Botany Bay Quotes

Of course it was not only the Bourbons’ mistakes which helped decide Napoleon to risk everything to try to regain his throne. Emperor Francis’s refusal to allow his wife and son to rejoin him was another, and the fact that his expenses were running at two and a half times his income. There was also sheer ennui; he complained to Campbell of being ‘shut up in this cell of a house, separated from the world, with no interesting occupation, no savants with me, nor any variety in my society’.88† Another consideration was paragraphs in the newspapers and rumours from the Congress of Vienna that the Allies were planning forcibly to remove him from Elba. Joseph de Maistre, the French ambassador to St Petersburg, had nerve-wrackingly suggested the Australian penal colony of Botany Bay as a possible destination. The exceptionally remote British island of St Helena in the mid-Atlantic had also been mentioned.

She remembered those fancy receipt books written by Lady Nonesuch, or Countess Thingumabob, and laughed out loud. They boasted how damnable high bred the lady was, and how the reader might herself be reckoned à la mode, if she could only cook such stuff herself. No, her book would hold a dark mirror to such conceits. Since Mother Eve's day, women had whispered of herblore and crafty potions, the wise woman's weapons against the injustices of life; a life of ill treatment, the life of a dog. If women were to be kicked into the kitchen they might play it to their advantage, for what was a kitchen but a witch's brewhouse? Men had no notion of what women whispered to each other, hugger-mugger by the chimney corner; of treaclish syrups and bitter pods, of fat black berries and bulbous roots. Such remedies were rarely scribbled on paper; they were carried in noses, fingertips and stealthy tongues. Methods were shared in secret, of how to make a body hot with lust or shiver with fever, or to doze for a stretch or to sleep for eternity. Like a chorus the hungry ghosts started up around her: voices that croaked and cackled and damned their captors headlong into hell. Her ghosts were the women who had sailed out beside her to Botany Bay, nearly five years back on the convict ship Experiment. She made a start with that most innocent of dishes: Brinny's best receipt for Apple Pie. For there was magic in even that- the taking of uneatables: sour apples, claggy fat, dusty flour- and their abradabrification into a crisp-lidded, syrupy miracle. Mother Eve's Secrets, she titled her book, a collection of best receipts and treacherous remedies.

If Australia had not been settled as a prison and built by convict labor, it would have been colonized by other means; that was foreordained from the moment of Cook’s landing at Botany Bay in 1770. But it would have taken half a century longer, for Georgian Britain would have found it exceptionally difficult to find settlers crazy or needy enough to go there of their own free will.

Their next option was Australia. Its eastern seaboard had been explored by the great seafarer Captain James Cook. On April 29, 1770, Cook landed in a wonderful inlet, which he called Botany Bay in honor of the rich species found there by the naturalists traveling with him. This seemed like an ideal location to British government officials. The climate was temperate, and the place was as far out of sight and mind as could be imagined. A fleet of eleven ships packed with convicts was on its way to Botany Bay in January 1788 under the command of Captain Arthur Phillip. On January 26, now celebrated as Australia Day, they set up camp in Sydney Cove, the heart of the modern city of Sydney. They called the colony New South Wales.

Serve the Queen or go to bloody Botany Bay. That’s the choice they gave me. So here I am. You’re a charlatan and I’m a thief. Proud redcoats all.

He sang, Farewell to the homeworld forever, Farewell to each warm, golden day, Farewell to the seas and the forests, For we’re bound out for Botany Bay! ‘Botany Bay was better than where we’re bound for,’ said Clayton. ‘But my ancestors weren’t real criminals. They only picked a few pockets or burgled a few houses. They weren’t guilty of the real crime — passing their forty-fifth birthdays!’ Singing, tooral I ooral I addy, Singing torool I ooral I ay, Singing tooral I ooral I addy — And we’re bound out for Botany Bay!

The president had much on his mind. It was the age of Napoleon and Nelson, of contending powers who seemed never truly at peace, and America remained a target for the designs of enemies determined to dominate all or part of it. His final four years in public office were like the previous decades: Jefferson still struggled to secure the nation. It began—but hardly ended—with Britain, which still harbored doubts about the wherewithal of the United States. “We drove them into being a nation when they were no more fit for it than the convicts of Botany Bay,” the British diplomat Augustus Foster wrote his mother in 1805.

vaste réceptacle Cette Botany-Bay, sentine d’ALBION,

There’s lots o’ bad things ’appen in this world. Lots o’ bad things what ’appen, and lots o’ folks what do bad things. But there’s good, too. Lots o’ good. Me mum, before they put her on that ship for Botany Bay, she told me never to forget that. She said that things like ’onor, and justice, and love are the most important things in the world and that it’s up to each and every one of us to always try to be the best person we can possibly be.

For a generally peaceable person, Miss Faber does like to go about well armed in the world. As

it is not impossible that I could become Governor of this state. Or even President. I would not mind having a horde of sycophants licking my boots. Actually, that is quite an attractive notion. Thank you, Jacky, I had not thought of that.” Amy

Australia, as its most viciously eloquent prime minister, Paul Keating, once pointed out, “is the arse end of the world”. So what inspired Great Britain to select distant Botany Bay as the outhouse of its empire? Let’s start with tea.

Cook’s travels paved the way for the British settlement of the southern land: in particular, the lush surrounds of Botany Bay, which Cook judged the ideal place to build an airport.

In Britain, the advertising business was so complex that the Scotch, English, and Irish Newspapers, and Advertising Office in Edinburgh offered clients access to 115 newspapers across the empire, including the Botany Bay Gazette and the Madras Courier.28 Good communications networks and fierce competition meant that even rural people had a choice of private subscriptions, and taverns, inns, and coffee houses regularly subscribed to a host of newspapers

If cool, damp New Zealand seemed a mirror of Britain, much of Australia—thirty times the size of the U.K.—represented its opposite: dry and harsh, with only 6 percent of its land arable. Yet colonists at Botany Bay, and across Australia, imported English notions of land management to terrain that was horribly ill suited to European husbandry and agriculture.

Cook had no way of knowing that the Endeavour’s pinnace and yawl were about to pierce a community that had remained cocooned from the rest of humanity for millennia. “Aborigine” is Latin for “from the beginning”—an apt name for a people whose culture is probably the oldest surviving on earth. Most scholars believe that the first Australians island-hopped from Southeast Asia in small craft before 40,000 B.C., roughly the time that Cro-Magnons supplanted Neanderthals in Europe. As the Australian pioneers spread across the continent, rising sea levels cut them off from their neighbors. Apart from a few tribes along Australia’s northern rim, who had intermittent contact with Asian fishermen, Aborigines, scattered in clans across an island the size of the continental United States, were completely isolated from every other people on the planet. Those living around Botany Bay in 1770 are believed to have dwelled there, undisturbed, for eight thousand years.

Nine years later, Britain’s Parliament began canvassing sites for a convict settlement to replace the rebellious American colonies, which had long provided a dumping ground for prisoners sentenced to “transportation.” Parliament sought a “distant part of the Globe, from whence [convicts’] Escape might be difficult,” and where they would be able to “maintain themselves…with little or no aid from the Mother Country.” Joseph Banks recommended Botany Bay, which he said enjoyed a gentle Mediterranean climate and could support “a very large Number of People.

The only way to understand Cook’s mistake, if you could call it that, was to view both Botany Bay and Sydney Harbour from sea. I had my first chance to do this on Australia Day, which commemorates the First Fleet’s arrival at Port Jackson on January 26, 1788. The ships’ landing launched white settlement on the continent, and therefore marked the birth of modern Australia. But few present-day Australians regard the holiday with patriotic fervor. It’s hard, first of all, to celebrate the founding of a penitentiary—except, perhaps, to appreciate the long-term irony; thanks to the First Fleet, today’s Sydneysiders occupy a semitropical paradise instead of wet, chill England.

Rather, they’d picked up “kangaroo” from the English and guessed that it referred to all large beasts. So a word that originated with an encounter between Cook and a small clan in north Queensland traveled to England with the Endeavour, then back to Botany Bay with the First Fleet, and eventually became the universal name for Australia’s symbol.