This contrasted with Boyce’s narrative of the convict experience.
Those left alive were shipped off to a camp on Flinders Island, where they all in due course died. That book showed how thoroughly systematic had been the genocide of the Tasmanian Aborigines. Sydney’s beginning as a grim and brutal penal colony is well known to all of us – especially to the citizens of Victoria and South Australia, whose colonies, as they often remind the rest of us, were not founded as prisons.īoyce’s tale builds on his 2008 work Van Diemen’s Land, and appropriately so, for Melbourne was founded by Van Diemonians. Until I read James Boyce’s new book, 1835: The Founding of Melbourne & the Conquest of Australia (Black Inc, 288pp $44.95), I knew little of Melbourne’s origins. Melbourne’s edifices are bigger and grander than their counterparts in Sydney, reflecting the comparative wealth of the two cities at that time. The beauty of Melbourne’s wide boulevards, its opulent architecture and magnificent parks remind us of the extraordinary wealth and confidence of nineteenth-century Victoria. James Boyce’s ‘1835: The Founding of Melbourne & the Conquest of Australia’
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