to American colonies during the 18th century. When the American War of Independence (1775–1783) deprived Britain of its American colonies, one of the things that was lost was a handy place to send convicted criminals. Felons had been sent from Britain as bonded labour for decades, at a time of rapid demographic increase. Now convicts continued to be sentenced to ‘transportation across the seas’, but with nowhere to transport them to. A stopgap measure was housing them in prison hulks (old ships refitted for the purpose of holding prisoners) moored on the River Thames, and putting them to public work in chain gangs.
A few problems arose with this system. Firstly, the authorities had always thought that transportation should send convicts far away to some largely unknown place overseas, and now this option was gone. Secondly, in the course of the 18th century the British people had become used to getting rid of felons in such a fashion, and had a real problem with the sight of men chained up in gangs in public. Other countries in Europe had followed this route, and it was seen as a sort of continental ‘despotism’. Thirdly, pretty soon they were running out of hulks!
But the twist here is that the system coped all right with losing the American colonies, just so long as a nice couple of wars were bubbling along to keep would-be crims pleasantly occupied fighting in the British army or navy. If it wasn’t the Americans, there was always the French, and if no-one else was around then you could always pick on the Dutch. But in 1782 a terrible spectre arose: Peace. By 1784 and 1785, returned soldiers and seamen were being demobbed (stood down from the armed services) and coming back into the country via the southern ports of England. As they did so, an explosion in crime occurred.
Getting access to vital resources
In the second half of the 18th century, Britain managed to get herself tangled up in conflicts with all the other major global powers — France, Spain and Holland. These protracted conflicts made Britain vulnerable as it ran short of vital commodities controlled by enemy nations. Without flax plants and pine trees, Britain was going to have difficulty getting new masts, spars, canvas and cordage, and without these, its navy would have great difficulty maintaining the powerbase it had fought so hard to win.
Pushing for a settlement in NSW
After leading the voyage that charted the east coast of Australia in 1770, Cook led two more exploratory voyages around the world. His journeying came to an abrupt end in Hawaii in 1779 when some seriously irritated natives clubbed him to death.
Banks, meanwhile, settled back into a comfortable and sedentary existence in Soho, London — perhaps getting a little too comfortable, as gout would plague his later years. On good terms with everyone from the King downwards, he became a prime mover, shaker and patron behind establishing a settlement in NSW some years after he’d been there himself.
In 1785 Banks repeated this advice to another committee, strongly recommending Botany Bay for penal settlement and saying NSW was ‘in every way adapted to the purpose’. ‘But what about the natives?’ someone wondered. Wouldn’t they be difficult? Not at all, assured Banks jovially. They were ‘extremely cowardly’, and would ‘soon abandon the country to the new comers’.
Sounds so wonderfully simple, doesn’t it? Take livestock and tools, add crop seeds, mix well with humans, stir for 12 months, and voila — instant colony. Reality would prove to be very far removed from such rosy predictions.
While the British were happy enough to strike treaties with Native Americans and New Zealand Maori, they didn’t even accept that Indigenous Australians owned the land they lived on. This was because Indigenous Australians were nomadic. The British logic was that if they didn’t build and live in houses, didn’t fence land and grow crops, Aboriginal people didn’t own the land, they only lived on top of it. Indigenous Australians were pretty clear in their minds that they did own the land they lived on, and that it was incredibly precious to them. But the British saw differently (this was a debate that wouldn’t be fully resolved until the Mabo and Wik cases in the 1990s — see Chapter 21).
Picking a winner: NSW it is!
After the crime explosion in Britain in 1784 and 1785 (refer to the section ‘Losing America and a terrible outbreak of peace’, earlier in this chapter), and the resulting urgent need to get rid of convicts, Banks was pushing for NSW to be established as the settlement to send them to.
However, many other possibilities existed — the Falkland Islands, Newfoundland, Nova Scotia, the West Indies, the East Indies, the Malay Archipelago and South Africa were all mentioned in public debate and were taken more or less seriously. Britain ended up choosing the NSW coast, which these days we tend to assume was natural, even inevitable, but at the time it was an odd choice. Certainly, it was satisfyingly remote — not many escapees paddling their way back to Britain in a hurry — but there was such a thing as too remote for a penal settlement. Ideally, you wanted a port of call on an already existing major trade route. Extremely isolated exile wasn’t preferred from the start — the presumption being that after convicts had served their time, they should be able to catch a ship home.
The proposed Botany Bay colony was outside any established shipping routes, and not a region with great existing trade, meaning that transportation costs would be very high. Although the influence of Banks can’t be denied, what other factors led the British Government to choose NSW? Here the plot thickens. This is an area that sustains a healthy amount of strong disagreement among historians, but some clear factors emerge:
NSW was near vital raw materials for maintaining a global navy: Britain had found out the hard way in recent wars that if shut off from crucial supplies from Europe, their vaunted navy ran the risk of disintegration. Flax plants were needed to make sails, ropes and cords, while long straight timber, preferably pine, was needed to replace masts. Cook had reported spruce pines of ‘vast size’ on Norfolk Island, not far from the NSW coast: ‘Here … masts for the largest ships may be had’. Flax plants were also seen growing in abundance.
Access to all the tea in China could be made less volatile: In the 1780s, trade with the Chinese port of Canton increased dramatically, with the importation of tea tripling in two years alone. But getting there was tricky. The French had established themselves in Indochina (modern-day Vietnam and surrounding areas), and the Dutch held the East Indies (modern-day Indonesia). While the British had signed a treaty that gave them a right to sail through Dutch waters, they worried that in the event of war both regions would become highly dangerous
