Queensland
A brief scan of Queensland's early history seems to endorse Australian history's conventional narrative. Founded as a penal station intended to strike terror into the heart of would-be malefactors, Moreton Bay undoubtedly lived up to the expectation. However, scratching the surface suggests possibilities that seem to run in directions London would not have preferred.
After the battle of Waterloo ended the Napoleonic wars, the British Isles were thrown into unprecedented turmoil. In one sense, it was a continuation of processes that had been running for decades: the massive economic and social changes often labelled the Agrarian and Industrial Revolutions. In another, it added a new element.
Britain had been at war for almost all of Australia's convict history. Convicted criminals who looked to avoid transportation to Botany Bay had an alternative: they could enlist in the British Army or the Royal Navy. What would those individuals do when they were demobilised? Would they return to their "criminal ways" in a society without a welfare state? So there's the home government's motivation. On the ground in New South Wales, things looked slightly different from several perspectives.
Newly arrived free settlers, well-established 'exclusive' would-be aristocrats, ticket-of-leave convicts, and those still 'doing their time' all had their expectations and ambitions. And then there was Surveyor-General John Oxley, apparently obsessed with untangling the Gordian knot that appeared in my primary school Social Studies textbooks as the riddle of the rivers.
