2 - The Civilising Mission
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 16 November 2019
Summary
The fact that the first Australian settlements were founded as penal colonies casts a peculiar light on the kind of vision that underpinned colonialism in Australia. It is, however, unquestionable that the Botany Bay project was to a considerable extent driven and informed by a utopianism with deep roots in the European imagination. A clear glimpse of this can be gained from artworks and poetry inspired by the colony's dubious beginnings. In 1789 Governor Phillip sent a sample of clay from Sydney Cove to Joseph Banks, who had his fellow member of the Royal Society, the famous English potter and industrialist Josiah Wedgwood, fashion it into a medallion called ‘Hope encouraging Art and Labour, under the influence of Peace, to pursue the employments necessary to give security and happiness to an infant settlement’. This medallion gives an early insight into the utopian vision behind the British colony in its depiction of Hope personified as a female in classical dress commanding the similarly personified figures of Peace, Art and Labour. The medallion became the frontispiece to Phillip's journal, accompanied by a poem by Erasmus Darwin which spells out this vision in more detail:
VISIT OF HOPE TO SYDNEY-COVE, Near BOTANY-BAY
Where Sydney Cove her lucid bosom swells,
Courts her young navies, and the storm repels;
High on a rock amid the troubled air
HOPE stood sublime, and wav'd her golden hair;
Calm'd with her rosy smile the tossing deep,
And with sweet accents charm'd the winds to sleep;
To each wild plain she strech'd her snowy hand,
High-waving wood, and sea-encircled strand.
‘Hear me’, she cried, ‘ye rising Realms! record
‘Time's opening scenes, and Truth's unerring word. –
‘There shall broad streets their stately walls extend,
‘The circus widen, and the crescent bend;
‘There, ray'd from cities o'er the cultur'd land,
‘Shall bright canals, and solid roads expand. –
‘There the proud arch, Colossus-like, bestride
‘Yon glittering streams, and bound the chaffing tide;
‘Embellish'd villas crown the landscape-scene,
‘Farms wave with gold, and orchards blush between.
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- Australia as the Antipodal UtopiaEuropean Imaginations from Antiquity to the Nineteenth Century, pp. 39 - 64Publisher: Anthem PressPrint publication year: 2019