Australia as the New America

Abstract

The idea of Australia began, at least initially, out of a British need to transport convicts somewhere after the loss of the British American colonies. There still was a British North America, but its only centre of population was French-speaking, and potentially hostile, despite their lack of sympathy for the American rebels during the recent war. Someone in the British government, probably at the behest of Sir Joseph Banks (who had accompanied Captain Cook on his first voyage to the Pacific), eventually remembered the expedition’s report on its landfalls in Australia and decided that it would provide the solution to the British need for a penal colony. At the same time, the British Admiralty was aware of the need to prevent the islands of the South Pacific from falling under the control of the French or the Dutch.1 In numerical terms, Australia never replaced America as a destination for emigrants from Britain, Ireland or Europe, although it became a destination in the period to 1914 that was almost (but not quite) exclusively British and Irish. Australia thus attracted a different type of British emigrant from the dominant North American template for British emigration.2 In British terms, emigration to Australia was significant. Apart from convict transportation, over a million and a half people emigrated to Australia in the nineteenth century, and most of them were British or Irish.3