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The Day Britain Invaded Australia | Tony Robinson
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Apr 4, 2025
Comedian and Historian Tony Robinson goes beyond the familar history of white settlement, diving deeper into the complexities of Australia's long history. Tony gets an First Nations perspective of what it was like to witness the arrival of the British, and he finds a man with an incredible theory about accient Egyptians.
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0:00
I always thought that the British discovered Australia in the year 1770
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our own version of an 18th century moon landing, with Captain Cook playing the part of Neil Armstrong
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But the weird thing is, Australia's got over 25,000 kilometres of coastline
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So how come no one had ever discovered it before? Or had they
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Less than 20 years after Cook's voyage of discovery, the First Fleet arrived off the shores of Australia
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This is what we learn at school, isn't it? In 1788, the first Europeans ever to settle in Australia
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arrived in Botany Bay. It was a hugely ambitious project, round about 1,500 people, men, women and children
1:07
mostly convicts, transported to an unknown land 17,000 kilometres away. And that was the start of the biggest migration of humans
1:16
by sea in history. It was a grim time in England. Petty crime was spiralling out of control
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The jails were so overcrowded that the hulks of old ships were being used to house prisoners
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England was running out of space, and the quick cure to her social ills was to send the problem offshore
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At the time of the First Fleet, 23 women were convicted in London of offences that carried the death penalty
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All were pardoned, provided they were prepared to go to New South Wales
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for the rest of their natural lives. Of the 23, only 16 agreed
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The other seven elected to die rather than come here to Australia
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This is the place that England criminals considered a fate worse than death For men at this time the death penalty meant being hanged But women who committed serious crimes could still be burned at the stake
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But they were prepared to risk that terrible fate shows the desperate fear they had of being exiled to the other side of the world
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Today, most Australians treat a convict connection as a source of pride
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So having a first fleeter in the family is a bit like being minor royalty
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My great-great-great-great-grandmother was sentenced to hang for stealing at gunpoint coins from her employer
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My great, great, great, great, great grandfather was Edward Kimberley. He was arrested near Coventry for stealing several parcels of muslin
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Lydia was my great, great, great, great grandmother. She was sentenced to death in 1786 for stealing 10 yards of printed cotton
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He was transported to Australia for seven years on the first fleet. 14 years transportation
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Seven years transportation to Australia. Helen, Wayne and Cheryl belong to an elite club
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although identifying with rogues and scallywags is a national pastime in Australia, convict roots or otherwise
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Most Australians today also recognise that their convict relatives stepped ashore onto a land that was already occupied
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Watching their arrival were the original inhabitants of Australia, the Aborigines. If you want to talk about Australian ancestry
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Professor Eric Wilmot's family tree goes back not 200 years, but literally thousands
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If we'd been Aboriginal people looking out to sea on that day
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what would we have seen? You'd have seen a group of what appeared to be human beings land here
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They appeared human like the people watching them But once you get close to them they appear different For Aboriginal people it was a fascinating idea
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that they weren't as alone in this part of the world as they thought they were
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But I've heard that they thought what they were seeing was something like ghosts or cloud people
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Well, the cloud person thing came from their ships because the ships appeared on the horizon like clouds
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which slowly, if you watch them, they turned into ships. And these were the people from the cloud ships
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And the clothes had splashes of white over them. Now, white is a kind of an alarm colour
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If you look at an Aboriginal ceremony, main dancers come in, the ones that are supposed to carry a bit of shock
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Don't be painted white. These guys walk around and they go brilliant white on their uniforms
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mixed with a bit of red and other colours. So they could have some potential for badness about them
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Oh, absolutely. They could have infected them with spirits of the long past or perhaps spirits that they didn't even know about
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Did they want to get rid of them? Not at first, but then they did
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Because the British had become both a threat and too much trouble
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And that was just their first impression. The arrival of the First Fleet marked the start of an English colony in Australia
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which only happened because of Cook's journey in the late 18th century. But that's the British story
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Many other nations were sailing the high seas in a race to find a great southern land
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And there's one first contact theory that blows all others out of the water
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I'm heading to a secret location not all that far from where Captain Cook first landed
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My guide is an environmentalist named Jake Kasser Who subscribes to a very radical take on history
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What's more, he's going to show me the evidence This is the last place you'd expect to see Egyptian hieroglyphs, isn't it
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There are so many There a load over here and up here as well Do we know what they say There a story I heard from an old lady when I was a young fellow growing up not far from here
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And this is just local folklore, Tony. Two Egyptian princes came out here, of course, all the way from Egypt and ended up shipwrecked
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And they've made their way up the hill where one of the brothers got bitten by a snake. And this may be a representation of the snake here with the horned viper
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And the two little birds may represent the Egyptian princes. So one of the brothers was bitten by a snake and passed away
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and the other Egyptian brother lived his life out here with the local tribe. So this is independent Aboriginal folklore that tells the same story about Egyptians
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Yeah, well, there's a group out at Penrith, a tribe out in the Sydney area, that apparently use a lot of Egyptian words in their language
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Also in Western Australia, they say that they've got the same word for sun, ra
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There's a criticism, isn't there, that actually the Egyptians didn't have the technology
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to sailboats all this way 4,000 years ago. I've heard that, but if the Aboriginal people came over on canoes
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and the Maori went to the land of the long white cloud and canoes
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I can't see why the Egyptians couldn't do it. I mean, they had flushable toilets a couple of thousand years before Christ
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You're very robust about this, aren't you? You believe it. Well, if it is genuine
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then it could really change history the way we know it. Just a bit, mate
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I love Jake's passion, and I love the fact that he's determined to believe that it's all true
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but look at me, I'm just an old English sceptic. To me, the idea that an Egyptian civilisation
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discovered Australia 4,000 years ago is just very, very daft. But maybe what all this does demonstrate
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is the fact that we all yearn to have something ancient and dramatic
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in our lives and in our landscape. But the irony, as far as the Australians are concerned
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is that they do. Look at all these. These are the marks left by Aborigines over thousands of years
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That is the real, dramatic, ancient, magical story of Australia
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