Joseph Banks History Essay

Joseph Banks thought that colonising Australia would be advantageous for Britain. To what extent was it advantageous to those living in Australia?

Australia had been lived in by Aborigines for over 40,000 years prior to white settlement. At present, Australia is currently a thriving multicultural society. Joseph Banks and others of his time believed that colonising Australia would be of great advantage to Britain as it would free up prison space, establish trade routes with surrounding countries, expand trade and allow more land to grow crops. In the long run, colonisation was definitely advantageous to Australia, however for a lot of people at the time, it was a terrifying time full of hardships that they had not prepared for. Life was difficult for the pioneers and the early settlers as they worked hard with little reward. Women were also at the receiving end of suffering in ways such as discrimination and convict factories, and Aboriginal people had terrible things done to them. Despite this, there were some advantages in the events such as the gold rush and people who were dedicated to good.

The women who lived in colonial Australia were treated badly and unfairly in comparison to men. In an attempt to even out the ratio of men to women in Australia, the government offered bounties and low fares to new female immigrants. Australia was sold as a welcoming, developed country that the women would be able to waltz into and set up in a place that was advertised as a New England. These bounties lured in both poor and rich women alike, as for the poor it would mean a fresh start with a little extra cash, and for the wealthy it meant an opportunity to reunite with husbands and fathers and to gain more wealth. Upon arrival, the new immigrant women were devastated by what they found: “Many of the young 'bounty' girls who arrived in Sydney and Melbourne found themselves in a miserable situation, with little but prostitution and crime to sustain them.” This was because the women that came had nobody in Australia to help them find a source of income or find their way about this new colony. The majority of these girls had been raised in poverty in England and couldn’t read or write, so they had no skills to land them a job in Australia.
These illiterate women, however, were branded as being lucky by another group of immigrant women, who were convicts. During the first half of the 19th century, there were 12 female factories operating in Australia. Convict factories were harsh prison-like factories that convict women were forced to work long hours at, being shifted from place to place and never seeing their families. There were at least 24,960 convict women transported to Australia to face the tough conditions of the convict factories. A photo was taken of a women named Anne Dunne (taken 1865), who worked in a convict factory after stealing Irish linen. She went with her son, John, to the factory in Parramatta. The picture of Anne in question shows her with hollow cheeks and sunken eyes with dark circles under them. This picture is an example of what can happen in convict factories. Women, most being discriminated or not having had an education, were a group of people in colonial Australia who suffered. They had little advantage over those living in Britain, and women’s experiences were overwhelmingly negative.

Aboriginal people suffered horrifically after white settlement. The Aboriginal people had lived happily alongside the land in Australia for an estimated 40,000 years. Their technology had not advanced, preferring to live peacefully, and the white immigrants took this opportunity to claim the land “terra nullius,” which gives whites ownership of the land. From this point, conflicts and problems between white settlers and Indigenous people began. There were many, many cruel and brutal massacres of Aborigines by the white people, including the well-known massacres of 1834, 1838, 1841 and 1857. These massacres were

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