AUSTRALIA, 1835

Photo credit: www.aboutdarwin.com
Memory tags: My complete and continued surprise at Darwin’ s evaluation after I read his journal.

A young man aboard a survey ship approached the Australian coast. The harbor deep and big led to the main land where well built stone houses two to three storey high told him the Sydney they were approaching was well developed and prosperous. Unable to hold back his curiosity he went ashore that same evening. What he saw filled him with pride. Well laid out streets, mansions, fashionably dressed people, horse drawn carriages all pointing to a high level of prosperity and development. This was not something he had seen in the southern American states from where he had sailed a few months ago. The contrast was all the more telling for the Spanish had ruled the southern American states for about 300 years whereas the British had colonized Australia for much less. The young man was naturally proud to be a British citizen considering the fact that the British had achieved so much in so little time. Sydney gave at that time, a feeling of raw wealth that could be easily acquired. In this newly settled British colony even an ex-convict when his term had been served could hope to go home with at least a small fortune. A convict turned auctioneer was planning to go home with a mere 10,000 pound in those days! And believe it or not, land less than an acre in size apparently sold for 8,000 pound sterling in Sydney. But it did disappoint our traveler that there was not a single book shop equal to those found in London or Birmingham.

Our fancy free footloose traveler took a trip into the country side a few days later. The roads he travelled on were paved roads carved out by convict labor. The sheep farm he visited held at least 5,000 animals and a large number of men that worked relentlessly to harvest the wool. The land on which the sheep farm grew belonged to the aborigines. He met a group of them as he travelled to the farm. Their nomadic habit made them restless if they stayed too long in one place. They hunted, tracked and wondered all over the land they believed rightly would be theirs forever. Yet they were easy prey to the small handouts that the British colonizers gave them in exchange for miles of precious land. They did not seem to realize they had sold off their children’s inheritance for less than the proverbial 30 pieces of silver. The different types of men seemed to the traveler to act against each other exactly like different species of animals; the strong winning over the weak. He noted that where ever the European had trod, death seem to pursue the aboriginal. It did not escape him that the dogs and rabbits brought by the colonizers had taken their toll of the indigenous Kangaroo and the wallaby populations, to say nothing of their fodder usurped by the sheep.

Today Australia is in the news with alarming regularity for crimes committed against people of a different nationality. I leave it to you to mull over what our traveler wrote as he left Australia in 1835. “Farewell, Australia! You are a rising infant and doubtless someday you will reign a great princess in the south: but you are too great and ambitious for, affections, yet not great enough for respect. I leave your shores without sorrow or regret”. The writer- traveler was Charles Robert Darwin while circumnavigating the globe on HMS Beagle.

Main references:

• Gaurangi Maitra and Veena Tandon, “Travelling With Darwin: Evolution Of An Evolutionary” Published by National Academy for Sciences, India 2009 ISBN:978-81-905548-1-7.
• Charles Darwin, “ Voyage of the Beagle” Published byPenguin Books, 1989.ISBN 0-14-043268-y-91101