Born in county of Ross of an ancient Scottish family. His father was Provost of Wick and a Deputy Lieutenant of the county of Caithness. Took up various public positions including, in 1795, Chief Clerk in the Prisoners of War Office. In 1797 he was Head of the Correspondence Department of the Transport Board and in 1806 Secretary of the Board. In 1825 he was selected by Earl Bathurst to be Colonial Secretary to the Government of New South Wales and left for Australia. There he rose to become first Speaker of the Legislative Council, from which he retired in 1846. He married early in life and had 17 children. He died in Sydney where he helped to found the Museum. Before leaving England Macleay gave ‘27 years of unremitted and unrequited labour’ to the Linnean Society. This included taking on the Secretaryship from his friend Thomas Marsham in 1798. His chief natural history interest was entomology and he is recorded to have had ‘the finest and most extensive collection then existing of any private individual in England’. This included the British Collection of John Curtis now housed in Melbourne. Macleay is not recorded to have published on entomology, but there is MS correspondence, etc. in the Linnean Society. Stephens (1828) p.2 refers to him as ‘my friend’ and talks about his philosophical views on insect structure and arrangement. Chalmers-Hunt (1976) notes that Macleay was present at the sale of Dru Drury’s collection (p.4) and that he bought many of the lots at the Francillon sale which included many Fabrician as well as Donovan types (pp.5-6). Macleay himself sold 122 lots of duplicate insects on 9 July 1814 at King and Lochee, the 4pp catalogue is in the HDO library. FRS from 1809. There is a reference to him not previously noticed in Imperial Dictionary of Universal Biography, 3, n.d. [c.1880], p.275. (MD 2/04)
Dates
24 June 1767 – 1848