British Roots in Australian Soil: Forby Sutherland, Death and the Nineteenth Century Nation
The first British man to be buried in Australian soil was a Scottish sailor. Forby Sutherland was an Orcadian sailor who was part of the crew of Captain Cook’s voyage to New South Wales in 1770. A casualty of the late eighteenth-century push by European nations to explore and colonise the South Seas, Sutherland would almost certainly have left little mark on history or literature, another sailor lost at sea, were it not for the extraordinary location of his dissolution….