Whereas for thousands of years there was some prospect that the economic and social life of the Aborigines would be reshaped by the entry of immigran… - Geoffrey Blainey

Many convicts were bewildered by the first days of the voyage to Australia. Most had never seen the open sea until they boarded the convict ship, and few had travelled in a ship. And now, by sentence of the courts, they were about to begin one of the longest voyages any traveller could make.

Most Australians did not love a sunburnt country. Farmers preferred a reliable rainfall; bank managers and city merchants preferred to deal with customers living in towns where the economy did not suffer from drought. The governors, who came from the British Isles, still retreated in summer to the cool hill towns - to Sutton Forest and Mount Macedon and the Mount Lofty Ranges and other colonial Simlas.

Innovation is usually not a gigantic step but a series of small jumps involving various enterprising people whose names are soon forgotten.