WI Victoria in 1803?

HMS Calcutta landed 402 people including 307 convicts at modern day Sorrento in port Phillip bay in 1803. but they picked a bad spot and left soon after and Victoria wasn't settled for another 31 years.

WI the Calcutta people set up at Melbourne, geelong or even Portland?
 

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HMS Calcutta landed 402 people including 307 convicts at modern day Sorrento in port Phillip bay in 1803. but they picked a bad spot and left soon after and Victoria wasn't settled for another 31 years.

WI the Calcutta people set up at Melbourne, geelong or even Portland?

Gold would have been discovered earlier, leading to an earlier massive influx of immigration, which might have led to Melbourne still being Australia's largest city to this day (rather than Sydney regaining that title in 1902).

Portland was settled before melbourne or Geelong, but it still fell by the wayside in development compared to Melbourne and Geelong.
 
Is there any reason why the Sorrento colonists didn't just move the site of the colony somewhere up the peninsula, where they could find access to freshwater? The first fleet moved up the coast from Botany to a more suitable location after all.
 
Gold would have been discovered earlier, leading to an earlier massive influx of immigration, which might have led to Melbourne still being Australia's largest city to this day (rather than Sydney regaining that title in 1902).

This would have meant an early end to transportation. Suddenly Australia would be a place people wanted to go.

Also, with Britain having so much gold at this point, Napoleon's efforts at economic warfare would have been completely hopeless.
 
I do find it a bit strange that the Calcutta didn't go elsewhere in Port Phillip Bay, certainly the Barwon is fresh water above Buckley Falls (rapids would be more accurate) and the Werribee River has rapids at Werribee so it would be fresh as well.

Having a convict rather than free society at the foundation might make a bit of a social difference, although higher class people didn't do well in Melbourne's first election, so it mightn't have made much difference.

Just as a matter of interest I grew up in 'Australia Felix' and my brother works on what was/is a landed gentry grant or selection right in the heart of Australia Felix.
 
I do find it a bit strange that the Calcutta didn't go elsewhere in Port Phillip Bay, certainly the Barwon is fresh water above Buckley Falls (rapids would be more accurate) and the Werribee River has rapids at Werribee so it would be fresh as well.

Indeed there are many alternative sites that could work for a settlement. Melbourne is probably the best, and is still going to become a big town at some point. But it would be interesting if it remained undiscovered for a number of years until a regional rival could become established. Maybe Victoria would become less Melbourne centric?

A surviving settlement is going to speed up settlement in the Western district as well, but not by much since as early as the 1820s there were runs that were operating on Victoria's side of the Murray. The million (billion?) dollar question in this scenario is if the gold is stumbled upon significantly earlier than it already was.

If it happens early enough, and Victoria may establish a solid lead over NSW as the 'big' colony much earlier than when it overtook her.
 
Interesting question, I hadn't realised the settlement was so delayed. Incidentally, I shall be in Melbourne tomorrow for the first time in a while.

I wonder how an earlier gold rush might play out and what impact that would have on Australia and the wider world.

So far as I understand it there were 4 big gold rushes of the 19th century, California, Victoria, NZ and then the Klondike and each of those had the effect of massively boosting the colonisation and development of the area in question (perhaps more the first 3 than the last).

An earlier, rich Victoria, with a rich government and business class is probably going to drive a much earlier New Zealand intervention too. OTL, NZ didn't really get settled by the British in any numbers before 1850 and even then, not really till the late 1850s. Then gold was found in 1861 and this really massively drove the settlement of the South Island, which then helped fund and push the long land wars with the Maori in the North.

If this all happens 2 decades earlier, then the history of NZ would likely be radically different, as everything is butterflied.
 
It probably wouldn't get named 'Victoria'?

Good point: maybe Port Phillip District becomes the new centre of NSW. They are certainly going to be loath to let the golden goose secede as per OTL

So far as I understand it there were 4 big gold rushes of the 19th century, California, Victoria, NZ and then the Klondike and each of those had the effect of massively boosting the colonisation and development of the area in question (perhaps more the first 3 than the last).

An earlier, rich Victoria, with a rich government and business class is probably going to drive a much earlier New Zealand intervention too. OTL, NZ didn't really get settled by the British in any numbers before 1850 and even then, not really till the late 1850s. Then gold was found in 1861 and this really massively drove the settlement of the South Island, which then helped fund and push the long land wars with the Maori in the North.

If this all happens 2 decades earlier, then the history of NZ would likely be radically different, as everything is butterflied.

Huh. Never knew that NZ ha a gold rush. Of course you forgot Johannesburg, but the other thing to consider is that a very early gold rush could inhibit the rush of immigrants compared to OTL. After all, it would be smaller, slower ships carrying the miners compared with what did occur.

Nonetheless, very interesting! Imagine NZ and Victoria being majority Yankee by 1840!
 
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I think the easy access to huge swathes of good farmland would be a major factor in Victoria gaining an economic dominance if it was settled in 1803. The Sydney basin was hemmed in my mountains which were not crossed for 25 years after the colony was founded, but west of Port Phillip Bay is a big open plain with little in the way of obstacles which IOTL was occupied by pastoral concerns with remarkable speed.
 
I think the easy access to huge swathes of good farmland would be a major factor in Victoria gaining an economic dominance if it was settled in 1803. The Sydney basin was hemmed in my mountains which were not crossed for 25 years after the colony was founded, but west of Port Phillip Bay is a big open plain with little in the way of obstacles which IOTL was occupied by pastoral concerns with remarkable speed.

In part, but only in part. The Sydney basin was not immense, but it was large enough to still attract some free settlers, and in practice there's only a decade between 1803 and when the Blue Mountains were crossed by Europeans in 1813, so it's not that large of an advantage.

The more fundamental question is what sort of colony is being run here? If it's just another convict settlement, well, the number of convicts being sent out from Britain is unlikely to change as a result, so all that means is that the same number of settlers are spread over a larger area. Some increased economic dominance for Victoria vis a vis New South Wales, but not that much of a larger population continent-wide, if any.

The wild card is, of course, gold. Will there be an earlier gold rush? Perhaps, perhaps not. A few points to consider:

Gold had been discovered several times in Australia before the first gold rush in 1851: at least 8 times in New South Wales, several times in Victoria, possibly also in Tasmania, and an active (though small and quickly exhausted) gold mine in South Australia. But news of these had mostly been suppressed, and it's quite possible that a penal colony governor in Victoria (or the New South Wales governor, if it remains part of the same colony) would try to squash the news in the same way.

Even when the news wasn't suppressed, it still didn't trigger gold rushes. As late as 1848, news of gold finds in Bathurst were published in the main Sydney newspaper - but no gold rush yet. It could well be that the example of the California Gold Rush was required both to act as general inspiration and to create a large enough class of people who were prepared to travel around the world in pursuit of gold. California was remote from the perspective of most gold rush migrants, but Australia was even more remort.

There's also a question of shipping. The Victorian gold rushes led to the pioneering of new shipping routes - which essentially cut the time to travel to Australia in half - but would these be feasily discovered and used three or four decades earlier? (I don't know, but it makes an important difference.)
 
The decade after the crossing of the Blue Mountains was a big one for exploration, with Oxley, Wild and Hume & Hovell traipsing around the interior. If the 1803 plantation was enduring I'd think that the exploration of the interior would occur from Port Phillip where there are few natural obstacles rather than the arduous crossing of the Blue Mountains which required chopping a path through the rugged bush. I'd also guess that with a portion of the convicts heading to Port Phillip the need to break out of Sydney wouldn't be as pressing, so crossing the Blue Mountains mightn't be followed by rapid colonisation.

As for Victoria, perhaps with the convict assignment system and land grants to emancipists the likes of the Hentys, Blacks and others won't acquire vast (70,000 acres for Edward Henty) landholdings and dominate early Victorian politics.
 
Blainey, in 'The Tyranny of Distance', suggests that LtCol Collins was ordered make a settlement that could cover Bass Strait and if he made a settlement in Melbourne it would be too far and The Rip too treacherous for this to occur. But Blainey also suggests that another officer would have made the settlement work, so an opportunity was lost.
 
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