19th-Century Australian Travel Writing
Captain Watkin Tench (1758-1833) of the Marines was a writer and member of the first fleet of convict ships that travelled to Australia. Except for Chapter XIV, which gave a selection of "amusing" travel diaries of Tench's from throughout his time in the colony, the majority of A Complete Account of the Settlement at Port Jackson is a detailed, historical account of the "transactions" of the colony. These travel narratives chronicled the daily conditions of travel through the bush, encounters with Aboriginal peoples, the climate, and the flora and fauna of the colony. The entry on Tench in the Australian Dictionary of Biography notes the influence of Gibbon and Voltaire on his work, and highlights his "interest in the novel, the picturesque and the primitive which foreshadows romanticism". Tench also wrote A Narrative of the Expedition to Botany Bay (1788).