A Narrative of the Expedition to Botany-Bay

In 1788, a young captain of marines stepped ashore at Botany Bay and began writing what would become the first classic of Australian literature. Watkin Tench arrived with the First Fleet, carrying convicts and colonial ambitions to the far edge of the known world. His account of that voyage, and the fragile settlement that followed, reads less like an official report than like a man genuinely astonished by what he encounters. Tench writes with the keen eye of an Enlightenment thinker and the wit of a natural storyteller. He observes the cramped horrors of the voyage, the desperate hopes of the convicts, and above all, the Indigenous people of New South Wales, whom he credits with "acumen" and "sharpness of intellect" in an era when such respect was almost unheard of. Where other colonists dismissed the natives as savages, Tench saw a people with their own sophisticated culture. This is history from the ground level: messy, surprising, often dark, occasionally funny. It is also the closest we can get to witnessing the moment when two worlds collided, recorded by a man who could not quite believe what he was seeing. Two centuries later, Tench's journal remains the most vivid portal to Australia's earliest days.