Читать книгу Australian History For Dummies - Alex McDermott - Страница 72

IN THIS CHAPTER

Watching a settlement go from surviving to thriving under the care of the NSW Corps

Encountering convict entrepreneurs, officer traders and raucous living with Governor Hunter

Introducing reforms with Governor King

Rebelling against Governor Bligh

Australia, originally planned to serve multiple purposes, ended up being solely a prison dump for convicts (refer to Chapter 3). At the same time as the new colony was settled, Britain became seriously distracted by the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. Britain, fighting off invasion threats and struggling for world domination, wasn’t massively concerned with what the penal dump on the other side of the world was doing.

Facing failing crops and a huge wait between resupply ships, life for arrivals on the First and Second Fleets — convict and soldier alike — was pretty grim. Yet, within 20 years of settlement, many of those who’d been sent out here in exile were making fortunes, and were making a life much freer and in most ways better than they could ever have hoped of getting in Britain.

In this chapter, I cover the way officers of the NSW Corps stepped into the vacuum left by Britain’s lack of real planning or ongoing involvement in the development of the economic life of NSW. From 1792, resourceful officers from this permanent regiment of soldiers started using government money — and rum, that other great motivator — to expand cultivation and settlement. They also established a cartel on incoming trade, and made themselves seriously wealthy in the process. I also look at how their monopoly was short-lived — convict men and women who the officers originally set up to handle the retail side of things pretty quickly cut in on their turf.

And I cover the governors sent to wrest power out of the hands of the NSW Corps and various ex-convict traders — governors Hunter, King and Bligh.