820, Macquarie and Greenway's unconventional alliance threatened NSW's very legitimacy as a penal colony.

Here Luke Slattery breathes dramatic life into Australia's first political dismissal and, along the way, maps Macquarie and Greenway's bold collaborations and extraordinary architectural – and cultural – legacy.