Lord Sydney

Just who was the man responsible for the first European settlement of Australia?

His name was Tommy Townshend. Full of bumptious ambition and self-confidence, he had become home secretary after the American Revolutionary War. Thanks to his efforts, Canada’s boundary with the United States was drawn through the Great Lakes, not further north as the Americans had demanded. As a result, modern Toronto is a Canadian city, not an American one. Grateful to Townshend for providing this safe haven for loyalists – those Americans who had remained loyal to the crown – King George III offered him a peerage.

After choosing the name Lord Sydney, the home secretary had to find a place to transport convicts now that the newly independent United States refused to take them anymore. And when the British cabinet accepted his recommendation to send these felons to Botany Bay, Sydney instructed the Treasury ‘forthwith’ to provide for the First Fleet, choosing Arthur Phillip as the convict colony’s first governor.

Sydney, Nova Scotia and Sydney, Australia are named after him.

Andrew Tink's author talk on Lord Sydney

What the critics say

The Sydney Morning Herald: ‘This disarming biography…has great vitality…[and] shows [Sydney] to be worthy of grateful recognition by Sydneysiders as one of their founding fathers’.

The Australian: 'A fine biography…and the research that underpins…[it] is exemplary'.

The Age: 'This…the first biography of Sydney… is a detailed and readable account of Townshend, the times and his family'.

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