Enterprise in Tropical Australia

Enterprise in Tropical Australia

George Windsor Earl with an introduction by R H W Reece

A facsimile edition of original published in 1846 by Madden and Malcolm, London

In the 1820s and 1830s when the first British settlements were being made in what is now Australia's Northern Territory, the northern part of the Australian continent was already intimately connected with island Southeast Asia by a long history of Indonesian economic activity. All through the early settlements of Melville Island (1824) and Raffles Gay (1827) were intended by the British government more as strategic garrisons than as trading entrepots, they were also the outer limits of Britain's continuing efforts to profit from the indigenous trade of what was then called the Eastern or Indian Archipelago.

Alexander Dalrymple, Thomas Stamford Raffles and James Brooke were all inspired by this mercantile spirit, the latter envisaging in his 1838 prospectus for a voyage of exploration a chain of British settlements from Singapore to Port Essington, a new post which was to be established by the British government later that year near Raffles Bay. And it was at Port Essington that one of the chief protagonists of northern settlement, George Samuel Windsor Earl, was to be based for the next six years in the vain hope that Macassan trepang (beche-de-mer) fishermen and Chinese traders resorting there would provide the nucleus of a second Singapore. In many ways, Earl's adventurous and varied career epitomises British entrepreneurial activity in island Southeast Asia in the early nineteenth century and how northern Australia was seen as its geographical extension. It also suggests that what has become known as the 'tyranny of distance' in early Australian history seems not to have influenced the perceptions of many contemporaries. Geoffrey Blainey's concept, stimulating as it has been to Australian historical writing, has blinkered a true appreciation of the cultural geography of early nineteenth century Australasia.

[RHW Reece, from the Introduction]