LITMIR.BIZ

      PREFACE TO THE UK EDITION

      Late in January 1788 a British fleet made landfall at ‘Botany Bay’ and then at ‘Port Jackson’, on the south-east coast of Australia. Their cargo was convicts; their task to create a self-sufficient society on those remote, unpropitious shores.

      The expedition was led by Commander Arthur Phillip of the Royal Navy. Phillip was a most unusual imperialist. Like most of his officers he was a child of the English Enlightenment: scientific in observation, critical in analysis, fastidious in record. Unlike most of his fellows, he was also a restless, even reckless, thinker. In recognition of the colony’s isolation he had been given close to absolute power. Within the settlement he would use that power with judgement and finesse. When he went home at the end of his five-year term, he knew the colony would survive.

      A subsidiary requirement of settlement, little pressed, was dearer to his heart. He was determined to establish his colony at the least possible cost to the people whose lands he was entering. He wanted nothing material from them: he brought both provisions and labour with him, while the slice of land the British occupied was uncultivated, and consequently, he thought, there for the taking. What he wanted from the Aboriginal Australians was a rarer commodity: their trust. Phillip believed that all men, whatever their colour or custom would, after a period of tutelage, recognise the benefits of civilisation encapsulated in the moral beauty of British law – a law, as we now realise and as Phillip did not, evolved from centuries of agrarian and pastoral pursuits and pivoting on the twin principles of the protection of property and the rights of the individual.

      The people Phillip and his men met on the harbour beaches were nomads, moving lightly over their land, carrying with them few possessions beyond an intricate law forged out of millennia of experience of human survival in Australia, that driest, most recalcitrant of continents.

      The British passion for scrupulous documentation provides a detailed record of what happened next.