convict authorities pleaded with the English government to send more women convicts. Further, because most female convicts were assigned as servants once they reached Australia, they are usually represented in the context of the domestic sphere of the home, defining the femininity and social status of their mistresses and masters—sometimes themselves former convicts. Domesticity was an important marker of social status for male convicts as well, and their treatment of women and the men’s desire—or lack of it—for a properly domestic home was a measure of their fitness for return to England or for social mobility in Australia.
Many other literary critics who have written about English national identity have addressed the ways that the indigenous peoples of the various colonies constituted an Other against which the English could define themselves.48 This was of course particularly true in Australia, where the indigenous people arguably suffered even more at the hands of English conquerors than they did in many of the other colonies; the Aboriginal people in what is now called Tasmania, for example, were almost exterminated in the Black War of the late 1820s and early 1830s.49 The English tended to view the Australian indigenous people as the most backward and least civilizable of all their subject peoples.50 Perhaps because of this, in most of the nineteenth-century literature about Australia, the Aborigines are not represented as particularly threatening; even more than in other settler colonies, claims David Pearson, they were simply invisible (31). Rather, the convicts are more often portrayed as the alarming Other of the respectable English. The existence of two major but distinctly different oppressed groups, one of them technically British, makes Australia and literature about it unique in imperial and colonial studies (America, of course, had both Native Americans and African slaves, but neither of these were British, as the convicts were).
While there were a few attempts to equate the convicts and the indigenous Australians, some English administrators believed that even England’s criminal rejects were civilized enough to model European behavior and attitudes toward the “savage” Aborigines. In the twenty-first century, the historically prior and continuing existence of the Australian indigenous people is a fact that cannot be ignored, but overt racism virtually erased their existence in many of the nineteenth-century texts I examine. Despite the fact that many of these texts do not mention the indigenous people, the presence of the Aborigines underlies and informs all of them and points to settler guilt about the conquest and slaughter—amounting to genocide in places like Tasmania—of the original inhabitants of the land. Relations between Aborigines and convicts varied in different places and at different times, of course. There are numerous stories of convicts “going native” but an equal or greater number of accounts of convict hostility toward the indigenous Australians. Some of this hostility may be traced to convict anxiety about being likened to the native people. For instance, the convicts were frequently characterized as “savages,” like the Aborigines, and were often even represented in racial terms, with a convict “stain” or “taint” that was supposedly ineradicable. This extension of racism to convicts, alongside the indigenous people, erased Englishness as a possible identity for both of them, but it still left the convicts with the option of adopting a new national identity, even if at first this was only vaguely imagined. Aborigines, in contrast, according to Bruce Buchan, were not considered as potential citizens of an Australian nation nor as having any sovereignty with which to negotiate self-determination until at least the late twentieth century.51
The figure of the convict transported to Australia was, as one might expect, used in multiple ways in literary representations of various types, just as there were multiple and competing racial, gender, class, and national identities among the diverse groups of settlers who went there in the nineteenth century. This figure, of course, was obviously only one of many representations involved in imagining a national community in England or Australia. In most accounts, the national community imagined for England was led by a British gentleman who could be trusted to be honorable and humane. Most English people believed that their society was held together by the interlocking bonds of a paternalist pseudofeudal class hierarchy. The convict banished to Australia could be used to represent and solve challenges to this system by creating a new identity within a different class system elsewhere for those who threatened the imaginary stable national community in England. This system removed the threatening figure from England and resituated it in a new environment where what was a problem in England could become a productive force that was still part of Britain but was not English. A problem arose, however, when Australia became a destination for free English settlers who did not want to be defined as deviant or as working class but instead wanted to create an Australian identity free of the taint of “convictism,” which many commentators called it, as its defining quality.52 This led eventually to the abolition of transportation, which began to happen in the late 1830s and was finally accomplished in 1868. Even so, the cultural work accomplished by the figure of the transported convict did not end with the cessation of criminal transportation. Certainly transportation was still a vital issue in Australia, where living convicts and convict descendants were a reality that had to be incorporated into its emerging we-identity. But English and Anglo-Australian writers continued to write convict literature for English audiences that represented the creation of Australian identity as a solution to British social problems well after the historical practice of enforced exile had been abandoned in the major settlements of the Australian colonies. Doing so enabled readers in England to continue to imagine England as free of poverty, dissent, and crime, even though by the 1830s there were more voluntary emigrants arriving in Australia than forced ones. In other words, voluntary transportation of problematic English people still served a similar function to forced transportation, and the two could be represented in similar terms in fiction.
THE LITERARY FIGURE OF THE CONVICT IN AUSTRALIA
I mention Dickens’s Great Expectations, the most famous nineteenth-century representation of the figure of the transported convict, at the beginning of this introduction, and I focus on it in more detail in the next chapter. This novel is, however, by no means the first or the last portrayal of this figure. Many other cultural productions, including broadsides, poetry, memoirs, letters, travel narratives, journalism, and popular novels, featured convicts banished to Australia. Most of these works struggle with the interrelated issues of class and national identity.53 The chapters that follow explore the questions I have outlined here in some of these cultural texts, mostly produced in England, which was the center of the publishing industry, but shipped to Australia for Australian readers as well. Texts written in Australia usually appeared only in serial form in local journals or newspapers until quite late in the century, when novels began to be published there more regularly.54 As in the history of nineteenth-century Australia, representations of the convict in popular culture there varied at different times and in different places. Despite such variety, a historical narrative does gradually arise when looking at these texts, one in which Englishness as the predominant and desired national identity is gradually supplanted by a new and separate identity for Australians in both English- and Australian-produced texts.55 By midcentury at least, around the time that England began to grant self-government to the Australian colonies, fictional narratives began to imagine Australianness not as a colonial identity but as a national one.56 This was a crucial step in preparing the way for an actual independent Australian state some fifty years later, though one that would still be closely allied with Britain. Beyond the period that I discuss in this project, from 1788 to 1881, the figure of the convict became less prominent in Australian literature until the late twentieth century; yet the central issue of the relation of social class to national identity remained as Australia was officially founded and nationalism imagined it as a less socially stratified society than England.
While the figure of the transported convict and how he or she is represented in the various texts I examine is my primary focus, I am also concerned with the forms in which this figure was presented. Many of the narratives I explore are novels with familiar novelistic conventions. The earliest printed representations of transported convicts, however, took other forms, including broadsides and autobiography or memoir. These forms accomplished cultural work in terms of constituting national identity through their assumptions about or representations of social class relations. Even the novels about transported convicts used generic
