Flax and Convicts: More Light on Botany bay

Abstract

This publication brings further credit upon Hale and Iremonger who have shown of late that Australian publishers can still provide scholarly books, attractively produced and at a reasonable price. Ged Martin's compilation presents the central arguments from the academic debate as to whether penal, commercial or strategic motives prompted the British government to embark upon the unprecedented imperial enter prise of founding a settlement at Botany Bay in 1788. Though the articles and chapters in this edition have previously been published, there are obvious advantages for teachers and students?at senior schools and at universities?in having them gathered in one collection. The book has two useful maps, 21 pages of documents from the period 1783-86, a handy introduction and reference notes. It gives the opinion of E. C. K. G?nner, who wrote in 1888, and then presents the interpretations of historians of the 1950s (Dallas and Roe), 1960s (Clark, Blainey, Bol ton and Shaw) and 1970s (Fry, Martin, Atkinson and Frost). Given Martin's inclusion of two or three different articles by five of his authors, it may be asked whether he may have been more selective, thus leaving space for the inclusion of other notable work. I regret his omission of any extract from Eris O'Brien's pathfinding The Foundation of Australia 1786-1800 (1937) and from John Manning Ward's masterly British Policy In The South Pacific 1786-1893 (1948) ; Bede Nairn's deft chapter 'The Selection of Botany Bay' in Economic Growth of Australia 1788-1821 (1969) might have been included, as also T. R. Reese's thoughtful article 'The Origins of Colonial America and New South Wales: An Essay on British Imperial Policy in the Eighteenth Century' in the Australian Journal of Politics and History, vol. vii, no. 2, 1961. Re-reading the articles in Martin's edition, in general I found most substance and sense in the writers of the 1960 period, since when the debate has either run in ever constricting circles, or the theories have become more far-fetched. If, at the extremes, historians' interpretations have polarised, they have often become so qualified that there is much common ground between them: while they differ on the principal reason for the selection of Botany Bay, they frequently concur with the idea that the principal reason was not the only one. Yet, until more evidence is produced, the question of the motive or nexus of motives for planting a bizarre settlement at Botany Bay must remain open. While Martin laments that 'the problem facing the historian of the founding of Aus tralia is that little more than the government's laundry bills survive from 1786-88', one wonders whether his view is perfectly accurate. Before add ing little more than plausible or unsubstantiated hypotheses to the already fulsome, if not flatulent, debate, it is high time that Australian historians of the period before 1788 researched further into the differing opinions in Britain regarding the resources of New South Wales and looked more rigorously in archives outside London for private papers of politicians and civil servants. There is, as well, another alternative, albeit 106