Botany Bay Mirages: Illusions of Australia's Convict Beginnings

The first dozen years of European settlement of Australia are fixed in our minds by powerful images raised from an incomplete historical record. Alan Frost, after collecting a greatly expanded range of documents from archives around the world, sets the record straight. The images he challenges are immediately familiar and include overcrowded and unhealthy English prison hulks, hasty decisions based on overly optimistic assessment of the land's fertility, a poorly equipped and managed First Fleet, subsequent neglect by Britain, callous treatment of Aborigines, and the opportunistic and aberrant use of the notion of terra nullius.