It was ... Botany Bay, rather than Sydney Harbour, that the British government had in mind when ... it dispatched a fleet to colonize New South Wales in the name of the Crown. ...[I]t had been decided that this arcane far corner of the world would be a suitable site for a penal settlement. The American colonies having lately been lost, the West African colonies being generally more lethal than even villains deserved, a new dumping-ground was needed for Britain's felons. The prison hulks of the Thames and Medway were hideously overcrowded, and there were thousands of miscellaneously convicted criminals, rebels, layabouts and ne'er-do-wells that the British Establishment wished to be rid of.

Botany Bay was far away, relatively temperate, and might one day prove strategically or commercially useful; that it was already occupied by its native people was no handicap, in the political morality of the time; for a start 775 luckless misfits, 582 males, 193 females, average age twenty-seven, were packed into six chartered transports and sent to the Antipodes.

Many of them were habitual offenders, though their crimes were mostly trivial. Their sentences were for seven years, fourteen years, or life, but good behavior might earn them tickets-of-leave before the expiration of their sentences, giving them limited freedom within the settlement, and the right to a grant of land. They might indeed be pardoned altogether at the government's discretion, but for the vast majority transportation to Botany Bay meant perpetual exile--very few would ever accumulate enough cash to buy a passage home. The convicts were accompanied by a couple of hundred marines, with 27 wives and 25 children, and by miscellaneous livestock. With the transports sailed two small warships and three ships carrying supplies. The route took the First Fleet of Australian history via Rio de Janeiro and the Cape of Good Hope--13,950 miles in all--and never before had so many people traveled so far together.

For most of the convicts, never having heard of Captain Cook, let alone read his reports (for they were almost all illiterate), it must have been like sailing to the moon. It is hard to imagine a more violent contrast between departure point and destination. In England Jane Austen was at work, the Marylebone Cricket Club had lately codified the rules of cricket and the House of Commons was considering a motion for the abolition of slavery. In New South Wales the cicadas chafed, the parrots squawked, and aboriginals speaking unknown tongues hunted inconceivable marsupials. Cowering in their creaking ships, often in chains, the prisoners of the First Fleet went all unknowing from one to the other. [Jan Morris: Sydney, pp. 14-15]

Australian Identity and the Land

The legend of the bush and the mystique of the people who worked it are deeply embedded in our folklore thanks to ... poets like Lawson and Patterson.

But how relevant are these myths when Australia is one of the most urbanised societies on the planet? This process was well under way before federation when settlers and their descendants sought relief from the harsh interior along the coastal fringe.

Perhaps the bush myths were, as some suggest, the product of alienated writers and intellectuals dissatisfied with their 'sleazy urban frontier,' and so took to romanticising the outback while depicting the city as a place of moral 'corruption and exploitation' (Graeme Davison, "Sydney and the Bush: An urban context for the Australian Legend," Intruders in the Bush, pp. 112, 122).

Certainly immigrants have seen this land as something to be owned, worked over and made productive.

However, common law notions of ownership and the exclusivity ownership brings sit uneasily with traditional Aboriginal spiritual and collectivist understandings of the land. [Fact File: Australian Identity, Immigration Museum, Melbourne]

White Australia Policy:

The 1901 Immigration Restriction Act was popularly known as the "White Australia Policy." The policy remained in force into the 1960s, when [it was] gradually dismantled and finally abolished with the passing of the 1975 Racial Discrimination Act.

The origins of the "White Australia" policy can be traced back to the 1850s Gold Rush period, with the white miners' resentment towards industrious Chinese miners. Later it was hard working kanakas (indentured labourers from Pacific islands) in Northern Queensland. Factory workers in the southern states became strongly opposed to all forms of immigration, which they considered as a threat to their jobs--particularly by non-white people who they thought would accept a lower standard of living and work for lower wages.

The key and most evocative symbol of the White Australia Policy was the Dictation Test. [Fact File: Post World War II Immigration to Australia, Immigration Museum, Melbourne]

Two Letters to the Editor in Christchurch, New Zealand

A Mere Column
I was disappointed that the latter question in What Is Maori? Who Is Pakeha? was gifted a mere column. New Zealand's search for a national identity rests on discovering what makes us as a people unique. The use of the term Pakeha could well be the catalyst to this long overdue debate.

As a Pakeha New Zealander, I can only describe the word as it applies to me. I am a young woman of largely Irish descent who can date the arrival of ancestors into this country pre-treaty. Like most New Zealanders my age, I understand the meaning of, and use in preference to English equivalents, words such as "mana" and "whanau." I believe in the concept of "turangawaewae" and know mine is here.

I am not European. The irony of this seems lost on Anthony Hoeke who, unlike myself, by virtue of having an English mother is entitled to a European Union passport. I refute his assertion that my ethnicity is only important in relation to a Maori context. I do not become Irish by leaving New Zealand. I cannot because I am not. I am Pakeha. His wife is not; unless she was born in new Zealand, unless when she is away form new Zealand she yearns to be home, unless when she sees beautiful mountains and sunsets elsewhere she compares them unfavourably with New Zealand's beauty--as New Zealanders are wont to do; she is Belgian.
I am not "tau-iwi." As a seventh generation New Zealander I refuse to be considered a foreigner. I have the good fortune of "looking like a kiwi." My friends of Asian descent--even those whose great-grandparents arrived on the goldfields of Otago--are not so lucky and suffer for it. Until New Zealanders are allowed to be just that, without reference to long-forgotten ancestral homelands, New Zealand will struggle for national identity.

Keep up the thought provoking articles.
Kate Thompson
Wellington

Time to Be Blunt
After glancing through the article What Is Maori? Who Is Pakeha (August) I think it's time to be blunt and say that the New Zealand obsession with racial origins has gone completely over the top.

My European ancestors can be traced in this country for at least 110 years so I find it absurd to be referred to as a European after all this time. I'm also one-sixteenth Maori but even most Maori would find it hilarious for me to insist on being called one of the tangata whenua, especially in light of my more Irish than Irish name and pale features.

It's time everyone did a bit of growing up. The Maori were here first, despite the popular mythology surround the Moriori, and they deserve to have democratically elected and accountable leaders to best serve their needs in accordance with the traditional concept of mana, as opposed to the self-serving rubbish that is now dubbed "mana" by money-grabbing swine among Maori leaders.

It must also be faced by Maori that about half of the whites in this country (and quite a fair number of Asians) have been here at least three generations and simply don't have the option of going back to the country of their ancestors. They too need to be accorded some respect. They have earned the right to be called tangata whenua and be accorded the same degree of respect as that which the Maori have often demanded for themselves.

It's time to put away the genealogical charts, stop fussing over whose ancestors came here in canoes and whose ancestors came over by sailing ships, and to finally cut the ties with mother England. Only then can we start to mature as a truly independent and sovereign nation in which everyone here has a place and everyone has a contribution to make.

Miles Lacey
Porirua