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1835 : The founding of Melbourne / and the conquest of Australia

by James Boyce

An examination of the 1835 settlement of Melbourne by Tasmanian speculators in defiance of colonial authorities. The text explores the political manoeuvres between Hobart, Sydney, and London that shaped the early history of the region.

Accession 9781863955683 ISBN 9781863955683 Publisher Black Inc.

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1835 : The founding of Melbourne / and the conquest of Australia

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Topics and Themes

Based on my knowledge of James Boyce's *1835: The Founding of Melbourne and the Conquest of Australia*, here are the key themes and topics to help connect it to other books in a library:

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1. **Colonial Settlement & Frontier Expansion**
Boyce reconstructs the unauthorised founding of Melbourne in 1835 by John Batman and the Port Phillip Association, examining how a small group of private settlers bypassed official colonial authority to claim vast tracts of land. The story is one of frontier capitalism and land hunger driving expansion far ahead of government control.

Connect to books about: colonial history, frontier settlement, land rush, British Empire expansion.

2. **Indigenous Dispossession & Sovereignty**
Central to the book is the catastrophic impact of settlement on the Kulin nations — the Aboriginal peoples of the Port Phillip region. Boyce examines the pretence of Batman's "treaty," the rapid dispossession of Aboriginal land, and the destruction of Indigenous ways of life that followed.

Connect to books about: Indigenous rights, terra nullius, Aboriginal history, settler colonialism, sovereignty.

3. **The Myth of Peaceful Settlement**
Boyce challenges the long-held narrative that Melbourne's founding was a civilised or benign event, revealing it instead as a conquest — brutal, calculated, and largely unacknowledged in mainstream Australian history.

Connect to books about: historical revisionism, national mythology, memory and forgetting, colonial violence.

4. **Land, Capitalism & Speculation**
The founding of Melbourne was as much a commercial land grab as it was an act of exploration. Boyce explores how the promise of cheap, fertile land drove speculative investment and shaped the economic logic of early colonial Australia.

Connect to books about: land rights, economic history, speculative capitalism, pastoral industries, agrarian society.

5. **Law, Authority & Illegitimacy**
Batman's settlement was initially declared illegal by Governor Bourke, yet it succeeded regardless. The book probes how law and power interacted — and failed — at the edges of empire, where settlers acted with impunity far from official oversight.

Connect to books about: colonial law, governance, rule of law, empire and administration.

6. **Place, Identity & the Origins of Cities**
Boyce is deeply interested in how Melbourne came to be — not just as a political event but as a place with a particular character shaped by the circumstances of its founding. The book raises questions about how origin stories define civic and national identity.

Connect to books about: urban history, place-making, city biographies, Australian identity.

7. **Exploration, Encounter & Cross-Cultural Contact**
The early interactions between settlers and the Kulin people — including the role of John Helder Wedge and others — illustrate the complex, often violent dynamics of first contact, trade, and negotiation on the colonial frontier.

Connect to books about: exploration history, cross-cultural encounter, ethnography, frontier relations.

8. **Australian History & the "Black Armband" Debate**
The book sits squarely within the ongoing Australian historiographical debate about how to honestly reckon with the violence and injustice of the colonial past — a conversation sometimes called the "history wars."

Connect to books about: Australian historiography, the history wars, postcolonial studies, public history, truth-telling and reconciliation.

1835 : The founding of Melbourne / and the conquest of Australia

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