'Where Sydney cove her lucid bosom swells': the Songs of an imagined 'nation', 1786–1789

In the years between the mooting of the Botany Bay scheme (1786), and the news of the founding of the New South Wales penal colony reaching England (1789), a number of songs were written which envisaged the Botany Bay colony as a new ‘nation’. While the survival of many of these pieces in broadside ballad form have led to their being placed within the Australian ‘transportation ballad’ tradition, they were not folk ballads but popular songs which generally used the themes of transportation and the penal colony to make satirical or comic comment on contemporary English politics and society. This article examines the contexts and meanings of these songs, examining their reception, audiences and publishing history, in an effort to question their placement within the Australian ballad tradition, to interrogate the views expressed on nation-building and on the structure of eighteenth-century British society, and to examine the connections between Georgian elite and popular cultures. Copyright © 1999–2011 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All Rights Reserved