Australia Day Pt 2: Margaret Cameron-Ash

Menzies Research Centre

In the second of two Watercooler conversations centred around Australia Day and the need for stronger foundational narrative that accurately describes our country and that values that unite us.

It is hard to have serious discussion about the meaning of European Settlement unless we can first agree on the facts. Yet fewer than four out of ten Australians know which event they are supposed to be celebrating or mourning, according a recent survey by Compass Polling. Only 39 per cent correctly identified it as the date of the arrival of the First Fleet at Sydney Cove.

A new account of the founding of modern Australia by Margaret Cameron-Ash exposes how little we have known up to now about the British government’s decision to establish a colony in NSW and how much of our understanding has been clouded by prejudice.

Tellingly, Cameron-Ash trained as a lawyer, rather than a historian.

Her book Beating France to Botany Bay: The Race to Found Australia debunks the myth that Australia was purely a dumping ground for Britain’s criminal class, the explanation for settlement that was considered unquestionably true by Manning Clark, one of Australia’s most influential historians.

In his seminal four-volume A History of Australia, Clark makes no mention whatsoever of the French voyager Captain Jean Laperouse who’s expedition to the Pacific stirred the British into action.

Yet as Cameron-Ash documents, intelligence that Laperouse was on course for Australia with two vessels laden with trees, plants and seeds, manufactured goods, tools and unwrought iron convinced prime minister William Pitt the Younger that French settlement was imminent.

Margaret Cameron Ash joins Nick Cater to describe the photo-finish to the race to Botany Bay and its consequences.

Nick Cater is Executive Director of the Menzies Research Centre.

Beating France to Botany Bay: The Race to Found Australia by Margaret Cameron-Ash is published by Quadrant Books. Order online here: https://quadrant.org.au/product/beating-france-to-botany-bay-the-race-to-found-australia/

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