Captain Cook seemingly has a good deal to answer for, by pointing the path for British colonisation of Australia. In 1787, under the reign of George III, the English Government sent a fleet to establish its rule Down Under, possibly fearing that the Dutch or French might get there first. (Abel Tasman had already given his name to Tasmania).

Colonists soon followed, but almost from the start the English Establishment saw it as an opportunity to use transportation as a way to get rid of its criminal classes, which were seen as self propagating, a threat to good order and property rights, and never as a product of inbuilt injustice and poverty. It was, as Robert Hughes says, "social amputation". The legalised brutality of the convict colonies, where prolonged flogging was a commonplace and living conditions were often subhuman, needs a tough stomach to swallow: sometimes men preferred to murder one another in order to earn a death sentence, as the final method of escape. The few who fled into the bush rarely survived long. "Van Diemen's Land" became a by word in songs and ballads of the underdog, though the treatment by the colonists of the aborigines was even worse they were hunted like animals at times, in a "gigantic shoot". The Irish, of course, were among the worst sufferers and kept the memory of their wrongs into the 20th century, with considerable effect on Australia's political life. As Hughes shows, they also created their own mythology seeing themselves as victims of political oppression, where of the 30,000 men and 9,000 women transported directly from Ireland, only 1,500 were political prisoners.