Convicts in Australia

• 1. Introduction

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  Convicts in Australia arrived first on the 20th of January 1788, when eleven ships dropped anchor at Botany Bay and established what would become Sydney. Between 1788 and 1868, roughly 162,000 people were transported from Britain and Ireland to the far side of the world as punishment. Who were they? Mostly thieves. About 80 percent had been convicted of petty crimes, the kind spawned by poverty and displacement. Some were Irish rebels. Some were Chartists and trade unionists. One man had set fire to a haystack deliberately, hoping to be caught and given a warm cell. What happened to them, what they built, and what their descendants made of the inheritance forms one of the defining stories of modern Australia.

• 2. The Logic of Transportation

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  Robert Hughes, writing in The Fatal Shore, traced the pressure behind transportation to a single demographic shift. The population of England and Wales had held steady at around 6 million from 1700 to 1740, then began climbing sharply. London filled with the unemployed. Cheap gin flooded the streets. The Bloody Code, as it was known, listed some 222 crimes carrying the death penalty by the 1770s. Stealing goods worth more than 5 shillings was one. Cutting down a tree was another. Killing a rabbit from a warren could hang you.

  Judges and juries increasingly refused to apply such penalties, finding them too severe. Transportation offered a middle path: punishment severe enough to deter crime, but not the noose. The system had already been used for decades. About 60,000 convicts were shipped to British colonies in North America under the Transportation Act 1717. When the American Revolutionary War ended that arrangement, the government needed somewhere else to send people. Hulks left over from the Seven Years' War were pressed into service as floating prisons, and the overcrowding in those makeshift jails made finding a new destination urgent.

  James Cook had charted the east coast of Australia in 1770, and his detailed account of the South Pacific made it the most suitable candidate. Concerns that France might claim the region added a strategic reason to act quickly. On the 18th of August 1786, the decision was made. Captain Arthur Phillip was appointed Governor, and 775 convicts were loaded onto transport ships.

• 3. Who Was Transported

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  About one in seven of all transportees was female. Between 1788 and 1852, roughly 24,000 women made the voyage. Some 80 percent of them had been convicted of theft, usually petty. No woman was transported for prostitution, as it was not a transportable offence.

  Approximately 3,600 of the total were political prisoners, arriving in waves tied to unrest in Britain and Ireland. The First Scottish Martyrs came in 1794. Irish rebels arrived after the uprisings of 1798, 1803, 1848, and 1868. The Tolpuddle Martyrs, agricultural workers prosecuted for forming a trade union, were transported in 1834. American and French-Canadian prisoners from the Upper Canada and Lower Canada rebellions arrived in 1839. William Cuffay, a prominent Black London Chartist leader, was convicted in 1848 of preparing acts of arson as a signal for a planned armed uprising. He had been betrayed by a government spy at an Ulterior Committee meeting on the 13th of August. Sentenced to 21 years penal transportation, he went on to contribute to Australia's labour movement.

  The final breakdown of the roughly 164,000 transported across the full period breaks down as English and Welsh at 70 percent, Irish at 24 percent, Scottish at 5 percent, with the remaining 1 percent drawn from British outposts in India and Canada, Maori from New Zealand, Chinese from Hong Kong, and enslaved people from the Caribbean. Several hundred non-indigenous Black convicts were also transported to Van Diemen's Land, some specifically as punishment for speaking or acting against the British Empire. Most had previously been enslaved and were transported for resisting that enslavement.

  Constance Couronne was transported at the age of 10, believed to be the youngest female convict. Mary Wade, transported at 13, had 21 children and more than 300 living descendants at the time of her death.

• 4. The Penal Settlements

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  Governor Phillip's first fleet arrived at Botany Bay and quickly found the site unsuitable. A small expedition led by Phillip sailed three leagues north to Port Jackson on the 22nd of January 1788. An account from the time describes the reaction: "Here all regret arising from the former disappointments was at once obliterated; and Governor Phillip had the satisfaction to find one of the finest harbours in the world, in which a thousand sail of the line might ride in perfect security." Sydney Cove was chosen for the main settlement and named after Lord Sydney. The colony was formally established on the 26th of January 1788, the date now celebrated as Australia Day.

  Tasmania, then called Van Diemen's Land, received its first penal colony in 1803. The small party led by Lieutenant John Bowen settled at Risdon Cove on the eastern side of the Derwent River. Lieutenant-Colonel David Collins later moved the settlement to Sullivan's Cove on the western side, which became Hobart. The Macquarie Harbour penal colony, established in 1820 on the West Coast to exploit Huon Pine for furniture-making and shipbuilding, was deliberately chosen for its near-impossibility of escape. Most escape attempts ended in drowning, starvation, or on at least three recorded occasions, cannibalism.

  In 1830, Port Arthur replaced Macquarie Harbour as the main Tasmanian settlement. Despite its fearsome reputation in popular memory, Port Arthur's management was considerably more humane than the earlier sites. It experimented with the so-called model prison system, favouring solitary confinement over corporal punishment.

  In Queensland, John Oxley explored the Brisbane River in 1823 and returned in September 1824 to establish a temporary settlement at Redcliffe. On the 2nd of December 1824, the settlement moved to the site of present-day Brisbane's Central Business District. Western Australia began receiving convicts in 1850 after Governor Charles Fitzgerald petitioned Britain for labour. During that period, 9,668 convicts arrived on 43 ships. An Albany newspaper at the time praised their conduct, writing that "there were instances in which our free settlers might take an example."

• 5. Reform and Resistance

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  Lieutenant-General Sir Richard Bourke, the ninth Governor of New South Wales, served from 1831 to 1837. Appalled by the punishments he witnessed, Bourke passed the Magistrates Act, which capped at fifty lashes the sentence a magistrate could impose. Previously no such limit existed. Furious magistrates and employers petitioned the Crown, arguing the reduction in severity would undermine deterrence. Bourke was not dissuaded. He limited the number of convicts any single employer could hold to seventy and granted emancipated convicts the right to acquire property and serve on juries.

  Opposition to the transportation system as a whole came from an unlikely coalition. Newspaper proprietors who were also members of the Independent Congregational Church, including John Fairfax in Sydney and Reverend John West in Launceston, argued that transported convicts were both economic competitors to free labourers and a source of crime. Bishop Bernard Ullathorne, a Catholic prelate who had been in Australia since 1832, testified before a Parliamentary Commission in 1835 and submitted a tract on the evils of transportation. A parliamentary committee headed by Sir William Molesworth recommended ending transportation to New South Wales in 1837.

  The anti-transportation movement, however, was rarely motivated by concern for convicts themselves. Its energy came from a desire to remove what its members called the "hated stain" that the convict system was believed to inflict on the free middle classes. Transportation to New South Wales was temporarily ended in 1840 under an Order-in-Council dated the 22nd of May. In 1850, the Australasian Anti-Transportation League was formed to push for a permanent end. The last convict ship sent from Britain to the eastern colonies, the St. Vincent, arrived in 1853. Jubilee festivals in Hobart and Launceston on the 10th of August that year marked the official end of transportation to Tasmania.

• 6. Lives After Conviction

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  A well-behaved convict could earn a ticket of leave, granting limited freedom before completing a sentence. At the end of a full term, usually seven years, the convict received a Certificate of Freedom and could become a settler or return to Britain. Those who misbehaved were sent to places of secondary punishment, such as Port Arthur or Norfolk Island, for additional confinement.

  Many ex-convicts stayed and rose to positions of prominence. James Squire, a First Fleet convict of Romanichal descent, became Australia's first brewer and cultivator of hops. Mary Reibey became a businesswoman and shipowner. Henry Kable, who had arrived on the First Fleet, filed the first lawsuit in the new colony and became a wealthy businessman. Andrew Thompson, transported in 1791 at the age of 18, became the largest private employer in the colony and in 1810 was the first ex-convict appointed as magistrate. Ikey Solomon, transported as a professional thief, later became the inspiration for Fagin in Charles Dickens' novel Oliver Twist.

  William Buckley escaped into the bush near Port Phillip and lived among Aboriginal people for 32 years before approaching new settlers in the 1830s and working as an interpreter. Convict artist William Buelow Gould, imprisoned at Macquarie Harbour, left behind work that inspired the 2001 novel Gould's Book of Fish.

  Samuel Speed is believed to have been the last surviving transported convict. Born in Birmingham in 1841, he was tried in Oxfordshire for arson in 1863. He had set the fire deliberately, hoping an arrest would provide shelter. Speed was transported to Western Australia in 1866, arriving in Fremantle aboard the Belgravia on the 3rd of July. He was conditionally released in 1869 and received his Certificate of Freedom two years later. He worked as a general servant, then in bridge construction, and eventually retired to an old men's home in Perth, where he died in 1938, exactly 150 years after the First Fleet's arrival.

• 7. Cultural Memory

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  One year after the First Fleet arrived, convicts performed the first theatrical play on Australian soil. The prologue, attributed perhaps apocryphally to pickpocket George Barrington, became famous for its closing lines: "We left our country for our country's good." The production came to be known as Our Country's Good.

  The poet known as Frank the Poet, whose full name was Francis McNamara, wrote some of the few surviving literary works produced by a convict while still incarcerated. His best-known work is A Convict's Tour of Hell. He also wrote a version of the convict ballad Moreton Bay, which detailed the brutal punishments inflicted by commandant Patrick Logan and Logan's death at the hands of Aboriginal people.

  In fiction, the convict era has been treated across more than a century of Australian literature. Charles Dickens' 1861 novel Great Expectations introduced Abel Magwitch to readers worldwide. Marcus Clarke's For the Term of His Natural Life, published in 1874, became the most famous convict novel. It was adapted for film as early as 1908, shot on location at Port Arthur with a budget of 7,000 pounds, then a remarkable sum. A 1927 adaptation was considered one of the most expensive silent films ever made.

  Thomas Keneally returned to the subject twice, in Bring Larks and Heroes in 1967 and The Playmaker in 1987. Kate Grenville's 2005 novel The Secret River drew on the life of her own convict ancestor, Solomon Wiseman. Alexander Pearce, the Tasmanian convict who turned to cannibalism while trying to escape Macquarie Harbour, inspired three separate films released in 2008 and 2009.

  Attitudes toward convict ancestry shifted substantially across the 20th century. By 2007, an estimated four million Australians were related to transported convicts. In 2010, UNESCO inscribed 11 Australian Convict Sites on its World Heritage List, recognising them as the best surviving examples of large-scale convict transportation and the colonial expansion of European powers.