Thomas Townshend, 1st Viscount Sydney PC (1733-1800) was British Home Secretary in the Pitt Government, given responsibility for devising a plan to settle convicts at Botany Bay. He chose Arthur Phillip as governor; on 26 January 1788, Phillip named Sydney Cove in honour of Sydney and the settlement became known as Sydney Town. Sydney was recognized as the ‘Originator of the Plan of Colonization for New South Wales’ by David Collins, who dedicated his Account of the English Colony in New South Wales in these terms. Collins wrote that Sydney's ‘benevolent Mind’ had led him ‘to conceive this Method of redeeming many Lives that might be forfeit to the offended Laws; but which, being preserved under salutary Regulations, might afterward become useful to Society’. Manning Clark sneered in A History of Australia (1961) that ‘Mr Thomas Townshend, commonly denominated Tommy Townshend, owed his political career to a very independent fortune and a considerable parliamentary interest, which contributed to his personal no less than his political elevation, for his abilities, though respectable, scarcely rose above mediocrity.’ Alan Atkinson, in The Europeans in Australia (1997) countered that ‘Townshend was an anomaly in the British Cabinet, and his ideas were in some ways old-fashioned . . . He had long been interested in the way in which the empire might be a medium for British liberties, traditionally understood.’ It might now be said that Phillip’s commission, together with the colony’s charter of justice establishing the legal regime, created in New South Wales a colony whose European inhabitants enjoyed all the rights and duties of English law. Phillip’s well-known statement that ‘There will be no slavery in a new country and hence no slaves’ owes a good deal to Sydney’s philosophy.
