Transportation to Australia

11 Key excerpts on "Transportation to Australia"

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  The Cambridge Economic History of Australia

  • Simon Ville, Glenn Withers(Authors)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  Then, in 1853, with eastern Australia in the throes of the gold rush, transporta- tion to Van Diemen’s Land was stopped. Britain relinquished its addiction to transportation. The Penal Servitude Act of 1853 converted sentences of transportation into imprisonment at home, but Britain lacked the capacity to incarcerate as many as it had exiled. The solution was to change the law. The Criminal Justice Act of 1855 returned larceny to summary jurisdiction, delivering thieves into Houses of Correction for a matter of days, weeks or months, rather than the years of enforced labour typical for those banished to Australia. Transportation to Western Australia lingered on at the behest of DAVID MEREDITH AND DEBORAH OXLEY 102 labour-hungry landowners. Only when the Hougoumont sailed into Fremantle harbour on 9 January 1868 did transportation truly end. Around half a million British people were sentenced to penal trans- portation over the life of this policy. Over 225 000 were eventually ban- ished – more than 70 per cent of them to the Australian colonies – while the remainder served some time in floating ‘prison hulks’ or local gaols, judged too old, too young or too sick to send abroad (Shaw 1966, p. 150). Critical shortages in shipping, particularly during wartime, also prevented exile. Not everyone sentenced to transportation was sent and there was thus scope for selection in determining who arrived on colonial shores. It has been argued that every available female was transported because of the acute sex imbalance (Summers 1994 [1975], p. 268). The changing nature of law and punishment, the stresses in the British economy and society, the happenstance of whose crimes were detected, prosecuted, found guilty and sentenced to exile, and the ultimate decision of who was selected to be sent, provide a series of critical junctures shaping the peopling of white Australia.

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  A Concise History of Australia

  • Stuart Macintyre(Author)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  They publicised the scandals that emerged from the penal settlements to clinch their argument that the convict system was immoral and unnatural. Along with campaigns against slavery and oppression of native peoples in other parts of the Empire, the anti-transportation movement worked on a humanitar- ian conscience that was more sensitive to pain, more susceptible to reports of moral degradation. It also fostered the pejorative British attitudes towards the Australian colonies that affronted the colonists, and possibly contributed to a lingering condescension: well into the twentieth century a prickly Australian could be accused of ‘rattling his chains’. Conquest, 1822–1850 79 Within Australia there was a reluctance to acknowledge the con- vict stain. The gothic horrors of Macquarie Harbour, Port Arthur and Norfolk Island later became lodged in the popular imagination through the writing of Marcus Clarke (who based a character in the novel His Natural Life, 1874, on Price), William Astley (who wrote of the same events during the 1890s in Tales of the Convict System and Tales of the Isle of Death), and more recently in Robert Hughes’ epic The Fatal Shore. Against such dark and brooding imagery contend the revisionist historians, who point out that most convicts avoided the lash. They emphasise the utility of the convict worker and normality of the convict experience within a compara- tive framework of global movements of labour in the nineteenth century. A recent study has noted their ethnic diversity. They came from Antigua and Barbados, China and India, Madagascar and Mauritius; they included Maori warriors and Aboriginal men pun- ished for night raids, bushranging and even pauperism. Women have particular salience in these reworkings of convict history, because they emerge in them as actors in their own right. Earlier historians assessed the female convicts according to how they met expectations posed in moral or economic terms.

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  Lives in Transition

  Longitudinal Analysis from Historical Sources

  • Peter Baskerville, Kris Inwood(Authors)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • McGill-Queen's University Press

    (Publisher)

  PART ONE

  Transnational Migrations

  Passage contains an image

  2

  A Test of Character: A Case Study of Male Convicts Transported to Van Diemen’s Land, 1826–381

  REBECCA KIPPEN AND JANET MCCALMAN

  INTRODUCTION

  Convicts transported to the Australian colonies from 1788 to 1868 were among the most carefully observed populations of men, women, and children in the nineteenth-century world. Their records have provided rich data for the biological standard of living and the history of punishment and criminality.2 Australian history abounds in stories of convicts who went on to make new lives after servitude, and the family history movement has revealed some remarkable lineages.3 But until recent developments in information technology, in particular the explosion of genealogical information on the Internet and the digitization of vital and historical records, it has not been possible to study convicts at a population level outside the “paper panopticon” created by the various convict departments of the penal colonies. Now it is easier to reconstruct convicts’ lives and social contexts both before and after transportation, providing richer data than the bare bones of date and place of birth, sentence, type of crime, and height. Will these change our understanding of transported people as subjects for wider economic, social, and demographic analysis?

  Economic historians pioneered the use of convict records, in particular for height, geographic origin, and occupation, for both convict history and for the impact of economic change and dislocation on vulnerable populations in the Old World. For this purpose, it was important for convicts to be understood as representative of “ordinary” urban and rural poor people. This was the central claim of Stephen Nicholas et al.’s Convict Workers and Deborah Oxley’s work on convict women.4 Australian and labour historians have also sought to rescue transported people from the “contempt”, even more than from the “condescension of posterity.” Convicts as a “class” were more sinned against than sinning, and in popular history the catalogue of crimes for which they were often transported appear trivial to the ahistorical eye. Nicholas, Oxley, and Meredith created databases from the indents held in the Mitchell Library of New South Wales.5 Haines and McDonald compared the convicts from their datasets with bounty immigrants who arrived in New South Wales in 1841 and found that free and bond had more similarities than differences in human capital. The “character” rather than the skills of the transported constituted the divide between them.6

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  A History Of Australia (Volumes 1 & 2)

  From the Earliest Times to 1838

  • Manning Clark(Author)
  • 1999(Publication Date)
  • Melbourne University Press Digital

    (Publisher)

  3

  These were the men, women and children who had been found guilty of a crime punishable by transportation in either the British Isles or, in rare cases, a British possession overseas. Transportation was, next to death, the most severe punishment known to the criminal law and as such was intended to serve the ends of all punishment—namely to purge, to deter, and to reform. Of these three, the contemporaries responsible for the execution of the law believed the deterrent to be the principal aim. They believed the greater the terror the greater the deterrent, the greater the physical and mental sufferings, the greater the deterrent.4 The preamble to the act introducing transportation as a punishment defined its purposes as to deter wicked and evil-disposed persons from being guilty of crimes, and to supply servants to the colonies and plantations who by their labour and industry might be the means of improving and making the colonies and plantations useful to the nation.5 By the 1780s official comments added the aim of reformation, an addition acclaimed by the criminal law reformers, the philanthropists, and the charity workers, but treated with indifference by officials. Transportation, they said, was a deterrent, intended to be an object of the greatest apprehension to those who looked upon strict discipline and regular labour as the most severe and least tolerable of evils, to reform the convicts and to provide labour for the colonies.6 Some claimed that the greatest benefit of transportation was that it removed the criminal to a place where he could do no further harm.7 The interest of the mother country lay in the reduction of crime and in protecting citizens from harm, while the interests of a colony lay in the supply and quality of labour.

  The length of the sentence and the type of crimes punished by transportation varied between England, Scotland and Ireland. In England sentences were for seven years, fourteen years or life between 1788 and 1823, though there were isolated examples of ten-year sentences. A person could be sentenced to transportation either by the commutation of a death sentence to transportation for a stated period, or for a breach of law for which the punishment prescribed by statute was transportation, or for an offence against the army or navy codes. Wrongs to property, wrongs to the person, piracy, offences relating to the coinage (such as counterfeiting, gaming and lotteries), offences against the game laws, offences against the machinery of justice, offences against public order (such as framebreaking), offences against the state (such as riot or sedition), offences against army or navy law, and many miscellaneous offences—such as opening places of amusement or entertainment on Sunday evenings, the holding of debates on texts of Holy Scripture by incompetent persons such as a Jesuit or a member of a religious order coming into England without a licence to reside therein, solemnizing a marriage clandestinely, or stealing a shroud out of a grave—were all punished by transportation.8

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  History of Australia

  • (Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Learning Press

    (Publisher)

  ______________________________ WORLD TECHNOLOGIES ______________________________ Chapter- 2 History of Australia (1788–1850) The history of Australia from 1788–1850 covers the early colonies period of Australia's history, from the arrival of the First Fleet of British ships at Sydney to establish the penal colony of New South Wales in 1788 to the European exploration of the continent and establishment of other colonies and the beginnings of autonomous democratic government. Colonisation and convictism Establishment of the first British colony A proposal that Britain found a colony of banished convicts in the South Sea or in Terra Australis to enable the mother country to exploit the riches of those regions had been put forward in 1766 by John Callander in Terra Australia Cognita . Following the loss of the American Colonies after the American War of Independence 1775-1783, Great Britain needed to find alternative land for a new British colony. Australia was chosen for settlement, and colonisation began in 1788. Rather than resorting to the use of slavery to build the infrastructure for the new colony, convict labour was used as a cheap and economically viable alternative. It is commonly reported that the colonisation of Australia was driven by the need to address overcrowding in the British prison system; however, it was simply not economically viable to transport prisoners half way around the world for this reason alone. Many convicts were either skilled tradesmen or farmers who had been convicted for trivial crimes and were sentenced to seven years, the time required to set up the infrastructure for the new colony. Convicts were often given pardons prior to or on completion of their sentences and were allocated parcels of land to farm. Sir Joseph Banks, the eminent scientist who had accompanied Lieutenant James Cook on his 1770 voyage, recommended Botany Bay as a suitable site.

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  A Concise History of Australia

  • Stuart Macintyre(Author)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  Above all, his instructions from the minister for the colonies emphasised that transportation should be rendered ‘an object of real terror’. His three reports, presented in 1822 and 1823, suggested how punishment could be reconciled with profit. Deterrence called for greater severity in the punishment of convicts through greater reg- ularity. They should not be given special indulgences or allowed to earn money in free time to spend on town pleasures, but instead be assigned to rural labour under strict supervision. They should not receive land grants on expiry of their sentences but continue to work for a living. They should not be admitted to positions of public responsibility but rather remain in a subordinate status. Bigge’s Conquest, 1822–1850 57 recommendations on the penal system simultaneously defined the future development of the colony. It would rest on free settlers who would possess the land, employ the convicts and grow wool – John Macarthur had caught his ear. It would require a system of government suitable for free subjects of the Crown: a legislature to curb the governor’s arbitrary powers and a judiciary to safeguard the rule of law. With the implementation of these recommendations the colonial presence in Australia was transformed. Pastoralism flourished, and the greatly increased numbers it attracted burst the limits of settlement. Explorers and surveyors opened up the interior, and new colonies were planted on the southern and western coasts. Relations between Aboriginals and settlers on the vastly extended frontier deteriorated into endemic violence. Stricter supervision of the greatly increased numbers of convicts exacerbated conflict between the emancipists and the exclusives. The restraints on rule by decree opened up a three-cornered contest for power between these two groups and the governor. Australia was incorporated into an empire of trade, technology, manners and culture, while at the same time its own distinctive forms became clearer.

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  Connected Worlds

  History in Transnational Perspective

  • Ann Curthoys, Marilyn Lake, Ann Curthoys, Marilyn Lake(Authors)
  • 2006(Publication Date)
  • ANU Press

    (Publisher)

  67-9. 26 Jed Martin 1975, ‘Convict Transportation to Newfoundland in 1789’, Acadiensis , vol. 5, no. 1, pp. 84-99; Eugene I. McCormac 1904, White Servitude in Maryland, 1634–1820 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins Press), pp. 42, 61, 99; Kenneth Morgan 1985, ‘The Organization of the Convict Trade to Maryland: Stevenson, Randolph and Cheston, 1768–1775’, William and Mary Quarterly 3rd series, vol. XLII, pp. 201-7; Stephen Nicholas and Peter R. Shergold 1988, ‘Transportation as Global Migration’, in Stephen Nicholas (ed.), Convict Workers: Interpreting Australia’s Past (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp. 29-38; F. H. Schmidt 1986, ‘Sold and Driven: Assignment of Convicts in Eighteenth-Century Virginia’, Push from the Bush , vol. 23, October, pp. 2-27. 27 A. Roger Ekirch 1984, ‘Great Britain’s Secret Convict Trade to America, 1783–1784’, American Historical Review , vol. 89, no. 2, pp. 1285-91. 28 John Alder Burdon 1931, Archives of British Honduras (London: Sifton, Praed and Co.), vol. 1, pp. 146-8. 84 Connected Worlds end, would have been similar to earlier generations of criminals sent to the Americas. The sea crossing was designed to deliver much needed workers and to create a profit for the contractors. The punishment was in the loss of control over their personal autonomy and the fruits of their future toil, and for this they had to be prepared for their ‘sale’ to a master. For Thomas Limpus, however, whatever his experiences as a man being prepared for the sale of his labour power, they were short lived. He had in fact left the ship long before it reached Maryland and the Honduras Bay settlement. Only four days after the ship departed from England some of the convicts had mutinied and temporarily captured the vessel from the captain and crew.

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  Many Middle Passages

  Forced Migration and the Making of the Modern World

  • Emma Christopher, Cassandra Pybus, Marcus Rediker, Emma Christopher, Cassandra Pybus, Marcus Rediker(Authors)
  • 2007(Publication Date)
  • University of California Press

    (Publisher)

  Much of the mistreatment of slaves in earlier times, he added, had been perpetrated by convicts transported from Britain. 32 A planter writing in  had slightly different concerns: It may be argued, that our Convicts might be sent [to the West Indies], in Preference to the New Settlements lately discovered. Numerous as they are, they would be insufficient to supply the Demand of half the Settle-ments, and even that Number would be so greatly reduced, that one-third would never see a second Crop, and the miserable Remains so incapaci-tated by Indisposition, Pain and Sorrow, from pursuing their necessary Employment, that the Ground (for want of Hands) must lie uncultivated and unproductive. 33 e m m a c h r i s t o p h e r    To this planter the transportation of convicts to the West Indian colonies made no economic sense. Meanwhile, the planter William Beckford, who had inherited sugar plantations in Jamaica, suggested that if white men were sent to the Caribbean plantations in place of the slaves, crime in Britain might increase as men would envy the “easy soil and happy clime” of Botany Bay. 34 Whatever the complex ways in which convictism and slavery intertwined in abolitionist and pro–slave trade discourse in –, it is clear that to many of the slavery proponents the transportation of felons to New South Wales posed a major question to which their opponents had no answer. Bryan Edwards, who had an ambivalent attitude toward the whole contro-versy, acknowledged that if the slave trade had to be defended, then the abo-litionists should also condemn convict transportation “to Botany Bay; a voyage comprehending more than one half of the globe’s circumference, and encountering every variety of climate.” 35 And, by , at least one writer was linking racist sentiment with this question. An anonymous author, a man who wrote that he thought blacks to be “little more than incarnate devils,” while white people “reflect .

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  Empire of Convicts

  Indian Penal Labor in Colonial Southeast Asia

  • Anand A. Yang(Author)
  • 2021(Publication Date)
  • University of California Press

    (Publisher)

  The imperatives of empire also favored transportation by generating “push” factors: forces that encouraged the banishment of convicts from the British dominion in India to the rising empire overseas. As colonial rule expanded across the subcontinent—through the annexation of new terri-tories and the extension of its reach into the countryside—British officials increasingly perceived transportation as a punishment perfectly calibrated to rid the empire of political opponents and dangerous criminals. In other words, they viewed it as a pliable instrument of empire building, well suited to shore up the foundations of colonial rule and to enhance law and order. Across th e K a l a Pa n i • 39 Among the first to whom this measure was extended were the palaiyak-karar (poligars or local lords), 73 of whom were dispatched to Penang after the Sivaganga Revolt of 1799–1801 was crushed in south India. Some of the principal supporters of the Palassi (“Pychee”) Raja, who fought against the local authorities between 1799 and 1806, including Pallur Eman Nayar of Wynad, were also transported and ended up living alongside the poligar pris-oners. Briefly, authorities in Calcutta considered banishing Indian soldiers who fought pitched battles against their European officers in the Vellore Mutiny of 1806. Although not carried out, the initial plan envisioned dispers-ing the mutineers across the Cape, Penang, Bengkulu, and Malacca. 101 After Singapore emerged as a penal colony, it became the prime destina-tion in the Straits Settlements for political prisoners. Two notable inmates in 1850 were the Sikh rebel leader Bhai Maharaj Singh and his follower Khur-ruk Singh, both deported there from Punjab. However, during the Mutiny/ Rebellion of 1857 authorities across the Straits Settlements were not willing to keep their doors open for mutineers and rebels, preferring instead to limit the flow of convict traffic than to become the insular prisons for such offenders.

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  Empire of Hell

  Religion and the Campaign to End Convict Transportation in the British Empire, 1788–1875

  • Hilary M. Carey(Author)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  58 After his return to England he wrote pamphlets sup- porting the continuance of transportation, but solely to new colonies. 59 In his Thoughts on Transportation (1853), Morris argued that transporta- tion could not continue to settled colonies when it was not thought fit to release prisoners ‘among ourselves’. 60 Instead, he thought they should be deployed to open up territory in northern Australia from prisons estab- lished on offshore islands. In a Christian gloss, he suggested that the men might intermarry with the Malays, Christian instruction would be pro- vided for all, and the offspring of these mixed marriages would be brought up in the Christian faith. On the key question of reformation, he argued in a subsequent letter to Earl Grey ‘that convicts have turned out worse than emigrants’ in all penal settlements. 61 As evidence for this, he cited the account of Mrs Meredith’s Home in Tasmania (1852), who complained that prisoner women were of far lower grade than the men and not to be trusted as servants. (While she does make this point, Meredith devotes much more space to extolling the virtue and reliability of convict servants generally and the complete safety of her ‘home in Tasmania’.) 62 In Western Australia, Morris made selective use of crim- inal statistics to suggest that the rate of reoffending had increased since the arrival of convicts. Reviewing both works, the Argus agreed with Morris on the danger of convicts but opposed the suggestion that new penal colonies be created, whether on offshore islands in the Cape of Carpentaria or elsewhere. 63 In Westminster, Charles Adderley, member of the London delegation of the Anti-Transportation League, called for the final eradication of transportation in all its forms.

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  France And Botany Bay

  • Colin Forster(Author)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • Melbourne University Press Digital

    (Publisher)

  30

  It was Blosseville’s misfortune that his book appeared just as the tide of feeling in favour of penal colonies was about to recede. For almost two decades the penal debate tended to centre on the type of penitentiary system which should be established in France.

  In addition to this change in sentiment, it seems that Blosseville’s book did not attract more attention because it lacked rigour and bite as a tract on the advantages of transportation. There was great French interest in the Australian colonies, but it focused significantly on their penal aspect and thus on the relevance of their experience for penal change in France. On the positive aspects of transportation, all that Blosseville appeared to have shown was that few freed convicts returned to Britain, that many freed convicts became good citizens in Australia and that by the 1820s the colonies were an outstanding economic success. Although he mentioned them, he did not firmly address such important questions as: Was transportation a sufficient punishment? What were the effects on crime rates at home? Was transportation more costly than prisons? What proportion of convicts was genuinely reformed? What were the moral circumstances of a convict-based society? Did economic success begin only with the increasing number of free migrants? It mattered little that these questions were in the main unanswerable.

  The title page of the first history of Australia, by Ernest de Blosseville, published in Paris in 1831

  It was in the appendix to their analysis of the American prison system (1833), of which this is the title page, that Gustave de Beaumont and Alexis de Tocqueville made their first assessment of Transportation to Australia.

  It was also true that Blosseville admitted some virtue in the penitentiary case. Its main weakness, he thought, was that ex-prisoners, even if reformed by the penitentiary system, were not accepted back into civil society. In contrast, there were great opportunities for ex-prisoners in the new society of a penal colony. In his concluding chapter Blosseville argued for combining the two systems—a point of view later to be taken up vigorously in both Britain and France. He believed the weakness of the penitentiary system could be overcome by establishing it not in the home country but in the penal colony, and he had this advice for the British cabinet:

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