The Role of National Character in Australia’s Prosperity

Few histories of economic transformation are more dramatic than that which occurred in the British settlement in Australia during its first hundred years. In 1790, two years after the British founded the colony of New South Wales, a young captain in the British marines penned a bleak prognosis for the new settlement. In a poignant letter home, he wrote:

The dread of perishing by famine stares us in the face … our soldiers have not a shoe, and mount guard barefoot … the country … is past all repute a wretched one, a very wretched, and totally incapable of yielding to great Britain a return for colonising it.

This unfavourable account reflected the precarious and inauspicious beginning of the British venture in Australia. In the eighteenth century, creating an outpost of civilisation on the other side of the world was no trivial feat. Yet a century later, in defiance of this prediction, Australians would become the wealthiest people in the world. By the late nineteenth century, per…