The fourth volume in the resumed Historical Records of Australia series continues many vital historical developments, including the dramatic and terrible clash between Aboriginals and the colonist that culminated in the 'Black Line' operation of 1830—a sombre turning point in race relations in Australia.
Other events covered in this volume are hardly less significant. They include the opening of a new debate on the severity and utility of transportation of convicts to Van Diemen's Land and hence the genesis of the later famous (or notorious) Port Arthur Settlement as 'a most useful Secondary Penal Settlement formed at moderate expense'.
Among other matters of historical importance featured here are the assisted emigration of the wives of convicts to join their convict husbands in Van Diemen's Land and the plight they endured on arrival; and the new emigration debate arising from the Ripon Regulations of 1831, providing for 'the total alteration of the mode of disposing of the vacant lands in the Colony'.
In many ways this volume—which, in addition to the voluminous despatches, contains some one hundred and fifty thousand words of editorial analysis and researched commentary—forms a gateway to modern Australia. It portrays the evolution of free population and progressive economic growth that Governor George Arthur hoped would lead to a 'new Alexandria', and the radical step of expatriating the Aboriginals from their traditional lands. The former development was to lead to the dissolution of the bonds of convict Australia, the latter to the failed Batman treaty and then to the systematic dispossession of the Aboriginals, the restitution for which remains one of the foremost political questions in modern Australia.