'For some time now, Elizabeth Macarthur has taken form in the work of scholars as an individual distinct from the ‘domestic life’ that has long been recognised as fundamental to the powerful ‘public’ role of John and the Macarthur family in Australian settler colonial history. Here Atkinson shifts the spotlight away from these two individuals to examine the dynamic partnership they produced as a couple, which enabled both to ‘achieve’ in the terms of settler society. Their collaboration was rare, Elizabeth being among the few educated settler women in the colony, and this brought a host of advantages to John beyond domestic comforts and even complex management of their farm in his absence. As Atkinson shows, the man with a wife in the colony had an additional range of transnational sociabilities with both women and men that were critical to establishing new relationships of trust in an unfamiliar locale and sustaining others across the globe. These may have been all the more significant for this couple, since John was widely regarded by contemporaries as challenging or, more politely, restless. Atkinson sets the Macarthurs’ partnership in this wider fabric of connections that supported them, but equally constrained and bound them to old frameworks, ideas and ties.' (Introduction)
