Botany Bay

English

Etymology

The bay was named by explorer James Cook for the variety of plants observed near the shore.

(Worcester College): So called from its remote situation.

Proper noun

Botany Bay

1. A bay of New South Wales, south of Sydney Cove, Australia; the site of a landing by explorer Captain James Cook and later of the First Fleet, and originally planned to be the site of the first penal colony in Australia.
2. The penal colony, actually established at Sydney Cove, which developed into the now city of Sydney.
   • 1861, Ellen Wood, chapter 32, in East Lynne:

     "Do you come from West Lynne?" / Yes. "Horrid place. Mrs. Latimer took a house there soon after I went to live with her. I'd rather she'd taken it at Botany Bay."

   • 1871–1872, George Eliot [pseudonym; Mary Ann Evans], chapter LXXI, in Middlemarch […], volume IV, Edinburgh, London: William Blackwood and Sons, →OCLC, book VII, page 149:

     If everybody got their deserts, Bulstrode might have had to say his prayers at Botany Bay.

   • 1886, Thomas Hardy, chapter 8, in The Mayor of Casterbridge:

     Christopher Coney was silenced, and as he could get no public sympathy, he mumbled his feelings to himself: "Be dazed, if I loved my country half as well as the young feller do, I'd live by claning my neighbour's pigsties afore I'd go away! For my part I've no more love for my country than I have for Botany Bay!"

3. (UK, slang, obsolete) Worcester College, Oxford.

Derived terms

• Botany Bay dozen
• Botany Bay fever
• Botany Bay greens
• Botany Bay gum
• Botany Bay kino
• Botany Bay oak
• Botany Bay olive
• Botany Bay resin

References

• (Worcester College): John Camden Hotten (1873) The Slang Dictionary