SYDNEY — I had heard that Americans like visiting Australia, and on my arrival in Sydney, it was quickly apparent that Australians like having us around. Australia is a Western country washed by the Indian and Pacific Oceans, far from just about anything (except New Zealand) recognizably Western.
It was famously settled in 1788 by the British as a penal colony in consolation, as it were, for losing the American colonies not quite five years before. You need consider the steadfast temperament of British subjects during the Age of Enlightenment to observe that the American colonies had just been lost during a revolution started by men in frock coats in parliamentary debate over the text of a declaration telling their distant king where he could go and what he could do with himself once he got there.
Australia, conversely, was largely populated by Britons convicted of minor crimes; they, along with “free settlers,” quite soon set up a colony no more lawless than most places back in Britain.
