The first dozen years of European settlement of Australia are fixed in our minds by powerful images raised from an incomplete historical record. The reality was quite different. Alan Frost, after collecting a greatly expanded range of documents from archives around the world, sets the record straight.
The images he challenges are immediately familiar:
* overcrowded and unhealthy English prison hulks
* the colony as a cheap solution to the convict problem
* hasty decisions based on overly optimistic assessment of the land's fertility
* a poorly equipped and managed First Fleet
* subsequent neglect by Britain
* long years of deprivation and bare survival
* callous treatment of Aborigines, and the unleashing of smallpox among them
* opportunistic and aberrant use of the notion of terra nullius
Provocative and well-argued, Botany Bay Mirages contrasts the realities with the long-accepted illusions. It will reshape our thinking about our origins.
