ABSTRACT
The First Fleet anchored at Botany Bay off the New South Wales coast on 20 January 1788, preparing to land at the British government’s chosen site for the first European settlement in the Tasman world. It was almost eighteen years since James Cook had sailed the Endeavour along the east coast, initiating the discourse of imperial possibility which conceived of Australia and New Zealand as a region of imperial interest. The information gathered on this voyage had formed the basis of both the decision to settle and the place of initial British settlement. On board one of the ships of the fleet, the Sirius, was Lieutenant-Colonel David Collins, appointed as judge-advocate of the convict settlement, soon to be Governor Arthur Phillip’s secretary, and later to become lieutenant-governor of the settlement in Van Diemen’s Land. 1 As well as fulfilling these official duties, Collins published his record of the first years of white settlement in Australia, entitled An Account of the English Colony in New South Wales, in two volumes published in 1798 and 1802. 2 Collins’s two volumes helped embed the ideas of racial hierarchy which had been initiated on the Cook voyages. While the work is one of a number of publications by officers of the First Fleet, Collins has been described as ‘Australia’s original historian,’ with a voice that ‘echoed the original spirit of the state’. 3
