DENTISTS, ONLY ADDRESS : 14), ELIZABETH STREET, NEAR MARKET STREET. Established Years before any others of the ARTIFICIAL TEETH FITTED WITHOUT EXTRACTION OF ROOTS. NITROUS OXIDE GAS ADMINISTERED DAILY FOR EXTRACTING TEETH PAINLESSLY. Remember! Our Only Address is 141, Elizabeth Street, NEAR MARKET STREET, SYDNEY. Early Australian History. [COPYRIGHT.] A Series of Historical Sketches, bearing upon Australian Colonization and Convict Life in New South Wales and Van Dieman's Land. INTRODUCTORY. OW strangely the links fit in! Little did the British Government think when issuing the orders in Council in 1786 for establishing a Convict Settlement in New South Wales, that they were taking the initial steps towards founding a "New Britannia in the Southern World." Yet so it was. If the American War of Independence had not closed the plantations of Virginia against the reception of transported offenders, and cast upon the British Government the duty of fixing upon some other place to which they might send some of the prisoners who then filled the gaols of Great Britain to overflowing, the wonderful land of which Captain Cook had spoken as having been discovered by him, and concerning which the interest of the English people had been considerably excited at the time his narratives were published-the land which now ranks as one of the richest, most populous, and most progressive of the British dependencies might to this day have remained in the possession of the aborigines; producing nothing, promising nothing; locked up from civilization and all its blessings (and curses), and unknown save to the few thousands of blacks who might from year to year inhabit it. And what, then, would the world have lost-what, then, should we who live in it have lost? Pessimists, time and again, have raised a lachrymose wail about the "stain" which must always rest on the colony through the criminality of its early life; but these men can never see anything but the evil, and even that evil they would intensify for the sake of making their wailing more mournful. 'Tis true that the beginning was in some measure bad, but that bad beginning was better than no beginning at all; and, fresh from long and deep research among old records, I am bold to declare that the earlier convicts were not the worst criminals who came out to the colony, and that some of the darker and bloodier stains which deface the first pages of the colony's history were made by men who counted the poor chained wretches under them as worse than the offal in a charnel-house-men who came out free, who lived freely, lied and robbed and murdered freely, and who literally fattened on the blood of other mortals a thousand times better than themselves, although those mortals had been banished from their fatherland in chains. The facts in proof of this assertion will appear in proper order; at present we must deal with events that transpired before either bond or free from Britain's shores placed foot upon Australian land for the purpose of making it their home. Great Britain had had experience of transport colonization before ever Australia was thought of. For upwards of a century and a half, historians tell us, great numbers of convicts were annually sent across the Atlantic to American plantations, most of them being sold to the planters for a term of |