INVASION 1788 – ‘ENGLAND WON AUSTRALIA BY SIX DAYS’ BUT ‘NOT A HINT OF IT SHALL EVER TRANSPIRE’ NT OF IT SHALL EVER TRANSPIRE’
Tuesday, December 2nd, 2014‘Once again it was [Captain James] Cook’s fate to bring disaster in his wake’. Allan Moorehead, The Fatal Impact, Penguin, 1971
Eighteen (18) years later in 1788 Britain invaded New Holland. ccccc but; ‘not a hint of it shall ever transpire’.
‘It seems clear that only a few men in the inner circle of [Younger Pitt’s] government knew the exact purposes of the [Botany Bay] settlement; Eden [William Eden later Lord Auckland] was probably not in that secretive circle’. Professor Geoffrey Blainey, Gotham City, The Founding of Australia, The Arguments about Australia’s origins. Ed. Ged Martin, Hale and Iremonger, 1978
Yet the names of Prime Minster William Pitt’s ‘secretive inner circle’, Lord Hawkesbury, Lord Mulgrave and Henry Dundas, are familiar to Sydney-siders.