David Collins's The English Colony in New South Wales (Vol. 1 & 2) is among the foundational narratives of British Australia, combining official chronicle, legal record, ethnographic observation, and natural-historical description. Written in a measured, documentary prose characteristic of late Enlightenment travel and colonial writing, it records the precarious establishment of the penal settlement at Port Jackson, the struggles of supply and governance, convict discipline, exploration, and encounters—often tense, sometimes perceptive—with Aboriginal peoples. Its value lies in both its administrative precision and its revealing assumptions about empire. Collins was unusually placed to produce such an account. As Judge-Advocate of the colony and secretary to successive governors, he stood near the centre of decision-making from the arrival of the First Fleet onward. His legal duties, official correspondence, and daily proximity to military, civil, and penal life gave him access to the colony's practical machinery, while his later colonial service deepened his understanding of Britain's imperial experiment in the Pacific. This work is recommended to readers of Australian history, colonial studies, legal history, and eighteenth-century prose. It is indispensable not merely as a sourcebook, but as a complex witness to the origins of settler society.

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Colonel David Collins (1756-1810) was a British administrator of Britain's first Australian colonies. In the first European settlement of Australia in 1788, Collins was the founding Lieutenant Governor of the Colony of New South Wales. In 1803 he led the expedition to found the first, short-lived, British settlement in what was later to become the Colony of Victoria.