Book contents
- Frontmatter
- CONTENTS
- Acknowledgements
- List of Figures
- Introduction
- 1 ‘These Warlike People’: Violence, Imperial Ethnography and Depictions of Māori Sovereignty on the Endeavour Voyage
- 2 ‘We See this Country in the Pure State Of Nature’: Discourses of Blackness, Absence and Imperial Possibility
- 3 ‘They Would Speedily Abandon the Country’: Reading Land and Resistance at the Time of First Settlement
- 4 ‘A Valuable and Beneficial Article’: The Expansion of British Imperialism in the Tasman World
- 5 ‘A Few Blankets … would Greatly Relieve their Wants’: Samuel Marsden in New South Wales
- 6 ‘The Finest and Noblest Race Of Heathens’: The New Zealand Mission and Racial Thought in the Tasman World
- 7 ‘An Incontrovertible Right to their own Soil’: Land, Race and the Humanitarian Evaluation of Empire
- 8 ‘That Innocent Commerce’: The Aborigines Committee Report's Policy Recommendations and the Unexpected Outcomes of Empire
- Conclusion
- Notes
- Works Cited
- Index
3 - ‘They Would Speedily Abandon the Country’: Reading Land and Resistance at the Time of First Settlement
- Frontmatter
- CONTENTS
- Acknowledgements
- List of Figures
- Introduction
- 1 ‘These Warlike People’: Violence, Imperial Ethnography and Depictions of Māori Sovereignty on the Endeavour Voyage
- 2 ‘We See this Country in the Pure State Of Nature’: Discourses of Blackness, Absence and Imperial Possibility
- 3 ‘They Would Speedily Abandon the Country’: Reading Land and Resistance at the Time of First Settlement
- 4 ‘A Valuable and Beneficial Article’: The Expansion of British Imperialism in the Tasman World
- 5 ‘A Few Blankets … would Greatly Relieve their Wants’: Samuel Marsden in New South Wales
- 6 ‘The Finest and Noblest Race Of Heathens’: The New Zealand Mission and Racial Thought in the Tasman World
- 7 ‘An Incontrovertible Right to their own Soil’: Land, Race and the Humanitarian Evaluation of Empire
- 8 ‘That Innocent Commerce’: The Aborigines Committee Report's Policy Recommendations and the Unexpected Outcomes of Empire
- Conclusion
- Notes
- Works Cited
- Index
Summary
The First Fleet anchored at Botany Bay off the New South Wales coast on 20 January 1788, preparing to land at the British government's chosen site for the first European settlement in the Tasman world. It was almost eighteen years since James Cook had sailed the Endeavour along the east coast, initiating the discourse of imperial possibility which conceived of Australia and New Zealand as a region of imperial interest. The information gathered on this voyage had formed the basis of both the decision to settle and the place of initial British settlement. On board one of the ships of the fleet, the Sirius, was Lieutenant-Colonel David Collins, appointed as judge-advocate of the convict settlement, soon to be Governor Arthur Phillip's secretary, and later to become lieutenant-governor of the settlement in Van Diemen's Land. As well as fulfilling these official duties, Collins published his record of the first years of white settlement in Australia, entitled An Account of the English Colony in New South Wales, in two volumes published in 1798 and 1802. Collins's two volumes helped embed the ideas of racial hierarchy which had been initiated on the Cook voyages. While the work is one of a number of publications by officers of the First Fleet, Collins has been described as ‘Australia's original historian,’ with a voice that ‘echoed the original spirit of the state’.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Race and Identity in the Tasman World, 1769–1840 , pp. 61 - 82Publisher: Pickering & ChattoFirst published in: 2014