Word: lande
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...haul freight business lost to truckers in recent years, rail bosses plan to borrow at least $15 billion to build a dedicated fast-freight corridor between Mumbai, New Delhi and Kolkata (formerly Calcutta). They also have big plans for some of the 1 million acres (420,000 hectares) of land that IR owns along rail lines and around stations and shunt yards. Real estate developers are currently bidding to overhaul the first of 16 major stations. At New Delhi's central station, which is likely worth billions of dollars, developers plan hotels, wireless Internet services and food courts...
...story of Australia's settlement has as its refrain the taming of what celebrated historian Manning Clark called "that rude and barbarous land." The first settlers found themselves in an alien world, and for the convicts among them, the land's harshness must have seemed part of their punishment. The nation's self-image was shaped by those colonists' experiences of hardship, hunger, hostile natives, droughts and floods - their sense, from the outset, of being profoundly at odds with the land they had to call their home...
...Diemen's Land, (Black Inc., 388 pages) historian James Boyce argues compellingly that such a story wasn't true for all settlers. His focus is "the ordinary people" of early Tasmania, which as Van Diemen's Land received nearly half of all convicts shipped to Australia. Settled in 1803, it was soon ignored by London (at war with France) and Sydney (busy keeping its own population fed and under control), and, short on food supplies, set about fending for itself. Which it did, as Boyce shows, very well. For where Sydney's thick coastal scrub thwarted hunters, Van Diemen...
...While in Britain the poor starved, the colonists of Van Diemen's Land enjoyed plenty - kangaroo, oysters, wombat, echidna "stuffed with sage and onion." There was no money for prisons, so many convicts "simply wandered off to live a life of quiet freedom in the well-watered, game-rich bush". With absorbing detail and first-hand accounts, Boyce shows that while life in this new world was hard, it was, for many, better than what they'd left behind. One convict wrote of being "unaccountably indifferent" to the notion of returning home. Hunters, bushrangers and soldiers wore kangaroo and possum...
...That all changed in the 1820s. More free settlers arrived seeking their fortunes. As huge land grants were made, convicts and Aborigines were pushed further into the bush. Disgusted by the colony's convict "stain" and keen to reproduce the trappings of English society, the new élite soon had an ally in Lieutenant Governor George Arthur. "If my hands are strengthened," wrote Arthur in 1825, "I hope to make transportation a punishment which, at present, it certainly is not." His legacy would include chain gangs, the horrors of the Port Arthur prison settlement, and hundreds of hangings. Though...