Backbencher

The fourth lecture entitled Settlement: Convicts and Pilgrims began with pictures of Sydney and other places around Australia. Dr. Isern then went on to talk of how Australia was the place that England wanted to send some of its convicts . The first place that the convicts were sent was New South Wales, then Van Diemen's Land, and finally Western Australia. Other reasons that the convicts were sent to Australia were the industrialization, urbanization, and birthrate in England; the country could not keep up with the people who were living in it. I loved getting to know the different specialized words for the convicts who were in Australia, such as Bushranger, which is a person who ran away and returned to a life of crime. Eventually people stopped wanting to send convicts to Australia so that more respectable people could move there instead, so convict resettlement was disbanded.

It was completely different in New Zealand; there they did not have convict settlement. A man named Edward Gibbon Wakefield thought of a planned settlement that he thought would work for New Zealand; even though he had never been there himself. Everyone who went to New Zealand were supposed to be a cultured class of people with strong civil institutions who would be landowners and hire laborers who would in turn become a cultured class of individuals. Eventually pastoralism would change; the people began to put their money into the animals and wool and not into the land. This change was what Lady Barker wrote about in her book Station Life in New Zealand. I think that it would be interesting to learn more about what New Zealand means to people of different generations; how the older people feel about it and how the younger people of the country compare to the older people's view.