Our Country's Good - A Review of the Show

The Art is in the History:
A review of Our Country’s Good
Aboriginal Australians look at their lives as the re-enactment of the journeys and quests taken by ancestor heroes in the Tjukurapa, the Dreamtime, the time before which the earth did not exist. And yet it took less than 75 years of colonization to wipe out most of the people who had occupied the Australian continent for over 40,000 years. The hardships faced by their ancestors could not have prepared them for the boatloads of disease and destruction that landed at Botany Bay in 1788.
In the twenty-eighth year of the reign of King George III (1787), the British Government sent a fleet to colonize Australia. Eleven ships, carrying supplies and almost 1,500 officers, seamen, marines, and convicts, traveled for eight months before reaching New South Wales. Few of the convicts on board were dangerous criminals. Contrary to popular belief, of the 736 convicts shipped out in 1787, not one was convicted of murder or rape, a...