Backbencher

Lecture four was about how Australia and New Zealand came to be settled. Dr. Isern strated out with some of the photos that he has taken in his travels to these distant lands over the years. I always enjoy those photos because it gives a better view of the countries rather than something that is just in a textbook. Another concept that Dr. Isern covered was that of mythistory. Here he talked about William McNeill and his ideas of historians as myth-makers. Australia first started to be settled by England because the English prisons were overflowing so they thought what better way to get them out of their hair than to send them halfway around the world. It actually worked for quite a while too. They originally set up settlements in three places: New South Wales, Van Diemens Land, and Western Australia. New Zealand was planned colonization from the get go. They set up land for people and allowed them to travel down and become a colony. They referred to it as reproduction of english life, only better. It seems almost like the New Zealanders were kind of high on themselves by calling themselves better than England. I found this lecture interesting because it makes Australia look worse than New Zealand because they started off as a convict colony while NZ was a planned colonization. If I recall correctly too, the Australians tried to downplay their convicts a little bit by saying that the things they did to get shipped down there weren't actually that bad. Eventually they actually stopped sending convicts down south because it was starting to look bad. I also enjoyed the song that professor Isern sang to us about the colonists being sent down to Botany Bay. I can't help but wonder what Australia would have been like had they not stopped shipping criminals down there.