Tag Archives: Colonial Australia

British Colonialism – was it good or bad?

A long review of one’s cultural antecedents would reveal that the past has been a process of growth, adjustments, defeats, revival, consolidations until the present time. Take what I regard as Australian history. Time travel would take the majority of Australians back to the United Kingdom. From there, we would go back through the centuries, through migrations, invasions, colonization, and consolidation to the tribes of Northwestern Europe. From there one goes into the haze of pre-history or unrecorded history.

The point is that the above phases are a natural part of human history, a part of the nation into which one is born at a particular time. A country, a nation or a people is not illegitimate because it was the result of colonization and migration. Indeed, the new stable consolidation erases and supersedes whatever was prior to it.

However, one can make a moral and social judgment about a particular phase of migration and colonization. Prof. Nigel Biggar, Regius Professor of Moral and Pastoral Theology at the University of Oxford and canon of Christ Church Cathedral does so in his new book, Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning . Professor Biggar is interviewed by Peter Whittle on The New Culture Forum.

Celebrating the convicts who built Australia

I pay tribute to the Manly Daily for its articles on Australia’s colonial history, specifically about those who settled the Manly to Palm Beach peninsula. These articles are especially appreciated because of the Marxist left’s project to erase the history of white settlement and its magnificent achievements. I wrote in my first family history book PRISON HULK TO REDEMPTION (see below) that many Australians can look back on a family history similar to mine, with convicts who made good and contributed to the building of a brilliant new nation. It was their exclusive achievement.

*****

Humble origins didn’t stop James Jenkins becoming the largest landholder on peninsula

FROM arriving as a convict in 1802, by 1825 James Jenkins and his family owned all of the foreshore land from what is now Mona Vale Hospital to southern end of Dee Why Beach (NSW). John Morcombe looks back.

John Morcombe, Manly Daily, 20 November 2020

ONE of the best examples of how a person convicted of a petty crime in England and transported to Australia could rise to become highly regarded and comparatively wealthy is James Jenkins.

From his convict origin he rose to become the largest landholder on the northern beaches, consolidating valuable grazing land and opening up the area by building the first significant road from North Harbour to Collaroy.

But the complex web of legal disputes for the disposition of his estate following his death tended to obscure the magnitude of Jenkins’ contribution to the history of the northern beaches.

Then local historians Ken Muir and Shelagh and George Champion gradually unpicked the web in the 1990s to reveal the contribution Jenkins and his family made to the history of the region.

When James Jenkins and his brother William arrived in the colony as convicts aboard the Coromandel in 1802, they had less than two years left to serve of their seven-year sentences for allegedly stealing seven sheep.

Read the rest here…