Botany Bay

Botany Bay is a place before it is a chorus. Kamay, on Dharawal country — Gweagal country on the southern shore — is the wide shallow bay Cook’s men walked onto on 29 April 1770. Banks and Solander filled the nets, the English name followed the plants, and the names already on the water stayed in the country. Eighteen years later the First Fleet stood in from the sea (18–20 January 1788), found the water thin, the soil poor and the anchorage awkward, and Phillip took boats north. Port Jackson was the better harbour. On 26 January they shifted the whole expedition to Warrane, Sydney Cove. Botany Bay was the intended penal station that lasted a week as a camp and then became the other bay — La Perouse on one head, Kurnell on the other.

The lyrics on this post are not 1788. “Farewell to old England forever / Farewell to the well-known Old Bailey” is “Botany Bay,” the number from the London burlesque Little Jack Sheppard (Gaiety Theatre, Boxing Night 1885; Melbourne 1886, Sydney Theatre Royal 1887). It shares verses with the earlier broadside Farewell to Judges and Juries, and it became an Australian folk standard a century after the Fleet, which is why schoolrooms still think convicts sang it on the Charlotte. They didn’t. Transportation to New South Wales had already ended when the Gaiety first heard the tooral-i-ay.

Keep the song if you like — it is public domain, and slightly misspelt on the live page — but put the bay under it. Cook’s landing, Phillip’s rejection, Kamay Botany Bay National Park, Bare Island off La Perouse. The chorus is Victorian theatre. The water is older.