Page:The founding of South Australia.djvu/40

 sympathy of his father and mother, who entered with the keenest interest into the social politics of the day.

The only way out of the difficulty appeared to be to send the surplus population to some British colony, so relieving; the Mother Country of the burthen, and, at the same time, opening up new spheres of commerce and enlarging others already in existence. But colonisation up to that time had not been a marked success. New South Wales was founded as a penal settlement so early as 1788—eighteen years after its discovery by Captain Cook. The first settlement in Van Diemen's Land (Tasmania) was made in 1803 by a guard with a body of convicts, and, until 1824, was a dependency of New South Wales, but in that year it was made an independent colony. It had but a poor reputation, however, for many years after that, in consequence of the hostility of the natives, and the depredations of escaped convicts, known as bush-rangers.

Neither New South Wales nor Van Diemen's Land were popular, therefore, as a field of emigration, the great drawback being that they were still penal settlements, and that the trade of the colonies was in the hands of the early convicts who had served their time.

In 1829 the Swan River Settlement in Western Australia was founded, and for a time attracted many well-to-do families to emigrate there. But it was soon discovered that the colony had been established on an altogether wrong basis, and that disastrous consequences must in course