Geoffrey Blainey’s The Tyranny of Distance (1966) argued that more than convict transportation had been on the mind of William Pitt and his ministers in 1786 when they endorsed Botany Bay as a site for a bold experiment in state-run convict transportation. They had also been thinking about the sinews of war as imperial Britain contemplated the Pacific as a new theatre of operations. That would require deepwater harbours and naval stores such as ships’ cables, masts, and canvas sails. Cook had reported Botany Bay to be a commodious harbour, well supplied with freshwater and fertile soils. In nearby New Zealand, a thriving flax plant seemed ideally suited to making linen, which in turn could be woven into canvas. On Norfolk Island grew pines straight and tall like great ships’ masts. When A.G.L. Shaw published a strongly worded rebuttal of what some already called ‘The Blainey thesis’, Blainey responded in kind and it was game on. In 1975 Frost jumped ship, took a berth in the La Trobe History Department and hoisted Blainey’s colours.

Little did he suspect that the opening fusillades of his researches would bring down an albatross that would burden his shoulders for decades. Tracing wider and wider circles through the lonely vastness of southern oceans, Frost pursued his single-minded quest for total victory in the Botany Bay debate. On and on, book after book, and still the knockout blow eluded him. Botany Bay: The Real Story summarises and reiterates his findings. His justification for ploughing on is that over the last few years he has greatly expanded his collection of relevant documents – mostly from official British sources. These have not changed his mind, but they have expanded his previous contextualisation of British imperial and domestic policy in the late eighteenth century. Readers new to the Botany Bay controversy will find this a highly readable and educational summary of the evidence pro and con. Though Frost still wears his albatross, it is overlaid with a plenitude of academic honours attesting to the rigour of his research and the power of his argumentation.

Beware lest the glittering eye of this scholarly ancient mariner hold you too long in its thrall. For all of Frost’s bluster about the ‘traditionalist historians’ who pigheadedly insist that Botany Bay was chosen solely for its suitability as a jail, this is a dispute that flared in about 1969, peaked in the early 1980s, and died down twenty years ago. It satisfied university lecturers’ urgent need for raw materials at a time when Australian history was beginning to be taught as a stand-alone subject to first-year students. Controversies are the lifeblood of historical research, and the study of famous debates is used to induct apprentices into the discipline. ‘Botany Bay: Rubbish Dump for Convicts or Outpost of Empire?’ was an obvious choice of topic and remains a staple of some introductory courses. Scholarship, however, has moved on, as Frost tacitly acknowledges. His conclusion cites only David Mackay, Thomas Keneally, and Alan Atkinson as historians who have ‘recently repeated’ the ‘traditionalist explanation’. Mackay’s book, published in 1985, is hardly recent. Moreover, at the time of its publication, Oxford University Press touted it as a ‘revisionist work’ that challenged the historians who ‘in recent years have argued that “commercial or strategic reasons lay behind the European settlement of New South Wales”’. Thomas Keneally is of course a novelist, not an historian, and his casual references to academic arguments in Australians (2009) are employed to introduce a discussion of Arthur Phillip’s governorship rather than a studied defence of the ‘traditionalist’ position. He shows his muddled understanding of the debate by presenting it as an argument between those who see a ‘commercial thought’ about flax and masts as the real purpose of the Botany Bay venture and those who see it as merely ‘tacked on to the penal plan’. From the beginning, Blainey and Frost stressed the military, not the commercial, importance of flax and Norfolk Island pines. And that was in relation to larger concerns about the future of Britain in the Pacific.

John Boyne, Landing at Botany Bay, 1786, hand-coloured etching (National Library of Australia), depicting the landing of the Prince of Wales and members of the parliamentary opposition with convicts at an imaginary Botany Bay

Although Alan Atkinson expressed some early sceptical thoughts, he now holds a far more nuanced position on the settlement of New South Wales. According to Frost, in the first volume of The Europeans in Australia (1997) ‘Alan Atkinson ringingly dismisses the naval stores motive, declaring that “nothing could be further from the truth”.’ Here is what Atkinson actually wrote:

It is sometimes said that the founders of European settlement in Australia meant it as a place where convicts would serve out their time in hard labour. Botany Bay, it has been argued, was meant as a Gulag before Gulag. Or else it was meant to be a place where men would expiate their crimes by building a naval base, or by producing the raw mater-ial for sails and masts. Nothing could be further from the truth. In autumn 1786, if not later, New South Wales was envisaged as a land of Englishmen where the rights inherent in living conversation, the rights admired by the more old-fashioned advocates of liberty, would prevail.

Plainly, the comment ‘Nothing could be further from the truth’ is directed at the question of the future character envisaged for the settlement and its convict workforce, not at strategic considerations that might also have influenced imperial authorities. Atkinson’s present position is better represented by this passage in Australia’s Empire (2008):

… from the very beginning there were two equally inconsistent ambitions for a British Australia. The minister in charge of the project in 1786, Lord Sydney, hoped for a community of peasant proprietors, a quasi-republic whose members would learn to live in mutual trust. On the other hand, some of his colleagues recognised very early that the settlement at Sydney Cove might be a means of opening up the Pacific to British commerce and naval power.

The footnote to the last sentence cites Alan Frost’s Convicts and Empire: A Naval Question 1776–1811 (1980). In a similar vein, Glyndwr Williams writes in the authoritative Oxford History of the British Empire that while the reported suitability for settlement ‘may have been enough to prompt the government to choose Botany Bay as the new site for convicts … less publicized reasons may also have played a part’, including ‘a strategic naval base, ‘the hope of producing naval stores’, and ‘the necessity of a preventative strike to stifle French moves towards the region’. That is to say, Frost’s views are now routinely endorsed by serious scholars. There is no reigning traditionalist orthodoxy.

As with debates about the causes of the Industrial Revolution, the American Civil War, or the rise of Hitler, it is a mistake to cast arguments in terms of either/or. Undergraduates and journalists might be energised by the question ‘Was the 2003 Invasion of Iraq about Oil or 9/11 or Democracy or Weapons of Mass Destruction?’, but most experienced historians would say that it is not a fruitful way to frame research. They would not expect to find in the archives a single concise document stating the ‘real story’. Twenty-first century American officials and late eighteenth-century British ones knew, as Lyndon Johnson put it, how to fart and chew gum. Multiple motivations jostle for attention in the minds of active statesmen, even when they are concentrated on a single issue.

If asked to summarise the current scholarly consensus on the Botany Bay question, most knowledgable historians would say something like this: having decided to persevere with convict transportation after the United States had been ruled out as a destination, Pitt and his ministers considered several alternatives. Cost-effectiveness was a primary short-term factor; if private enterprise could not do the job, the state would have to find a place where convicts could support themselves by their own labour. The final serious candidates came to be south-west Africa, the eastern coast of the Cape of Good Hope, and New South Wales. What they had in common was that each occupied a strategic position in terms of British shipping and sea power. Recent experience of war (1756–63 and 1776–83) made clear that conflicts with other European powers would henceforth be fought right across the globe. Cook’s voyages and the expanding scale of trade with China ensured that the Pacific would also be a theatre of naval operations. Naval strategists seriously considered the advantages of bases at the Cape of Good Hope, Trincomalee Harbour in Ceylon, and New South Wales. Dutch opposition made the first two unfeasible in 1786, but they would be scooped up at the first opportunity in 1795. Meanwhile, an impregnable position in south-east Australia could be useful, though supplying it with naval stores would be a problem.

Spelling out all these factors in a public document justifying the Botany Bay decision would have needlessly antagonised rival powers and would have merely said what strategic thinkers already knew. That is why Alan Frost will never find a document to deliver the knockout punch he has looked for all these years. He can stop searching and shed his albatross. His side won.

CONTENTS: APRIL 2011