The inhospitable environment and the past had predisposed the minds of its European inhabitants to hand over the government of their country to men w… - Manning Clark

Civilization did not begin in Australia until the last quarter of the eighteenth century. The reason lies partly in the environment and way of life of the people inhabiting the continent before the coming of the European, and partly in the internal history of those Hindu, Chinese, and Muslim civilizations which colonized and traded in the archipelago of south-east Asia. The early inhabitants of the continent created cultures but not civilizations.

Australians must decide for themselves whether this was the land of the dreaming, the land of the Holy Spirit, the New , the Millennial , or the new demesne for to infest.

By the middle of the seventeenth century the Dutch had written the very first page in the history of European civilization in Australia by stating that there was no good to be done there. William Dampier popularized this idea amongst the English reading public half a century later.