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| Down Under |
| Thomas Jefferson and the Founding of Australia |
| 2023-04-20 |
| [Quadrant] The First King of Australia: Geopolitics Then and Now Andrew Roberts has written a sumptuous biography, George III: The Life and Reign of Britain’s Most Misunderstood Monarch, published in the US as The Last King of America: The Misunderstood Reign of George III. Yet for all its 784 pages, Roberts omits his subject’s most significant achievement: the founding of modern Australia. Roberts mentions the King’s contribution of £4000 to Captain Cook’s Endeavour voyage in 1768. He also refers to the King’s 1787 instruction to Governor-designate Arthur Phillip, to treat the indigenous population with kindness and respect and seek peaceful co-existence. Botany Bay, however, has one index entry for just one and a half lines. It is “a destination for the transportation of British convicts”. George III is nowhere to be seen. Roberts is not alone. Other biographers of George III and of his prime minister, William Pitt the Younger, also fall in with the cleverly crafted cover story put out at the time by the Home Office. No one comments on the distance, the cost or the politics. The audacious operation did not touch the lives or the office of their protagonists. It was a housekeeping matter of “law and order” that hardly warrants a paragraph. In fact, convicts were not the reason for the expensive antipodean colony, but they were vital to the success of the Botany Bay campaign. They provided a critical mass of travel-ready occupiers at a time when Eurocentric law required actual occupation, not just a flag-waving visitor, to secure title to new lands. The convicts also provided cheap labour for the term of their sentence (after which they were eligible for a grant of land). Consequently, Australia is the only continent free from the legacy of slavery. Finally, the convicts provided the all-important smokescreen: the world would see that Britain was merely ridding itself of derelicts; it was not reaching to extend its empire to the far side of the globe. At the time, secrecy was crucial and the cover story seemed to work, although there were plenty of sceptics even then. Yet it’s odd that more than two centuries later scholars still accept the government line that Pitt’s near-bankrupt administration undertook the crippling expense of sending 750 pickpockets to the opposite side of the world, merely to get rid of them. It’s a silly story, but it stuck, thanks mainly to repetition, which eventually makes things true: proof by repeated assertion, an idée reçue. The Botany Bay decision, made suddenly and unexpectedly on August 18, 1786, was arguably the most significant decision made by George III and by Prime Minister Pitt during their incumbencies. Secrecy was paramount, so documentation is minimal. As Professor Ged Martin writes, “the problem facing the historian of the founding of Australia is that little more than the government’s laundry bills survive from 1786–88”. Still, there is sufficient evidence to show that the aim of both men was to shape the geopolitics of the globe. The imperial struggle between Britain and France had shifted from North America to the Pacific, where the continent of New Holland was, in the words of Bernard Smith, waiting to be “possessed and filled”. The rise and fall of Europe’s maritime empires meant that the remaining contenders were France, the absolutist monarchy, and Britain, the democratic, constitutional monarchy. |
| Posted by:Grunter |