The stories of the Dreaming tell of beginnings that are both specific and general. They narrate particular events that occurred in particular places, but those events are not fixed chronologically since they span the past and the present to carry an enduring meaning. By contrast, the story of the second settlement is known in minute particularity. It began with a voyage of eleven vessels that embarked with a cargo of 582 male prisoners, 193 females and fourteen children, the first of 681 ships that transported 163,000 convicts over eighty years. The First Fleet landed in Botany Bay in January 1788 then sailed to a cove of Port Jackson, now central Sydney. Here the British flag was hoisted as the commander, Captain Arthur Phillip, took formal possession of the new colony. We do not have the direct testimony of those Aborigines who dealt with the first European newcomers, and cannot recapture how they understood their usurpation. We can only infer how they interpreted the violation of sacred sites, destruction of habitat, the inroads of disease, and their growing realisation that the intruders meant to stay. This encounter could only be traumatic

The long-running dispute among historians over the purpose of Britain’s new colony is beset by contradiction. If it was to serve as a naval base, why did the imperial authorities give strict instructions not to establish a shipyard? How could it function as a trading post when the East India Company had a monopoly on all trade in the Indian-Pacific? And if it was to appraise flax and timber, why did the First Fleet carry no botanist or gardener? Equally, the claim that Botany Bay was to be no more than a dumping ground for convicts overlooks the careful design of this new venture. It was to be a place of exile where convicts would work on the land under close supervision for the duration of their sentences and then on small plots of their own to meet their needs. The First Fleet thus marked the beginning of a new penal system in which the prospect of transportation to the other side of the world would deter crime and hard work would reform criminals, so that as peasant proprietors they would form the basis of a new society.

Oliver Goldsmith’s The Deserted Village (1770) and George Farquhar’s The Recruiting Officer (1706) embody the textual and ideological persistence of the Irish eighteenth century in our present. These texts inhabit contemporary culture as object of memory and as model of modernity. Eavan Boland’s poetry memorialises the eighteenth as Ireland’s ‘darkest century’, re-reading The Deserted Village as a front for a hostile colonial and capitalist modernity which took accelerated and influential shape in the Irish eighteenth century. Similarly, Farquhar’s play served throughout the eighteenth century to consolidate and extend the British fiscal-military state, an ideological function highlighted in Bertolt Brecht’s adaptation Trumpets and Drums (1955). The chapter focuses on two subsequent re-imaginings, Thomas Keneally’s 1987 novel The Playmaker and Timberlake Wertenbaker’s stage adaptation Our Country’s Good (1988). Both texts use metaphors of performance and rehearsal to illuminate the play’s function in propagating a political modernity grounded in the transitory and transitional cultures of eighteenth-century Ireland.