Dr Tim Causer to give address at 2022 Arthur Phillip Commemoration Service

On 24 January 2022, at St Mary-le-Bow Church, Dr Tim Causer (Senior Research Fellow at the Bentham Project, UCL Laws) will give an address at the Admiral Arthur Phillip Commemoration Service, which is organised annually by the Trustees of the Admiral Phillip Memorial Trust. The service marks the life of Arthur Phillip (1738–1814), Royal Navy officer, and who was the founding governor of the New South Wales penal colony, a position he held from 1788 to 1792. The service will be conducted by the Britain-Australia Society chaplain, the Reverend George Bush, and will be attended by Australia’s High Commissioner to the United Kingdom, His Excellency the Hon George Brandis QC. Previous deliverers of the address include Sir Roger Carrick, former British High Commissioner to Australia; Baroness Liddell of Coatdyke, former British High Commissioner to Australia; Sir Michael Savory, former Lord Mayor of the City of London; Professor Carl Bridge (King’s College London); and Professor Barry Godfrey (Liverpool).

In his address Dr Causer will draw upon his co-editing of the philosopher and reformer Jeremy Bentham’s hugely influential writings on criminal transportation and New South Wales. He will note the coincidence and contrasts of Phillip and Bentham’s respective backgrounds: the former having been born in humble circumstances ten years before, and barely a fifteen-minute walk away in east London from Bentham, who was born to a well-to-do middle class family and who went on to become the first major critic of New South Wales. Dr Causer will then go on to talk about Bentham’s powerful objections to transportation, why he was motivated to compare New South Wales with his panopticon penitentiary scheme, as well as Bentham’s use of evidence in seeking to condemn the penal colony.

Due to be published in February 2022, Panopticon versus New South Wales and other writings on Australia, edited by Dr Causer and Professor Philip Schofield (Director of the Bentham Project, UCL Laws), is the first volume of The Collected Works of Jeremy Bentham to be published in open-access by UCL Press. A collection of essays entitled Bentham and Australia: Convicts, Utility, and Empire, edited by Dr Causer, Professor Margot Finn, and Professor Schofield, in which scholars explore Bentham’s writings on Australia, will also be published in open-access by UCL Press in April 2022.

Image description: Captain Arthur Phillip, 1786, by Francis Wheatley, oil painting, State Library of New South Wales [http://archival.sl.nsw.gov.au/Details/archive/110315182 ML 124]. Credit: State Library of New South Wales, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.