The Road to Botany Bay
The Road to Botany Bay
This chapter considers history as told by the First Fleet chroniclers: Phillip, Tench, Collins, Hunter, and White. It suggests a reflective return to Botany Bay and a spatial interpretation of the accounts of the First Fleet journalists in order to recover from the Enlightenment logic of cause and effect something of what that logic suppressed. In particular, we may be able to recover that dimension of the convict’s existence which imprisonment and transportation were specifically designed to exclude: his occupation of a historical space. While recovering this lost space may not change the official history, it does represent a timely mutiny against imperial history’s methodological assumptions.
Keywords: spatial history, Australia, Australian history, First Fleet, convict, historical space
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