Insights
In 1787, the twenty-eighth year of the reign of King George III, the British Government sent a fleet
to colonize Australia. Never had a colony been founded so far from its parent state, or in such
ignorance of the land it occupied. There had been no reconnaissance. In 1770 Captain James
Cook had made landfall on the unexplored east coast of this utterly enigmatic continent, stopped
for a short while at a place named Botany Bay and gone north again. Since then, no ship had
called – not a word, not an observation, for 17 years, each one of which was exactly like the
thousands that had preceded it, locked in its historical immensity of blue heat, blush, sandstone
and the measured booming of glassy pacific rollers.
Now, this coast was to witness a new colonial experiment, never tried before, not repeated since.
An unexplored continent would become a jail. The space around it, the very air and sea, the
whole transparent labyrinth of the South pacific, would become a wall 14,000 miles thick.
The late 18th century abounded in schemes of social goodness thrown off by its burgeoning
sense of revolution. But here, the process was to be reversed: not utopia, but Dystopia; not
Rousseau’s natural man moving in moral grace amid free social contract, but man coerced,
deracinated, in chains. Other parts of the Pacific, especially Tahiti, might seem to conform
Rousseau. But the intellectual patrons of Australia, in its first colonial years, were Hobbes and
Sade.
In their most sanguine moments, the authorities hoped that it would eventually swallow a whole
class-the “criminal class”, whose existence was one of the prime sociological beliefs of late
Georgian and early Victorian England. Australia was settled to defend English property not from
the frog-eating invader across the Channel but from the marauder within. English lawmakers
wished not only to get rid of the “Criminal class” but if possible to forget about it. Australia was a
Cloaca, invisible, its contents filthy and unnamable.
To most Englishmen this place seemed not just a mutant society but another planet-an exiled
world, summed up in its popular name, “Botany Bay”. It was remote and anomalous to its white
creators. It was strange but close, as the unconscious to the conscious mind. There was as yet
no such thing as “Australian” history or culture. For its first forty years, everything that happened
in the thief-colony was English. In the whole period of convict transportation, the Crown shipped
more than 160,000 men, women and children (due to defects in the records, the true number will
never be precisely known) in bondage to Australia. This was the largest forced exile of citizens at
the behest of a European government in pre-modern history.
Nothing in earlier penology compares with it. In Australia, England drew the sketch for our own
century’s vaster and more terrible fresco of repression, the Gulag. No other country had such a
birth, and its pangs may be said to have begun on the afternoon of January 26, 1788, when a
fleet of eleven vessels carrying 1,030 people, including 548 male and 188 female convicts, under
the command of captain Arthur Phillip in his flagship Sirius, entered Port Jackson or, as it would
presently be called, Sydney Harbor
