Godwin's emigrants guide to Van Diemen's Land more properly called Tasmania, containing a description of its climate, soil and productions; a form of application for free grants of land; with ...

Maker Thomas Godwin

Date1823

Object number00005578

NameBook

MediumInk on paper

DimensionsOverall: 147 x 231 x 19 mm, 0.25 kg

ClassificationsBooks and journals

Credit LineANMM Collection

Terms

Description"Godwin's emigrants guide to Van Diemen's Land more properly called Tasmania, containing a description of its climate, soil and productions; a form of application for free grants of land; with a scale enabling persons in inland towns, to estimate the expense of a passage for any given number of men, women, or children, a list of the most necessary articles to take out, and other information useful to emigrants." London,England: Sherwood, Jones & Co. 1823. Contains chart of Van Diemen's Land, 90 pages of text. Contains liftout drawing of `south west view of Hobart town.HistoryGodwin's book on Tasmania is one of the earliest books to promote free emigration to an Australian colony. Earlier publications were essentially narrative accounts, and this is arguably the earliest Australian emigrant's guide. Tasmania was undergoing a period of massive expansion in the 1820s: the population rose from 5468 to 24,279 and included thousands of free immigrants, for many of whom Godwin's Guide would have been standard reading. It attempts to cover all areas of interest to the immigrant - as well as articles describing the island there are specialist chapters on sheep, land clearing, the cost of labour, cattle prices, commerce and much detail on the ordinary mechanics of living, including a short article on "a weekly Gazette published at Hobart Town by Mr A. Bent". The lithograph frontispiece ("South West View of Hobart Town, Van Diemen's Land") is by A. Aglio, after G.W. Evans's view of the same name. Aglio, adopting contemporary artistic practice, has embellished Evans's original work with the addition of cows and kangaroos in the foreground. Not all copies were issued with the folding map in the superior handcoloured form, as here. early nineteenth century with the global ‘race’ to attract emigrants. At this time around the world, new settler societies — in their quest for development — were competing for useful and productive settlers. At the same time, for various religious and economic reasons, many people in the old world were seeking to make a fresh start inthe new. New settler societies intent on attracting emigrants were thus pressured to identify comparative advantages in order to promote themselves in the best possible light. The rhetoric that developed and accumulated to attract these emigrants was in many cases later used to attract tourists. Emigration guides purporting to weigh up the advantages that new settler societies had to offer, became vehicles for this rhetoric. n 1820, when the first difficult years of settlement were over, and three years after free immigration had begun, The following year English guidebook writer, Thomas Godwin, echoed Evans, declaring that ‘this island has to boast of perhaps, the most salubrious and congenial climate of any in the known world, for an European'. 18 In 1824 Edward Curr wrote of Van Diemen’s Land that ... from its situation between the parallels of 40 degrees and 44 degrees south, it is possessed of a moderately warm and very salubrious climate, more especially in the northern part, which for an English constitution, can hardly be surpassed by any other country in the world. 19