The Botany Bay Medallion

‘Dear Jack…I value Death nothing but it is in leaving you my dear behind and no one to look after you’. David Prendergast,  Oxford Book of Australian Letters, ed. Brenda Niall and John Thompson, 1998

1788 – 1868: Gender disparity characterised Britain’s invasion and occupation of the island continent of New Holland now Australia.

Of 163,000 convicted criminals transported from the British Isles to Australia between 1788 and 1868 only 25,000 were women, of these 12,500 went directly to Tasmania. See: G is for Genocide

‘The tender [Supply] may be employed in conveying to the new settlement a further number of women from the Friendly Islands, New Caledonia etc. from whence any number may be procured without difficulty; and without a sufficient proportion of that sex it is well known that it would be impossible to preserve the settlement from gross irregularities and disorders’. London, Heads of a Plan for Botany Bay.

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‘The death penalty was brought to Australia with the First Fleet’. Mike Edwards, The Hanged Man, The Life and Death of Ronald Ryan, 2002.

1788 – 26th January, Sydney Cove: About 750 (570 male and 193 female) of England’s convicted criminals disembarked from the ‘First Fleet at Sydney Cove on 26 January 1788; among them Thomas Barrett, Henry Lavell, Joseph Hall and John Ryan.

1788 – 27 February, Sydney: One (1) month after landing – 27 February – these four (4) young men stood under‘ a large tree fixt as a gallows’. 

Britain’s invasion and colonisation of New Holland brought the First Nations’ Peoples starvation, disease and a racist caste system based on colour. Well practised retribution was meted out when they dared to challenge the predators who stole their land and plundered their resources.

Although the unjust consequences of invasion stand in plain sight, because of widespread ignorance of our nation’s history in mainstream non-Aboriginal Australia, these go largely unrecognised and unacknowledged or, if acknowledged, the First Australians are ‘blamed’.

‘Imagine if we had suffered the injustices and then were blamed for it’. Paul Keating Redfern Speech, Paul Keating, 10 December 1992.

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