Conventionally, the initial British settlement of Australia in 1788 is seen as a public project to establish a distant convict colony in the Antipodes, though there is increasing debate as to whether the intention was merely to establish a convict settlement or was influenced by considerations of imperial strategy and trade interests. This Eurocentric approach is heavily influenced by the long accepted belief that British settlers, whether convict or free, entered an Australia that was occupied by only a handful of Aborigines. There is less clarity on the legal evaluation of the day: in particular whether Aborigines who lived in Australia did or did not, in fact, occupy it because they were not ‘farmers’ in the accepted European sense.

These highly parochial attitudes to Australian history have had many far-reaching consequences. They have embedded almost all historical writing about Australia in a very narrow perspective. They have led either to a concentration on the alleged sordidness of the convict settlements or to the extraordinarily rapid and successful development of a pastoral Australia during the first sixty or so years, along with extremely rapid rates of expansion of population and economic activity. For economic historians, then, in particular, Australian economic history is seen as the development of ‘an area of recent settlement’ in which a great deal of wealth came relatively easily.

There is another perspective, radically different from the convention.