The Colonization of Australia

The Colonization of Australia

The Beginnings of the settlement in Australia were both doctrinaire and sordid. The world had a spare continent. The Dutch had first claim to it, but saw no profit in it. The claim next in validity was England's, founded on the voyage of the Roebuck. England showed no signs of wanting the country either. Cook's discovery and accurate charting of the east coast brought the continent into focus. It ceased to be legendary, it was real, England had her navy's word for it. Cook, to be on the safe side, had formally taken possession of half the continent in the name of the Crown. Everything was shipshape and Bristol fashion, but still England found no use for the country large and distant possession. It was a pity to waste it, but what could they do with it?

There were theorists who answered the question. As early as 1748, when only the west coast was known, John Campbell proposed a colony from which, drawing on his imagination and exaggerating the proximity of the Spice Islands, he expected great advantages. No one was impressed. In 1756 a Frenchman, Charles de Brosses, in one of those "instructive and entertaining" volumes of voyages so much the fashion in the eighteenth century, outlined with admirable logic a settlement on the Australian coast that would rid France of her felons, her foundlings, her beggars, vagabonds, and all other enemies of society. They would, he opined, support themselves in the new land and at home the worthy citizens would be unhampered by the expense and depredations of their useless or criminal brethren.

John Callander translated de Brosses into English and added some touches of his own. He moved the locale of the Colony of Disgracefuls to New Britain as handier for the spice trade. Where these visionaries found evidence to support their theory that successful and profitable colonies could be founded by social misfits on a coast that all reports, except one, had described as barren, waterless, and dangerous, it is difficult to conceive.

A slightly more credible plan was put forward in 1783 by James Maria Matra, who had been a midshipman in Endeavour with Cook. He at least had seen the east coast of the continent and his scheme was supported by Sir Joseph Banks. Matra belonged to a loyalist American family and conceived the idea of finding a new home in Australia for British subjects driven out by the War of Independence. He gilded his theme:

By the discoveries and enterprise of our officers many new countries have been found which know no sovereign, and that hold out the most enticing allurements to European adventurers. None are more inviting than New South Wales. . . . The climate and soil are so happily adapted to produce every various and valuable production of Europe, and of both the Indies, that with good management and a few settlers, in twenty or thirty years they might cause a revolution in the whole system of European commerce and secure to England a monopoly of some part of it, and a very large share in the whole.

One senses here a certain jealous of the Dutch. For good measure and to popularize his plan, Matra threw in flax of such exquisite delicacy that it could resemble cambric or silk, a trade in woollen goods with Japan, a depot for furs from China and Russia, and an outlet for convicts who, with Chinese and Otaheitans, would provide the labour necessary for the new plantation state. Expense he airily waved aside, tools could be drawn from Ordnance stores, the Navy had to keep ships in commission in any case, and they could pay for the voyages by picking up timber in New Zealand for spars. The plentiful soil would do the rest. Three thousand pounds would cover the whole expense. He also pointed out that it would be better for migrants to go to a British possession than to America. The only paragraph of all these that appealed to Lord Sydney at the Home Office to whom it was addressed was that regarding convicts. "Give them," wrote Matra, "a few acres of ground as soon as they arrive in New South Wales, in absolute property, with what assistance they may want to till them. Let it be here remarked that they cannot fly from the country, that they have no temptation to theft, and that they must work or starve." This sank into the official mind and can be traced in future policy.

Captain (later Admiral) Sir George Young also had a plan, like but less restricted than Matra's because he had never visited Australia. Judging from size and position, he took it for granted that New South Wales would produce "all kinds of spice . . . fine oriental cotton, indigo, coffee, tobacco, with every species of the sugar-cane, also tea, silk, and madder". Flax, of course, there would be to supply the current scarcity; convicts could be taken out as ballast in East Indiamen on their way to China and labour could also be brought in from China and the Friendly Islands. "The very heavy expence Government is annually put to for transporting and otherwise punishing the felons, together with the facility of their return, are evils long and much lamented." (You are telling me!--or words to that effect--remarked that dry and precise man, Lord Sydney.)

"Here is an asylum open that will considerably reduce the first and for ever prevent the latter." Again Lord Sydney was only interested in the disposal of convicts, but he absorbed the idea of using East Indiamen (by the Company's Charter New South Wales was within its sphere of trade monopoly) and, in an edited form, the importation of Friendly Islanders.

These schemes, however influential their source, would have fallen on stony ground but for a most uncomfortable by-product of the American War of Independence. In the days of the Old Dominion