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These years saw some significant arrivals: John MacArthur in 1789, Samuel Marsden in 1794 and the Irish. Transportation of Irish convicts began in Cork in 1791. As the (unofficial) relaxed and comfortable preamble to the Australian Constitution says:

The Australian nation is woven together of people from many ancestries and arrivals. ... In every generation immigrants have brought great enrichment to our nation's life.

Of course that enrichment has not always been initially welcome and so it was with the Irish, whose Catholicism was regarded with suspicion by the, largely Protestant, educated elite of the new nation. However, the Protestant work ethic was as alien to them as it was to the rest of the convict mainstream, and there is plenty of evidence that in this case, the new arrivals had little difficulty assimilating.

February 1794 saw the transportation of the first Lefties to Australia, with four of the five "Scottish Martyrs": Thomas Muir, the Reverend Thomas Fyshe Palmer, Maurice Margarot and William Skirving. The fifth, Joseph Gerrald was transported the following year. Their removal to Port jackson may have benefited the social order in England but whether their influence would be beneficial for Australia remains to be seen.

Grose resigned as Acting Governor in May 1794 and returned to England in December of that year, leaving Captain Paterson in temporary charge of the settlement under the title of Administrator. He was replaced in September 1795 by John Hunter of whom I shall have more to say in the next installment. Right now it's time to find a convenient roadhouse where the passengers can stretch their legs while the bus driver takes a much-needed leak.

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