Читать книгу Australian History For Dummies - Alex McDermott - Страница 43

IN THIS CHAPTER

Surveying the east coast of ‘New Holland’ with Cook

Choosing New South Wales to start a convict settlement

Getting there with Phillip

Staying alive once there — just

Encountering hardship in the new land

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.