Introduction

Abstract

The principal aim of this book is to consider aspects of the ways in which a consumer society became established in the Australian colonies from the earliest days of British settlement until approximately the middle of the nineteenth century. The establishment of a consumer society in Australia was a part of the wider processes of colonial expansion and colonization by European powers from the fifteenth through the twentieth centuries. This book examines some of the material culture-related aspects of what John Brewer and Roy Porter have described as “one of the special features of modern Western societies … the capacity to create and sustain a consumer economy and the consumers to go with it” (Brewer and Porter, 1993: 1).

One wreck does not provide sufficient data on which to base sound historical or anthropological theories. A number of wrecks from the same trade must be excavated, interpreted and published before such data, used together with conventional documentation, can form the basis for such theories.

(Henderson, 1980b: 118)