24 A NATURALIST IN TASMANIA ch. 



from the savagery of nature and man. The Home 

 Government, whose officials regarded AustraHa 

 merely as a dumping ground for criminals, were 

 not interested in the imperial aspect of the colonies, 

 despite the representations of men like Sir Joseph 

 Banks, the botanist who accompanied Cook in his 

 voyages, and the complaints of the colonists them- 

 selves. The insecurity of life and property, in the 

 early part of the century, owing to the hostility 

 of the natives and the depredations of armed bands 

 of escaped convicts, was a serious bar to the 

 material and moral improvement of the colony. 

 The prisons for the punishment of the worst 

 criminals, first at the desolate Macquarie Harbour 

 (1821), utterly cut off from the rest of the island, 

 and then at Port Arthur, were dens of the lowest de- 

 pravity and degradation too disgusting to describe. 

 But it was the discovery of gold in Australia in the 

 early fifties that made politicians in England wake 

 up to the necessity of doing something to regenerate 

 the country, and listen seriously to the repeated 

 complaints of the colonists ; and the transportation 

 of convicts was definitely stopped. 



At about this time (1847) out of a population of 

 70,164, 43,730 were free and 24,188 were convict, 

 while the military made up the rest. 



Bushranging in the early days, and even up to 

 the fifties, was carried on in Tasmania to an equal 

 or even greater extent than in New South Wales. 

 The most celebrated of the Van Diemen's Land 

 bushrangers was Martin Cash in the early forties, 



