Botany Bay Mirages

(Paperback)

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Challenges the web of powerful images which has shaped academic and popular thinking on the early settlement period. 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.

Author Bio

Alan Frost held a Personal Chair in History at La Trobe University until his retirement in 2008. His writings about our early colonial history include Convicts and Empire (1980); Arthur Phillip, 1738-1814- His Voyaging (1987); 'A Place of Exile', in Journeys into History (1990); The Global Reach of Empire (2003); Botany Bay- The Real Story (2011); The First Fleet- The Real Story (2011). In 1996 he published East Coast Country- A North Queensland Dreaming.