Backbencher

Convicts and Pilgrims was a great lecture on the settlement o f New Zealand and Australia. Starting with Australia we discussed how the high crime rates in Georgia England had caused a crowding of hulks that were sent to America. As a result convict colonies were created in New South Wales, Van Die man’s land and eventually Western Australia. Convicts ranged anywhere from political dissidents to habitual criminals. Many convicts on the first fleet to New South Wales suffered starvation due to dry land that was not easily cultivated. By 1868 all transportation of convicts to Australia was stopped.

New Zealand was settled in a very different way than Australia. New Zealand actually had planned colonization meaning they got to pick and choose who would be sent there to develop it. It was planned and thought of as a reproduction of English life only better. With the discovery of gold in Otago and the Westland of New Zealand, unplanned growth began to occur. Australians, Americans and Chinese began to enter New Zealand all in search for gold. As put in lecture this was an arrival of undesirables which would only mess up the planned colony.

My interest in this lecture was the topic of mythistory. Not knowing anything about New Zealand or Australia when coming to this class, hearing some of this was a bit shocking. If I hadn’t heard it from this class I would have thought it an untruth. Even knowing that these things happened, it’s hard to believe that it was thought safe to send convicts to an island and trust them to develop it. The planned colony of New Zealand is a little more believable and sounds much safer. We of the present have to make the decision of what to believe actually happened by way of journals and such. Any historian could make what was once a true story into untruth by revising it incorrectly so that those who read it may misunderstand.