The fact that the first Australian settlements were founded as penal colonies casts a peculiar light on the kind of vision that underpinned colonialism in Australia. It is, however, unquestionable that the Botany Bay project was to a considerable extent driven and informed by a utopianism with deep roots in the European imagination. A clear glimpse of this can be gained from artworks and poetry inspired by the colony's dubious beginnings. In 1789 Governor Phillip sent a sample of clay from Sydney Cove to Joseph Banks, who had his fellow member of the Royal Society, the famous English potter and industrialist Josiah Wedgwood, fashion it into a medallion called ‘Hope encouraging Art and Labour, under the influence of Peace, to pursue the employments necessary to give security and happiness to an infant settlement’. This medallion gives an early insight into the utopian vision behind the British colony in its depiction of Hope personified as a female in classical dress commanding the similarly personified figures of Peace, Art and Labour. The medallion became the frontispiece to Phillip's journal, accompanied by a poem by Erasmus Darwin which spells out this vision in more detail: