1787 by Nick Brodie

Author:Nick Brodie
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: ebook
Publisher: Hardie Grant
Published: 2016-08-03T16:00:00+00:00

The Endeavour voyage is a convenient marker of the story of Britain and the Commonwealth of Australia. It works well as a preface for the main story as usually told, which starts in January 1788 with the arrival of the British First Fleet and reaches maturity in 1901. The region encompassing Botany Bay and Port Jackson often gets reduced to a beachhead in a stark frontier between Europe and Australia — reconnoitred then occupied. The fact that it was a place of contestation is sometimes discreetly acknowledged, but more often downplayed.

But it was never this simple. There were wider historical processes at work. In part the Endeavour collapsed the eastern parts of the old Greater Australasian frontier. Cook facilitated New Zealand becoming reconnected with a wider Melanesian and Polynesian Pacific in ways that Tasman’s earlier voyage had not, but they are each part of a longer history. Similarly, while mainland Australia’s east coast had been distant from the old Eurasian frontier, it now relatively quickly became an area where Eurasia and the wider Pacific engaged with Greater Australasia. We tend to think along the narrative and sequential lines of the Endeavour voyage, tracking northwards along isolated shores. But in a bigger sense it mapped the contraction of ancient economic barriers and cultural borders. This time and place was the frontier. And this fact is made abundantly clear by the brief settlement the crew of the Endeavour undertook on another part of eastern Australia.

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