Second Decade

In the 1810s, the British penal colony of Australia, known then as New South Wales, was barely 20 years old. Already it had sunk into a morass of drunkenness, corruption and hopelessness, even suffering a military coup by the soldiers tasked to keep the unruly convicts in line. There were deep social divisions between the “Emancipists,” freed convicts who hoped to own their own land, and “Exclusives,” white settlers who came voluntarily. This is to say nothing of the tragic effects that European settlement had on the continent’s aboriginal population. But as much of a mess as Australia was in the Second Decade, there were seeds of hope that it could become something a little less depressing. When Lachlan Macquarie, an enterprising Scotsman, took over as the colony’s governor in 1810, he began transforming Australia into something more than a human refuse dump—but it was by no means an easy road.In this first part of a projected two-part series, Dr. Sean Munger explains where Australia came from, whose idea it