David Malouf

But the East India Company had a monopoly on all ships that came in and out of that port until 1819.

So that's it.

It was just too uneconomic to have it purely as a penal colony.

That's far too long a distance to send prisoners.

Look, I think actually they were interested in the port before they were interested in finding a solution to the penal question.

And one of the reasons why that port was very important was because all the other ports were in the hands of the French or the Dutch or the Portuguese and they couldn't trust the fact that a continental colony

alliance between those people would not close those ports to them.

But Cook had also opened up a new route, which was the route to the south of the continent, the Roaring Forties, which was hugely faster.

So in fact, you could get to India quicker by going that way, as long as you had a

port somewhere on the east coast.

Well, to duck under Australia, pop up to Sydney, and then go to India and back across again.

Yes.

You said in your Boyer lectures that in Australia we've always been forgetting that we're an experiment in this country.

Tell me what you mean by that, the idea of Australia as an experiment.

Well, even that penal colony was... The British had passed a law in 1773 that no convict, for example, in the country could be asked to work without being paid because to be unpaid was to be a slave and there were no slaves inside the British Empire.

So when they set up the colony...

It had to be built and maintained by someone.

It couldn't be built and maintained by free settlers because they wouldn't go there.

They refused to have slaves, which is a huge decision and a good one in terms of our future.

You think of the lack of that burden in Australia.