I’m writing on 26 January 2024, the day on which Australia effectively celebrates the 4 July 1776 Declaration of Independence of Britain’s North American colonies. 

The colonists may have been revolting against the imposition of unfair taxes in the name of the British Crown, but the eventual expulsion of Great Britain from its American colonies ended the transportation of Irish unfortunates to Virginia, where they had been put to work on cane and tobacco plantations that had formerly been swamps until they died of malaria and replacement convicts sought. The newly independent USA had a shortage of the slave labour it now needed.

Meanwhile, prisons in England were soon overflowing.  After failed attempts to establish penal colonies in West Africa (the prison transports would then transport malaria-resistant Africans to the Americas) convicts were transported to Australia instead. Had the British not lost their American colonies then American plantation owners would have continued working Irishmen to death instead of buying malaria-resistant Africans, and Australia could have been colonised by the French.  The First Fleet encountered the explorer Lapérouse at Botany Bay on 24 January 1788.  

The French expedition departed Botany Bay a couple of months later and were never seen again. A young Napoléon Bonaparte had unsuccessfully applied to join Lapérouse’s expedition before it departed France; had Bonaparte left France with Lapérouse in 1785, he too would have disappeared from world history, with no legacy.  

The Bastille was stormed by the mob in 1789, and many political prisoners released – yet of Lapérouse’s expedition there was no trace.  Even as he faced the guillotine in 1793, King Louis XVI was still asking if any word had been heard.  

 Whether colonisation by France rather than Britain might have been better, worse, or pretty much the same for Indigenous Australians and for Australian landscapes is something we may never know.  

In a presage of the weed problems of K’gari, under the scientific advice of Sir Joseph Banks, the First Fleet brought with it sugar cane and prickly pear – the red of British redcoat uniforms was made from crushed cochineal insects, and prickly pear was the plant on which these insects grew.  In Australia the insects soon died out, but the prickly pear spread to become a major environmental scourge until the introduction of the Cactoblastis moth and remains a problem today.  

Thanks to such botanical imperialism (see Garritt van Dyk’s “The botanical imperialism of weeds and crops: how alien plant species on the First Fleet changed Australia”) much has already been lost and the future of much more is at risk. In this now rapidly changing world, there is much restoration, repair and recovery that must be undertaken.

The Good News is we have a fair idea of what we need to do and how to go about it.

Reflection contributed by David Arthur, Wide Bay Burnett Environment Council