First Fleet Fare: food & food security in the founding of colonial New South Wales, 1788-1790.

Abstract

Integral to Britain’s colonisation of New South Wales was an adequate food supply. In 1790, two years after the First Fleet’s arrival at Botany Bay, a thousand-odd colonists faced the threat of famine and even starvation. Historians and social commentators have since described the first years of the colony as the hungry, starving or starvation years, a concept that has become a clichéd yet cherished foundation story: the government-controlled ‘ration’ was meagre and unappetising; introduced crops failed due to impoverished soils and colonial ineptitude; and through ignorance, arrogance or prejudice, colonists ignored or rejected native food resources in favour of familiar foods from England, except in times of dire necessity. Thus, the colony ‘barely existed’, surviving on the ‘brink of starvation’ throughout its first five years. Examining primary and secondary sources through a gastronomic lens, this thesis provides a more complete and considered understanding of the First Fleet colonists’ foodscape and the role food played in the shaping of society and the colony itself during their earliest years. Through fine-grained empirical analysis of textual records, experiential research and reconstruction, the thesis demonstrates the rich complexities of food as both material and embodied substance, and as a form of social expression imbued with meaning. It provides quantitative and qualitative analyses of the ration and the broader foodscape, and casts new light on the colonists’ accounts of and relationships with food, rarely questioned in existing historiography. It interrogates the colonists’ contribution towards and responses to the critical food insecurity crisis in 1790 and shows how the event has been remembered through successive generations, to form an enduring foundation story of privation and hunger.