Читать книгу Australian History For Dummies - Alex McDermott - Страница 90

The missionaries had their great patron — William Wilberforce — and he was close to Sir Joseph Banks. Banks was someone who’d long liked to think of himself as the special patron of this colony and the settlement he’d advised (refer to Chapter 3). At the same time, Whitehall was complaining how incredibly expensive this convict colony was still proving to be. They contacted Banks and asked him if he could suggest anyone who might be suitable to go out and bring this colony back into line, destroy this terrible rum monopoly that everyone’s talking about, and put some morality back into this depraved sink of fallen humanity.

‘Actually, yes’, Banks says (or something like it). ‘Come to think of it, I’ve got just the fellow. A naval protégé of mine. Been in some scrapes, got a bad reputation for having crews mutiny on him (happened twice so far, once the infamous Bounty, the other time closer to home). But for a case like this, it’s probably not such a bad thing — he certainly won’t stand any nonsense. Fellow by the name of Bligh.’

Britain had started out with only a vague idea of what sort of shape the colony was going to take. Self-sufficient farming was to be the order of the day for the mass of urban criminals being transported from London.

In sending William Bligh out to Australia, and in instructing him to crack down on various ad hoc practices that had sprung up in the absence of any workable instructions or assistance coming from Britain, the powers that be were working with a set of mistaken assumptions:

 They didn’t expect a society to have so quickly and spontaneously grown out of the dregs that had been deported. But it had.

 They didn’t expect it to be so modern, or so mercantile, or to consist of anything other than convicts and self-sufficient yeoman (peasant-like farmers). But it was and it did.

 They fully expected it to be a moral cesspit, thanks largely to both ingrained attitudes about the moral depravity of the criminal underclass, and to the bad press the colony had been given by the Evangelicals — Reverends Johnson and Marsden, and missionaries who’d arrived in NSW in the 1790s. But it wasn’t.