Early Sydney-how and why

The Roebuck Society is to be applauded for the fine catholicity of its choice of Australiana. Its fac simile of the Sydney Gazette for 1811 is hardly a thing of beauty—the original typography sees to that— but it is beautifully done; the actual reproduction is skilful and exact, the index first-class and perhaps more entertaining than the textual contents.

There really was not a lot of grist for the printer’s mill, apart from advertisements, shipping news, the disorders of the lower orders (that is, most of the colony), and the numerous and lengthy regulations of His Excellency Governor Macquarie.

News of the Peninsular War was late and patchy, Bonaparte had unfortu nately sired a legitimate son, and it is with some surprise that we meet a Portuguese squadron putting down pirates in the Ladrones.

More surprising still is the holding over of advertisements—obviously then as now the life-blood of the paper—in favour of an entire column devoted to the ghastly Ode of Mr Michael Massey Robinson for Her Majesty’s Birthday. But for the social historian there is an immediacy about these faits divers, in broken and blunt type, not to be attained by the most meticulous reconstruction; here are the messy streets of Sydney Town, the crude beginnings of rural in dustry, the constant to-and-fro of shipping from Bengal to Tahiti.

MR R. A. SWAN’S book, To Botany Bay, is a serious con tribution to the debate on Australia’s origins penal or geopolitical? initiated by K. W. Dallas. He comes down firmly on the side of the re visionists who see the motivation as not just the dumping of convicts any old where, but as a bid for a com mercial and strategic base in the Oceanic world newly opened by Cook and Bougainville.

The reviewer is also on this side and so were the Spaniards, mightily alarmed at the notion of a British Pacific base. Mr Swan conducts his case well: even though here and there it look a little like special plead ing, and the affairs of the Nether lands are something of a King Charles’ Head, he assembles an enormous number of clues, often significant and always suggestive, to the factors beh'ni the decision for Botany Bay. There are a couple of slips the flat earth theory was dead

long before the 15th century, and it is a shock to find Wesley described as ‘anti-fundamentalistic’ but these do not affect the issue.

Sometimes the evidence does not seem quite strong enough to support all the weight that Mr Swan asks it to bear; but we have a very handy guide to the evolution, through many false starts and abortive projects, of the final ‘plan’ which pitched 1,200 people right around the world on little more than Sir Joseph Banks’ memory of a few days ashore at Botany Bay, and in doing so absent mindedly founded a nation—though Mr Swan might not agree with my adverb.

Beyond this, although ‘serious his torians’ may quibble on details, it is the great, and rare, merit of To Botany Bay that it takes a global and not a parochial view of our be

ginnings.-

O. H. K. Spate.

[The Sydney Gazette, Volume Ix,

1811. $ll. TO BOTANY BAY, by R. A.

Swan. $5.50. Both Roebuck Society, PO Box 17, Aranda, ACT, 2614.