Nativity Sydney

The Introduction to Pig Bites Baby! Stories from Australia’s First Newspaper (Duffy and Snellgrove, 2003). 

This is us. In 1803, when George Howe began publishing the Sydney Gazette, most of our families had not arrived in the new homeland. But from the very beginning of our first newspaper its editor captured something familiar and typically Australian. 

In Britain shoplifters, pickpockets, rapists who hadn’t been hanged, marines, military officers, sheep stealers, pig stealers, free settlers, wives and children, forgers, government officers, thugs, horse thieves, and reprieved highwaymen, were rowed out to tiny ships and exported to Port Jackson. Landed on a foreign shore they fell in love with the scenery, even sometimes with its wandering inhabitants, and set about creating a new homeland, and a thing that would be called Australia. This peculiar mixture of rogues and sluts and ladies and gentlemen carried with them a love of gardens, passionate yet tolerant politics, a strong…