Botany Bay Mirages

The first ten years or so of British colonization of New South Wales are fixed in the academic and popular mind as a web of powerful images. The elements of the founding mythology are easily listed: grossly overcrowded and unhealthy English prison hulks; the colony proposed as a cheap solution to the convict problem; hasty decisions based on overly optimistic assessment of the land's fertility; a poorly equipped and managed First Fleet; subsequent neglect by Britain; long years of deprivation and bare surivial; callous treatment of Aborgines and the unleashing of smallpox among them; and terra nullius as an opportunistic and aberrant notion.