“There is a difference of opinion as to the lady whose name is borne by Elizabeth Street. Some years ago it was stated in a Melbourne publication that it was a compliment paid by Sir Richard Bourke to one of his daughters; but I am assured, on the authority of Mr. Hoddle, that it was meant for Elizabeth, the Virgin Queen of English history.”
- Garryowen, Chronicles of Early Melbourne 1888.
Elizabeth I, daughter of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn, was Queen of England from 1588 until her death in 1603.
During her reign she maintained violent British rule of Ireland, including through means of martial law. She funded Sir John Hawkins’ initial voyages to Africa in 1564, in which he violently captured Sierra Leoneans, marking the beginning of the organised British slave trade.
Queen Elizabeth provided Hawkins with ships, guns and funds to develop the English slave trade triangle. From 1564 and 1569, 1,200 people were captured in Sierra Leone and trafficked across the Atlantic; many being sold to Spanish colonisers in the Caribbean.
Elizabeth knighted Hawkins and awarded him a coat of arms depicting a bound slave.
In 1584 she granted Sir Walter Raleigh permission to invade what is now known as North America, or in her own words: any "remote, heathen and barbarous lands…not actually inhabited by Christian People".
Raleigh made one of the first attempts to establish a British colony near the coast of North Carolina, which marked the beginning of the British colonisation of stolen lands of the First Nations people of Turtle Island/ North America.
SOURCES
‘Elizabeth I and the Nine Years’ War’, Dr. Eoin O’Neill, University of Connecticut, Fluminense Federal University (2009)
‘Sir John Hawkins’, Far South West Black Networking Group
Abolition: England’s First Slave Trader, BBC (2007)
Charter to Sir Walter Raleigh: 1584, The Avalon Project, Yale Law School
So we start with the unquestionable position that, when Governor Phillip received his first Commission from King George III on 12th October 1786 the whole of the lands of Australia were already in law the property of the King of England.