Collapse_ How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed - Jared Diamond [241]
Britian’s principal motive for settling Australia was to relieve its festering problem of large numbers of jailed poor people, and to forestall a rebellion that might otherwise break out if they could not somehow be disposed of. In the 18th century British law prescribed the death penalty for stealing 40 shillings or more, so judges preferred to find thieves guilty of stealing 39 shillings in order to avoid imposing the death penalty. That resulted in prisons and moored ship hulks filling with people convicted of petty crimes such as theft and debt. Until 1783, that pressure on the available jail space was relieved by sending convicts as indentured servants to North America, which was also being settled by voluntary emigrants seeking improvement of their economic lot or else religious freedom.
But the American Revolution cut off that escape valve, forcing Britain to seek some other place to dump its convicts. Initially, the two leading candidate locations under consideration were either 400 miles up the Gambia River in tropical West Africa, or else in desert at the mouth of the Orange River on the boundary between modern South Africa and Namibia. It was the impossibility of both of those proposals, evident on sober reflection, that led to the fallback choice of Australia’s Botany Bay near the site of modern Sydney, known at the time only from Captain Cook’s visit in 1770. That was how the First Fleet brought to Australia in 1788 its first European settlers, consisting of convicts plus soldiers to guard them. Convict shipments went on until 1868, and through the 1840s they comprised most of Australia’s European settlers.
With time, four other scattered Australian coastal sites besides Sydney, near the sites of the modern cities of Melbourne, Brisbane, Perth, and Hobart, were chosen as locations of other convict dumps. Those settlements became the nucleus of five colonies, governed separately by Britain, that eventually became five of the six states of modern Australia: New South Wales, Victoria, Queensland, Western Australia, and Tasmania, respectively. All five of those initial settlements were at locations chosen for advantages of their harbors or locations on rivers, rather than for any agricultural advantages. In fact, all proved to be sites poor for agriculture and incapable of becoming self-supporting in food production. Instead, Britain had to send out food subsidies to the colonies in order to feed the convicts and their guards and governors. That was not the case, however, for the area around Adelaide that became the nucleus of the remaining modern Australian state, South Australia. There, good soil resulting from geological uplift, plus fairly reliable winter rains, attracted German farmers as the sole early group of emigrants not from Britain. Melbourne also has good soils west of the city that became the site of a successful agricultural settlement in 1835, after a convict dump founded in 1803 in poor soils east of the city quickly failed.
The first economic payoff from British settlement of Australia came from sealing and whaling. The next payoff came from sheep, when a route across the Blue Mountains 60 miles west of Sydney was finally discovered in 1813, giving access to productive pasture land beyond. However, Australia did not become self-supporting, and Britain’s food subsidies did not cease, until the 1840s, just before Australia’s first gold rush of 1851 at last brought some prosperity.
When that European settlement of Australia began in 1788, Australia had of course been settled for over 40,000 years by Aborigines, who had worked out successful sustainable solutions to the continent’s daunting environmental problems. At the sites of initial European occupation (the convict dumps) and in subsequently settled areas suitable for farming, Australian whites had even less use for Aborigines than white Americans had for Indians: the Indians in the eastern United States were at least