Early Australian History Convict Life In New South Wales And Van Diemens Land Charles White by Charles White instant download after payment.

How strangely the links fit in! Little did the British Government think when issuing the orders in Council in 1786 for establishing a Convict Settlement in New South Wales, that they were taking the initial steps towards founding a "New Britannia in the Southern World." Yet so it was. If the American War of Independence had not closed the plantations of Virginia against the reception of transported offenders, and cast upon the British Government the duty of fixing upon some other place to which they might send some of the prisoners who then filled the gaols of Great Britain to overflowing, the wonderful land of which Captain Cook had spoken as having been discovered by him, and concerning which the interest of the English people had been considerably excited at the time his narratives-were published—the land which now ranks as one of the richest, most populous, and most progressive of the British dependencies—might to this day have remained in the possession of the aborigines; producing nothing, promising nothing; locked up from civilization and all its blessings (and curses), and unknown save to the few thousands of blacks who might from year to year inhabit it. And what, then, would the world have lost—what, then, should we who live in it have lost?

Pessimists, time and again, have raised a lachrymose wail about the 'stain' which must always rest on the colony through the criminality of its early life; but these men can never see anything but the evil, and even that evil they would intensify for the sake of making their wailing more mournful. 'Tis true that the beginning was in some measure bad, but that bad beginning was better than no beginning at all; and, fresh from long and deep research among old records, I am bold to declare that the earlier convicts were not the worst criminals who came out to the colony, and that some of the darker and bloodier stains which deface the first pages of the colony's history were made by men