Convicts in Australia

The First Fleet arrived at Botany Bay on January 20, 1788.  There were 775 convicts on board the 11 vessels of the fleet, and an almost equal number of military personnel, civil servants and their families.  Great Britain was solving a problem at home and populating a remote colony of the British Empire abroad, all with one stroke.  It was the birth of a nation. 

Over the next 80 years more than 165,000 convicts—men, women and children—were taken from over-crowded British jails and exported to Australia.  Upon settlement, the convicts were still prisoners.  They were kept in compounds, assigned to forced labor and, upon completion of their sentence, were set free.

            Britain’s decision to send its native sons and daughters to a primitive and hostile environment literally half a planet away started, as all fateful decisions do, with a miscalculation and unforeseen circumstances.  We all know what paves the road to hell.

            In 1770 there were no less than 222 crimes in Britain which carried the death penalty.  Snare a rabbit…cut down a tree…swipe a button from the market…all of those would send you to the gibbet.  Age or circumstance made absolutely no difference.  A widow trying to feed her starving children by digging up turnips from already harvested land was treated the same as a cutthroat waylaying travelers on the highway—death by hanging.  But most societies evolve toward justice.   By the 1800’s death was seen as too harsh a punishment for crimes against property.  Prison was the next step down from the hangman’s noose, but    Britain was soon drowning in people imprisoned for everything from murder and rape to stealing bread.  At this point the decision to transport convicts to Australia became a good idea.  No one seemed to see it as a problem that, once in Australia, the convicts were treated as cruelly and heedlessly as all slave labor.  Call it by any name you want, the convicts were forced laborers without legal regress when their treatment exceeded the bounds of civility.  

             That ended with Sir Richard Bourke, the ninth Governor of the Colony of New South Wales.  This gentleman began a series of humanizing measures, ending in the elimination of convict transfer in 1850. 

            The creation of penal colonies throughout Australia may not have been Britain’s finest hour, but the descendants of those criminals wear that ancestry like a badge.  We have spoken with some of them and the stories are offered with solemn regard.  Their forebears may have been brought to Australia in chains, but they worked, and worked, and worked, and these modern Aussies now point with pride to the land they made and the successes they claimed.  They talk about the horrible conditions, the sorrows, the heroes and the villains that formed among both the convicts and the overseers.  [Not all convicts were good—not all overseers were bad—not all stories had happy endings.] But in the end, the people we talked to, held their chins up and said, “…it turned out all right y’know.  Where here, mate.”

            There is a lesson here.  You don’t hold modern man responsible for the conduct of generations past.  You don’t use the wrongs done your ancestors as an excuse for special treatment now.  History is just that.  We are each free standing individuals, accountable only for our own actions.  I have not found a single Aussie who wishes that his ancestors had stayed in England.  This is their land, regardless of the circumstances which brought them here.

            Create a legacy for your children, and keep the faith.