If you take a casual glance at a map of the world, you’d be pretty hard pressed to find two regions that are further away from each other, and less directly related, than Britain and Australia. One’s southern hemisphere, the other’s northern. One is a continent, the other an island. One has crummy weather, the other has Bondi (you get the drift). And yet, after the Indigenous Australians (who arrived millennia previously), it was the British who were the first people to take enough of an interest in Australia to decide to establish a colony here late in the 18th century.
Britain established maritime dominance in most of the seas of the world in the second half of the 18th century, with the Pacific being the ‘last frontier’ to explore for new trade and supplies. The British also had a couple of men who proved to be outstandingly good at not only exploring the region but also, in the case of one of them at least, pushing for a colony to be established there. Captain James Cook was the explorer, while Sir Joseph Banks, his botanist on the first exploring voyage, pulled strings with powerful men once back in Britain to help convince people to plant a colony on the coast of New South Wales.
The British, when they did establish a colony in Australia, decided to begin the settlement with convicted criminals as first settlers. In the first years of the colony, the new settlers encountered all kinds of problems, made worse by global events.
In this chapter, I cover Britain’s ‘discovery’ of Australia, the reasons behind their eventual decision to establish a settlement here, and what happened in the initial years of the colony.
‘Discovering’ the Great Southern Land
By 1763 the British had gained supremacy of the world’s oceans, except for one final frontier (bom, bom, boom): The Pacific Ocean.
For this daring task, two men were chosen: James Cook and Joseph Banks. Between them, they managed to chart the east coast of Australia, and have some lovely fun documenting all the weird and wonderful new flora and fauna they encountered along the way.
Finding the right men for the job
Two men from each side of the tracks. This part of the story belongs to Englishmen James Cook and Joseph Banks: One born in rural obscurity as a son of a labourer in Yorkshire; the other born the son of a gentleman and parliamentarian of significant wealth. One would end his life being clubbed to death on a beach in Hawaii (this would be Cook); the other as a Privy Council member and Royal Society President, dividing his time between Bath and Soho Square (big hello to Banks). (See the sidebar ‘The original odd couple: Cook and Banks’ for more on this unlikely duo.)
Between them, Cook and Banks not only managed to put Australia on the map in the most literal sense (even if it was still being called New Holland; see Chapter 5 for more on how the continent’s name was changed to Australia), but also helped ensure that the first European settlement of the Australian continent was begun. The founding of the modern nation of Australia begins with these two men — and the British Royal Society.
THE ORIGINAL ODD COUPLE: COOK AND BANKS
James Cook and Joseph Banks were integral to the charting and settlement of Australia by Britain, but two more different men could not have been picked for the job.
James Cook was born in 1728. He grew up on a farm in rural Yorkshire and began his working life apprenticed to a grocer. Not finding that to be quite the adventure best suited to his mental horizons, however, Cook managed to get himself apprenticed instead to a coal-shipper who operated in the North Sea. From this, he graduated to the Royal Navy, picking up expertise in mathematics and navigation somewhere along the way.
By 30 he was serving in Canada during the Seven Years War with France. Thanks to his precision surveying in the St Lawrence River, the French city of Quebec was captured. After this he was given a bigger job — surveying Newfoundland, something he clearly enjoyed so much that getting married in 1762 delayed him only temporarily. He was soon back in the harness finishing the job (perhaps aligning wife Elizabeth with the Quebecois on the list of people he was rubbing the wrong way). His work in Newfoundland, however, was what got him noticed and meant he was selected as commander for the1768 scientific expedition to the South Seas.
Cook, it seems, was meticulous with everything he did, whether surveying and charting inlets and rivers, or ensuring his crew stuck rigorously to a new diet to avoid scurvy. He was a stickler with those beneath him — he flogged often (especially in his third and last expedition to the South Pacific) — but was trusted too.
Joseph Banks was born in 1743. His father a member of parliament, and young Joseph himself enjoyed Harrow, Eton and Oxford. The wildflowers at Eton (he later said) sparked an interest in botany — this interest certainly helps explain why such a bright lad did so lamentably badly at his study of Greek and Latin. On getting to Oxford, he was horrified to find that the university had no botanist on hand to tutor him, so he was allowed to bag one from Cambridge.
At 21, Joseph came into his inheritance (his father having died when Joseph was 18). Leaving Oxford without bothering to finish his degree, Banks didn’t do the usual thing expected at the time of a young gentlemen of large fortune (go on the ‘Grand Tour’ of Europe) but instead went off on a naturalist tour of Newfoundland and Labrador in North America. By curious coincidence, around the same time Cook was charting the coast of Newfoundland, Banks was amassing a huge collection of the island’s natural specimens.
Banks was knighted in 1781.
In 1768, the Royal Society (a learned society originally set up by Royal Charter a century before for the advancement of scientific knowledge, and of which Banks was a member) managed to persuade the British Admiralty to send an expedition to observe the transit of Venus on the Pacific Island of Tahiti (the weather forecast for England that year being overcast with rain).
By this time, Cook was a lieutenant in the Royal Navy and he was selected to command the expedition. The Royal Society suggested Banks, ‘Gentleman of large fortune … well versed in natural history’, along with his ‘suite’, could accompany Lieutenant Cook on the voyage. Banks’s suite was a cast of eight — naturalists, artists and servants — there to help him pick, pluck, catch and collect as many new zoological and botanical specimens as possible, and draw, describe and preserve them as well.
As well as observing the transit of Venus, however, the British Admiralty also gave Cook a set of secret instructions to follow: To establish once and for all if the ‘Unknown Southern Land’, or ‘Terra Australis Incognita’ was anything more than a pipe dream. If it was there,
