The History of New South Wales, Including Botany Bay, Port Jackson, Parramatta, Sydney, and All Its Dependencies, from the Original Discovery of the Island

George Barrington was an Irish-born pickpocket, transported convict, and colonial official whose name was widely used by London publishers in accounts of New South Wales. Although works such as this were published under his name, their authorship is generally regarded as spurious and commercially motivated.

This volume was marketed as a sequel to Barrington’s supposed voyage narrative (416). Rather than continuing a personal memoir, it broadens the subject into a general history of New South Wales, including Botany Bay, Port Jackson, Parramatta, Sydney, and the early English colony. The text draws heavily, often without acknowledgement, on earlier sources, especially David Collins’s An Account of the English Colony in New South Wales. It combines geography, colonial history, descriptions of Indigenous inhabitants, natural history, and accounts of settlement into a form intended for a British reading public.

The engraved title page includes a vignette of a black swan, an emblem associated with the unfamiliar natural history of the southern continent. The volume also contains a hand-coloured frontispiece of Sydney and thirteen additional hand-coloured plates engraved by V. Woodthorpe, depicting Aboriginal Australians, native plants, and animals including a kangaroo, emu, black cockatoo, bird of paradise, and mountain eagle. Together with 416, this volume shows how Barrington’s notoriety was used to market accounts of New South Wales. The work presents the colony through a mixture of compilation, embellishment, and visual novelty.