Читать книгу Australian History For Dummies - Alex McDermott - Страница 61

Once the First Fleet had arrived in what would become Sydney, Captain Phillip tried to get the convicts to work, which didn’t go too well. Taken out of 18th-century London criminal subculture, dumped down in an alien wilderness, and expected to toil each day to establish crops and a settlement wasn’t their idea of smart living. They wandered off whenever they could, threw away tools into the bush, and generally behaved like grumpy contestants on an episode of Big Brother.

The assumption on the part of Lord Sydney in the Colonial Office in London had been that the convicts’ main punishment was exile — that once they’d been transported and had arrived in NSW, they’d be ‘free on the ground’. ‘Not on your life!’ said Arthur Phillip (or something similar). ‘You can see how little they do as servants of the Crown. Can you imagine what a disaster it would be if they were left to their own devices?’ So he insisted that the convicts should work on public farms under guard, and he continued to coerce, cajole and browbeat them. Neither of these two moves met with much success.