Why the British Colonized Australia

It was the perfect place to send our criminals!

In some ways, Australia offered the conditions for the perfect colony, but in other ways it was far from ideal. Captain James Cook had sailed along 2,000 miles of the east coast in 1770, landing only at Botany Bay (as named by him). He claimed the coastline for the British crown, but it was another 18 years before any attempt was made to site a colony there. He thought that the southern coastline was reminiscent of South Wales, and “New South Wales” it has been ever since.

A perfect colony?

What made Australia perfect for colonization was that it was an untouched, empty continent that the British could occupy without opposition. Although Dutch navigators had discovered parts of Australia long before Cook arrived, their countrymen made no attempt at settling there. Cook had noticed that there was a native population, but they proved to be largely docile and to have no intention of resisting any incursions by Europeans.

On the other hand, as the first settlers soon discovered, this new continent proved to be an unfriendly host. The natives were hunter-gatherers who had made no attempt to cultivate the land or build settled communities, so there was no infrastructure to take over or imitate. The wildlife was impossible to tame or…