The penal colonies were modern experiments that attempted to resolve surplus British populations, achieve strategic and naval ambitions, and form new imperial markets. Metropolitan reformers were keenly interested in prison systems, writing speculative accounts and plans in response to early evidence from New South Wales. This chapter analyses major theories about the penal colonies and ‘systematic colonization’ by Jeremy Bentham and Edward Gibbon Wakefield, examining how evidence was drawn from colonial texts and repurposed for metropolitan interests. Alternative forms of information from the colonies were fed into metropolitan inquiries by the Quaker travellers James Backhouse and George Washington Walker. Quasi-official colonial experiments with convicts and prison reform trialled through the first half of the nineteenth century in many cases anticipated the prison reform underway in Britain. This chapter analyses the network of texts that brought metropolitan attention to bear on controversial aspects of convict transportation and colonial reform that reshaped ideas about society, crime, and punishment, with distinctive religious overtones, and how new models for reform emerged from colonial experiments.

This chapter examines eighteenth-century textual records about the Australian colonies, from the early British press reports of the establishment of the penal colony at Port Jackson to the accounts of religious personnel such as the first colonial chaplain Richard Johnson. It reveals how convicts and Indigenous people were represented in texts designed for metropolitan audiences. The isolated voices of evangelical reformers provided rich accounts of the problems and failures of the penal colony. They questioned the morality of the military governance of the penal colony and the dispossession of Indigenous peoples. Evangelical accounts from New South Wales became part of a global knowledge economy and a thriving print culture; they provided evidence that thickened, and at times contradicted, official accounts that circulated in the British media.

Saxe Bannister was appointed Attorney General of New South Wales probably at least in part because his interactions with the Six Nations had brought him to the attention of the Colonial Office. He found himself plunged into conflict with competing settler factions. The chapter focuses primarily, however, on his interaction with Indigenous resistance, particularly by the Wiradjuri, in the context of the violent conquest of Australia. Bannister tried to apply the British rule of law as he saw it to frontier contexts, calling for the declaration of martial law during warfare in both Bathurst and Hunter Valley. He also tried unsuccessfully to prosecute police officers and local settlers for extrajudicial murders. Bannister left New South Wales in disgrace but his legal legacy persisted in debates that had implications across the British settler empire: the court case would later lay the groundwork for the legal refusal of Indigenous sovereignty in exchange for the protection of Indigenous people against settler violence. The chapter highlights the importance and the contradictions of the British ideology of the rule of law.

The performance of Edward Young’s The Revenge in Sydney in 1796 is used as a way to recast British-Aboriginal relations in the early years of the British invasion. Sydney became an amphitheater of struggle over contending claims of British and Aboriginal authorities, Eora clans who refused to give up their lands, exiled British felons of all sexes enraged at their fates, soldiers and sailors who bewailed their exile: revenge was on many people’s minds. How was The Revenge going to be interpreted in such a setting, by such a multitude?

Chapter 4 focuses on alpaca wool – a novel South American fibre that first entered British markets in the mid-1830s. Already widely used in Peru, alpaca wool first took off in Britain in 1836, after the woollen manufacturer Titus Salt discovered a bag of the fibre while walking through the docks in Liverpool. It was imported in increasing quantities from Peru in the 1840s and 1850s and used for the manufacture of shawls, cloth, ladies’ dresses and umbrellas. Charting the alpaca’s journey from the Andes to the outback, the chapter considers why contemporaries set so much store by the animal and how they went about appropriating it. It assesses how increased access, new technologies and new markets made alpaca wool viable and profitable as a luxury fabric and examines the transcontinental relationships that brought alpaca fibre, and later living alpacas, to Britain and its colonies. The chapter also emphasises the important local and regional dynamics of alpaca naturalisation, and the ways in which alpacas infiltrated wider discussions about identity, free trade and biopiracy. It concludes with a study of the alpaca’s wild relative, the vicuña, hunted to the point of extinction for its coveted fleece.

Within a month of landing at Sydney, John Bigge was in dispute with Lachlan Macquarie over the appointment of the emancipist surgeon, William Redfern, to the magistracy. Over the next fifteen months of his inquiry the commissioner reached conclusions about the future of the Australian colonies sharply at odds with those of the governor. The two men were divided by background, temperament and expectations of empire. Macquarie, a career soldier, always viewed New South Wales as a ‘penitentiary or asylum on a grand scale’. It was destined to grow from a penal to a free society and ‘must one day or other be one of the greatest colonies belonging to the British Empire’, but that would depend upon the rehabilitation of its convicts under his tutelage.

The British government’s decision in 1839 to seek the consent of native chiefs to its assumption of sovereignty in the islands of New Zealand cannot be explained adequately by reference to international law, European political thought or Christian humanitarianism. It owed a great deal instead to strategic and political considerations and a complex sequence of historical events that took place in the preceding seventy years. The decision to treat with the chiefs for sovereignty was in large part a function of protection talk that generated a status for Māori as being more or less an ally of Britain and brought into being a relationship of mutual protection between the chiefs and the British Crown. At the same time, small parties negotiated with natives to purchase land from the outset of European settlement, and later groups of European adventurers and land-grabbers followed suit. At the point the Colonial Office reluctantly accepted that the British government had to intervene and assume sovereignty, the long history of encounter in New Zealand persuaded it that the means required to make a treaty were available in the form of chiefs as interlocutors and missionaries as go-betweens.

I argue that imperial agents treated legal concepts as a resource rather than a script for claiming possession of overseas territories, and did so in order to make vague claims to legitimacy vis-à-vis their imperial rivals rather than make strictly legal claims. I have found no evidence to suggest that James Cook claimed possession of New Holland on the grounds of terra nullius, res nullius or occupation. It is more likely that Cook relied upon two other legal concepts: discovery and possessio. Cook’s claim-making was primarily done with a European audience in mind rather than a local one, that it was concerned with staking a preliminary claim, and that his claim-making did not determine how questions about sovereignty or title in land were to be treated later. We need to focus on the sequence of events that began with the encounters between Cook’s party and the Aboriginal people, and the perceptions that Cook and Banks subsequently formed of the natives. After the colony was planted, the British government never saw any need to negotiate with the local people for cession of sovereignty or the purchase of land because it was relatively well-armed and encountered no powerful rival sources of power.

The significance of the treaty made at Waitangi in 1840 has consistently been exaggerated by historians. All the British players involved in making it were preoccupied with the momentary diplomatic task of persuading the chiefs to cede sovereignty to the British Crown. The inclusion in the agreement of a clause confirming the natives in the possession of their lands did not spring from the British government’s instructions but from the influence of local rather than metropolitan actors and forces. Moreover, with one exception, there is no contemporary evidence that any parties attached the significance to the first clause of its second article that was attributed to it later. What is more, the British government eventually claimed possession of the larger part of New Zealand on the very same basis as it had assumed possession of New South Wales in 1788, namely the doctrine of discovery. The way in which critical matters relating to land title were treated at the imperial centre was fundamentally a function of political power and could readily change according to circumstances. The government bowed to the pressure that a group of adventurers, the New Zealand Company, was able to exert in parliament and the press.

In Australia, Irish and Catholic are virtually synonymous. In the eastern states, Irish Catholics often comprised nearly a third of the population and rarely less than a quarter. Irish nuns, priests, bishops, and laity shaped the country almost from the beginning. This chapter traces the development of Irish, and Irish Catholic, Australia across the continent from the early 1800s to Federation and beyond.

New South Wales was very late to receive the Judiacture Act system that effected fusion, and has been significant in discussions of fusion since for that reason. But did New South Wales need to administer law and equity separately in the first place? This chapter shows that when the Supreme Court was established, law and equity were administered without different courts or parts of the one court. There was already fusion, in that sense. But later, under colonial instruction, the fused court was differentiated when rules of court were made to replicate the procedures of the Court of Chancery at Westminster. In time, that differentiation became entrenched, and acquired some of the defects of the dual system abolished in England in 1875. Although the original set-up of the court did not require fusion – since it was already fused – by the 1960s fusion was needed, and came in 1972. The chapter shows the influence of local judicial figures and local events on experiences of fusion.