An environmental history of British settlement in Van Diemen's Land: The making of a distinct people, 1798 - 1831
Van Diemen's Land received approximately 72 000 convicts, mainly from the 
British Isles and Ireland, between 1 803 and 1 853, and convicts and their 
descendants formed the large majority of the population of the island colony 
throughout this time. This thesis focuses on the environmental experience of this 
majority population in the first three decades of settlement. It argues that the 
history of British settlement of Van Diemen's Land, and consequently, to a not 
insignificant extent, Australia, has been distorted by a failure to recognize that the 
rigorous attempts to reproduce English rural society - social and environmental - 
were largely undertaken by a relatively small group of free settlers. The 
consequence of the failure to recognize the extent to which socio-economic 
background shaped environmental experience, is that the life-changing 
experience of the new land by a people without the capital or privilege to buffer 
them from an immediate experience of place, have been obscured. The thesis 
studies how the rich and accessible resources of the off-shore islands, coastal 
bays and estuaries and, above all, grassy woodlands of the midlands and east 
coast provided convicts and former convicts with an economic and physical 
refuge from the rigorous and often brutal attempts to turn them into a disciplined 
subservient labour force. This encounter with the new land occurred in the 
context of a populated and defended land, and while this thesis is not 'Aboriginal 
history', the Aborigines are inevitably central to the British experience, and the 
cross-cultural meeting and conflict are major themes within it.