Backbencher

Lecture four starts out talking about convicts and pilgrims. The Sydney settlement was talked about and I found it interesting how Australians turned the city from a convict settlement into their showcase. From the lecture, Sydney sounds like a nice city, with their world famous opera house, beautiful harbor, and their highly developed mall, which sits on the grounds of the original convict prison. The mythistory in Australia and New Zealand was talked about and then the lecture went back to the convict colony topic. The transportation of the convicts was talked about and I found it particularly interesting that being sent to Australia as a convict was really not that bad of a punishment. After their stay in the prison, they had more opportunities available for them than they had in their home country. I also liked the Botany Bay song that we went over in class. I found the message of the song very interesting. We then went on to talk about the colonization of New Zealand, and how they had their scheme of planned colonization. I found it interesting how they wanted to reproduce English life, only make it better. They were not entirely successful with this however, and their land settlement plan did not work very well. The different planned colonies were listed and talked about and pastoralism was also talked about. All in all, lecture four interested me. I found the section on Mythistory to be the only one I had any questions about. Australian and New Zealand historians are more like story tellers than historians in other parts of the world and I just wonder why that is. Maybe this was covered in class, but if so, I didn’t catch it.