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Gold prospectors in Australia panning water and silt
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The image of early Australia as a convict society obscures the fact that not everyone was a felon. Both felons and freeholders created the successful longer term story of the colony: the 1850s gold rush, wooden ship-building in Tasmania, iron ore from Broken Hill, prairies of wheat and the big wool industry.

The earliest sheep in Australia were indifferent beasts. But this changed with the import of the Iberian merinos imported by Elizabeth MacArthur whose husband had been deported back to England. The pace set by the original settlers was faster than any other colonial experiment in the history of the British Empire.

Yet in 1817 Lord Bathurst, Secretary for Colonies, said the penal colony experiment was failing. There was no evidence that transportation had any deterrent effect on crime in England and there was no military and strategic value to justify the costs.

Australia was a curious society inasmuch as only a minority of the population chose to be there. Yet a lot was being learned from the administrative experiments in North America, the West Indies and India. In thirty years everything changed. Wealth accelerated, mansions and legislatures were built. In the 1850s came the telegraph, then the railway. By 1860, with the exception of Western Australia, all the states were self-governing although not independent. By 1870 British soldiers had gone for good. Australia was self-governing on most matters because it was better run that way and, unlike India, there was no indigenous population ever likely to demand independence.

Elizabeth MacArthur 1766-1850

Elizabeth MacArthur and her husband John arrived in 1789 in the second migration from England - not as criminals but landholders. They got a land grant, some sheep and within five years were in several other business as well as farming. John MacArthur was a sometimes belligerent man and he led a rebellion against the then governor, Captain William Bligh (he of the Bounty) who arrived in 1805. MacArthur was deported back to England and not allowed to return until 1816. But Elizabeth MacArthur stayed on. Her industry and business sense convinced her that the future was in sheep and the best sheep were in the Iberian peninsular merinos. So she shipped a flock to Australia and began to crossbreed to produce fine wool. Elizabeth MacArthur's sheep breeding started the Australian wool industry. The MacArthurs became multi-millionaires. In Australia hardly anyone remembers Bligh.

In 1642 a Dutchman, Abel Tasman landed in Tasmania and called the island Van Diemen's Land after his patron Antony Van Diemen, the governor-general of Batavia in Java - the headquarters of the Dutch East India Company. In 1855 Van Diemen's Land was renamed after its discover and officially became Tasmania. Why? A lot of the answer is to do with image. Tasmania was a barbaric society. The aborigines were slaughtered. Criminals were treated so badly that one convict area was known as Hell's Gate.

Events of this episode took place in Australasia region. We're interested to hear your comments on the influence of Empire on this region:

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A governor's view of the low character of gold diggers

Excerpt from a letter to Colonial Secretary Sir George Grey from C.J. LaTrobe, the Lieutenant Governor of Victoria, 2 March 1852

"The field now became the general rendezvous of a mixed multitude, amongst which the expiree population of Van Diemen's Land, returned Californians, and the most profligate portion of the inhabitants of this and adjacent colonies became broadly conspicuous. A marked change for the worse has been observable. At the outset the bad characters bore but a trifling numerical proportion to the general population, but now, although the preponderance of the well disposed and of those who are friends to law and order is still overwhelming, the number of thoroughly hardened and dissolute characters has greatly increased. It notoriously includes a number of the most determined and desperate ruffians in any community and this fact, taken into account with the great increase and almost general prevalence of the illicit sale of spirits, is sufficient to account for any amount of crime and disorder which may really be found to exist in such a mass, congregating under such extraordinary circumstances and subject to so little moral and physical restraint. Many a murder may take place, of the existence of which no evidence will ever transpire or record exist."