How does it form who we are today?

AUSTRALIAN HISTORY

Discovery or Invasion?

Cook landed at Botany Bay• In 1768, Cook began the first of the three great Pacific voyages which

would see him chart the whole ocean, from New Zealand to the Arctic, so accurately that his charts can still be used today. Cook spent over eight and a half years chartingpreviously unknown islands.

Cook's ship for his first Pacific voyage was H.M. Bark Endeavour. The aim of the voyage was to observe the passage of Venus over the disc of the Sun from Tahiti and then to search for a "Great Southern Continent" south of Tahiti. Endeavour left Plymouth on 25 August 1768, called at Madeira and Rio de Janeiro and, after rounding Cape Horn, reached Tahiti on 10 April 1769. The transit of Venus was duly recorded on 3 June 1769 and Cook soon began the second part of the voyage. 

• He searched for, and proved, that there was no continent to the south and west of Tahiti, discovered the east coast of New Zealand and charted its coasts, and discovered and charted the east coast of Australia. During this voyage Cook discovered and named Botany Bay (so called because of the many botanists on board Endeavour). But when Cook reached Batavia on 10 October 1770, malaria and dysentery spread among the crew. A number died at Batavia and on the way back to the Cape. The expedition had been, however, a great success.

A new colony

1786 England claims Australia• On August 1786, (sixteen years after Cook had first landed on Australia's east coast) the British government decided to start a convict settlement in New South Wales. This also allowed England to claim Australia and stop France or Spain from taking it. Arthur Phillip was chosen to organise and lead the First Fleet of convicts to Botany Bay.  It would have been a difficult task to organise the fleetfor the eigth month voyage to start an entirely new colony, and not knowing what would be there. There were eleven ships in the First Fleet with six of them being convict ship that had specially built prisoners quarters below the decks. Around 1500 men, women and children sailed in the First Fleet that left on 12 May 1787. Among them weremarines and a handful of other officers who were to administer the colony, and 772 convicts (of whom 732 survived the voyage) who were petty thieves from the London slums

Convicts

• During the late 18th and 19th centuries, large numbers of convicts were transported to the various Australian penal colonies by the British government. One of the primary reasons for the British settlement of Australia was the establishment of a penal colony to alleviate pressure on their overburdened correctional facilities. Over the 80 years more than 165,000 convicts were transported to Australia.[1]

• Poverty, social injustice, child labor, harsh and dirty living conditions and long working hours were prevalent in 19th-century Britain. Dickens' novels perhaps best illustrate this; even some government officials were horrified by what they saw. Only in 1833 and 1844 were the first general laws against child labor (the Factory Acts) passed in the United Kingdom.[4]

• William Hogarth's Gin Lane, 1751• London was overcrowded, filled with the unemployed, and flooded with cheap gin.[5] Crime

had become a major problem. In 1784 a French observer noted that "from sunset to dawn the environs of London became the patrimony of brigands for twenty miles around. [6]

• By the 1770s, there were 222 crimes in Britain which carried the death penaltwhich carried the death penalty,[7] almost all of them for crimes against property. Many even included offences such as the stealing of goods worth over 5 shillings, the cutting down of a tree, stealing an animal or stealing from a rabbit warren. The Code died out in the 1800s because judges and juries thought that punishments were too harsh. Since the law makers still wanted punishments to scare potential criminals, but needed them to become less harsh, transportation became the more common punishment.[8]

• Transportation was a common punishment handed out for both major and petty crimes in Britain from the seventeenth century until well into the nineteenth century. At the time it was seen as a more humane alternative to execution

Aboriginal People: A history of mistreatment

Terra Nullius: Aboriginal Rights Ignored• Terra nullius ( /ˈtɛrə nʌˈlaɪ.əs/) is a Latin expression deriving from Roman law meaning "land belonging to no one" (or "no man's land"),[1] which is used in international law to describe territory which has never been subject to the sovereignty of any state, or over which any prior sovereign has expressly or implicitly relinquished sovereignty. Sovereignty over territory which is terra nullius may be acquired through occupation,[2] though in some cases doing so would violate an international law or treaty.

The Myall Creek Massacre• The event occurred back on the 10th June of 1838, when a group of around 40

Aboriginal people (from the Kamilaroi tribe) camped on land known as the Myall Creek Station. At the same time, revenge was on the mind of a group of Europeans, intent on punishing someone for the loss of some of their cattle.

• It appears that these Aboriginal campers actually had no connection to the slaughter of the cattle, yet the Europeans went ahead and massacred, in cold blood, twenty-eight Aboriginal men, women and children. The brutality was horrendous with children even being decapitated and the bodies hacked to pieces and then heaped onto a fire and burnt.

• There was a susequent investigation into the murders with 11 stockmen finally being charged, the first time a white person had been charged with the murder of an Aboriginal person after decades of killing. In the original trial, the 11 men were found not guilty, but a subsequent retrial found 7 of the 11 men guilty and and they were subsequently sentenced to be hanged.

• To this day, Myall Creek remains the only massacre for which Europeans were charged, found guilty and punished, a sad reflection on the horrors that were perpetrated by European settlers within Australia.

The Drovers Wife

Life was hard