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parochialism, isolationism, even anti-Englishism showed the unmistakable signs of British,
especially Irish, influence’ (Levy, 5).
Of course, many of the early inhabitants can hardly be characterised as having come
‘determined to make better lives.’ It was no accident that Botany Bay was identified as the
land of depravity, of monstrous convicts and worse wardens, where ‘virtue became vice and
vice virtue’. This hell-on-earth image was disseminated throughout British public on the
theory that the severity of punishment was a better deterrent to crime than the prospect of
getting caught (White, 17).
The lowest element of British society was to be cast out among the lowest
form of human life; unnatural vice was to be exiled as far from home as
possible, where nature itself was inverted and nakedness knew no shame;
thieves were to be condemned to a land where there was nothing at all of
value. (White, 16)
It is yet worth remembering that among the ‘transported’ convicts in the days of the
Botany Bay penal colony were the most vigorous and capable leaders of the provocative
decades of the developing English trades unions, joined by many of the most dedicated Irish
rebels. Along with some of the worst criminals and miscreants, therefore, some of the very
best leaders of British society were transported to the Antipodes. The energies of these
outcasts could perhaps have been shaken, but, fortunately for Australia, not forever quelled. At
the outset, nevertheless, the Europeans who arrived in Australia were hostile and dissatisfied,
and ‘bore class and sectarian grudges like birthmarks’.
Imbued with the mediaeval myth of the Antipodes, they ingested a self-image
of weirdness, loneliness, and absurdity, of being underfoot and beneath
contempt, an immature satire of a Western society. (Broinowski, 1992, 7)
The problem once the penal colony was disbanded and Australia became a colony was,
nevertheless, not so much that the hell-on-earth image persisted as that, no matter how fast
immigrants could arrive from Britain, they would not even begin to satisfy the demand for the
kind of labour needed to develop the continent. The original concept of bringing in Asians to
meet the demand faced stubborn popular opposition. Workers objected to the competition for
labour, and accused employers of wanting to create a permanent class of slaves (Levy, 12).
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