Word: landing
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...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...
...hunting skills of convicts, Boyce argues that the mass killing of Aborigines was probably more common than previously thought. He throws new light on a particularly dark chapter, detailing the rounding up in the 1830s of the last Aborigines, those living in the island's west on land the settlers didn't want. Men, women and children were held at the infamous Macquarie Harbour jail before being exiled for life to a small island. That this was done to British subjects was, says Boyce, "one of the great crimes of the British Empire." Yet a visiting Charles Darwin echoed...
...vivid recreation of the lives of the convicts who adapted so creatively to the Australian landscape. Though they, and not the free settlers who arrived later, were the founders of Tasmania, history has depicted them as merely savage. Yet their success as "bush entrepreneurs," living on and using the land they were let loose upon, was unmatched in the Australian colonies. Yes, they did harm - introducing pests, wiping out species - but they were also changed by the land, and many loved it. In exploring Australia's past, "we need a richer loam of memory to draw on," says Boyce. "These...