A Partial Account of Watkin Tench’s Journeys to the Hawkesbury-Nepean

We're back for Season 4! Instead of our usual 2 minute teaser episode we are launching with a bang: just shy of 2 hours of mostly 18th century prose!

In this episode Jed surprises Alistair with a dramatic reading of several passages from Watkin Tench's 1793 publication 'A Complete Account of the Settlement at Port Jackson'. The stories we explore relate to some of the first journeys the colonisers made to Dyarubbin, the river that they had mistakenly identified as both the Hawkesbury and the Nepean.

Tench's writing gives us access to life on the river in the first years of the colony and shows some of the earliest interactions between the British and the Dharug people in the brief period before their displacement began.