Читать книгу Australian History For Dummies - Alex McDermott - Страница 54

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.

Completely reversing his earlier negative opinion (refer to the section ‘Setting (British) eyes on New South Wales’ earlier in this chapter), Banks confidently predicted to the Beauchamp Committee in 1779 that nothing could be easier than establishing a colony near Botany Bay in NSW. This area had enough rich soil ‘to support a very large Number of People’, the grass long and luxuriant, and the country well supplied with water. Equip two or three hundred people with ‘all kinds of tools for labouring the Earth, and building Houses’, then a year on, ‘with a moderate Portion of Industry, they might, undoubtedly, maintain themselves without any Assistance from England’.

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.