For decades the purpose of British settlement in New South Wales seemed too obvious to question. The American War of Independence had robbed Britannia of its penal colony while the criminal class was multiplying. Australia, according to the influential but slipshod historian Manning Clark, offered ‘a remedy for the late, alarming and numerous increase in felons in the country and more particularly in the metropolis’.
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Nick Cater is executive director of the Menzies Research Centre and a director of Quadrant.
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