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The Great Brown Kings Fisher, a plate from ‘The Voyage of Governor Phillip to Botany Bay’ by John Stockdale, 1789, estimated at AUD$38,000-$48,000 ($24,900-$31,450). Image courtesy of The Book Merchant Jenkins and LiveAuctioneers

Key first edition on Australian history headlines at Aug. 12 auction Down Under

Sheila Gibson Stoodley
Sheila Gibson Stoodley
The Great Brown Kings Fisher, a plate from ‘The Voyage of Governor Phillip to Botany Bay’ by John Stockdale, 1789, estimated at Aus$38,000-$48,000 ($24,900-$31,450). Image courtesy of The Book Merchant Jenkins and LiveAuctioneers
The Great Brown Kings Fisher, a plate from ‘The Voyage of Governor Phillip to Botany Bay’ by John Stockdale, 1789, estimated at AUD$38,000-$48,000 ($24,900-$31,450). Image courtesy of The Book Merchant Jenkins and LiveAuctioneers

BRISBANE, Australia – A deluxe first edition of the most famous of the First Fleet books will be offered at The Book Merchant Jenkins in New South Wales on Saturday, August 12. The 1789 copy of John Stockdale’s The Voyage of Governor Phillip to Botany Bay – considered the foundation book of modern Australia – is expected to sell for AUD$38,000–$48,000. Absentee and Internet live bidding will be available through LiveAuctioneers.

Published in London only a year after the arrival of the First Fleet in what was known as ‘New Holland’ in January 1788, Stockdale’s work is the most detailed early account of the famous expedition.

The title pages from ‘The Voyage of Governor Phillip to Botany Bay’ by John Stockdale, 1789, estimated at Aus$38,000-$48,000 ($24,900-$31,450). Image courtesy of The Book Merchant Jenkins and LiveAuctioneers
The title pages from ‘The Voyage of Governor Phillip to Botany Bay’ by John Stockdale, 1789, estimated at AUD$38,000-$48,000 ($24,900-$31,450). Image courtesy of The Book Merchant Jenkins and LiveAuctioneers

Compiled from Admiral Arthur Phillip’s official reports and the journals of other officers in the First Fleet, the account describes the 250-day, 15,000-mile journey from England, the administrative and functional challenges facing the fledgling colony and safaris to the interior around Botany Bay and Port Jackson.

It includes the earliest plan of the settlement of Sydney Cove and, to the appendix, a list of the names of the first transported convicts that is today a key source for Australian genealogy. Six of the 11 ships that made up the First Fleet carried a total of around 850 convicts.

New Holland Cassoware, a plate from ‘The Voyage of Governor Phillip to Botany Bay’ by John Stockdale, 1789, estimated at Aus$38,000-$48,000 ($24,900-$31,450). Image courtesy of The Book Merchant Jenkins and LiveAuctioneers
New Holland Cassoware, a plate from ‘The Voyage of Governor Phillip to Botany Bay’ by John Stockdale, 1789, estimated at AUD$38,000-$48,000 ($24,900-$31,450). Image courtesy of The Book Merchant Jenkins and LiveAuctioneers

The Voyage of Governor Phillip to Botany Bay was published at the time in two ‘grades’: one uncolored, the other (an example of which, in the first state, appears in the sale) with the 46 natural history plates and seven folding maps and charts hand painted with watercolors. In Jonathan Wantrup’s collecting reference work Australian Rare Books, 1788-1900, it is described as “a key work and essential to any serious collection of Australian books.”

It was 18 years after Captain Cook first landed at Botany Bay that Britain established the first permanent European settlement in Australia. The cost to Britain of dispatching the First Fleet of colonists was £84,000 – about £9.6 million, or $12.3 million, in today’s money.

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The current rate of exchange is AUD$1 = $.67.

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