over the course of its five-decade history as a penal colony. Like those in New South Wales, most convicts sent to Van Diemen’s Land either were assigned to settlers or worked on government projects. Lieutenant-Governor William Sorell had begun to institute reforms of the system, including keeping better track of the convicts and instituting efforts to more effectively control their working conditions, even before Bigge’s investigations in 1819–20 (Reid, Gender, 127–28). Lieutenant-Governor George Arthur, who became Governor Arthur in 1825 when Van Diemen’s Land was officially separated from New South Wales, had the longest tenure of any of the Australian colonial governors, serving from 1824 to 1836. A “devout Calvinist evangelical,” Arthur was also a “high-minded, autocratic but thoroughly efficient administrator” (Shaw, “Arthur”). He instituted strict rules for the assignment of convicts to private settlers, aiding the settlers with free labor but concerned with both the punishment and the potential reform of the convicts. His name is preserved in the notorious penal settlement Port Arthur, which was much dreaded by convicts and is featured in several convict novels. Arthur supervised the notorious Black War that virtually exterminated the Tasmanian Aborigines, although he later supported the conciliatory efforts of George Augustus Robinson and the setting aside of an island for the remaining indigenous people, most of whom died there.9
Port Arthur was one of several penal stations for convicts who had committed secondary offenses after leaving England. Besides Port Arthur, Newcastle, Moreton Bay, Macquarie Harbor, and Norfolk Island are the most well-known of these. Prisoners sent to these settlements were not expected to reform and were subjected to hard labor and brutal punishments, often for minor offenses. Flogging was particularly common; most of the convicts in the penal settlements probably felt the lash more than once. At Port Arthur, convicts were used as beasts of burden to pull passengers in a “railway” up and down a steep mountainside. The secondary penal settlements were notorious in both Australia and England, and the physical and mental brutality inflicted there did effectively create dread of transportation, though only a minority of transported convicts were actually sent to them. These settlements became settings in several convict novels, notably Marcus Clarke’s His Natural Life (discussed in chapter 6).
Convict transportation continued in Van Diemen’s Land under Arthur’s successors, increasing after its abolition in New South Wales. In the early 1840s it took a different form, known as the probation system, in which convicts underwent a period of government-supervised hard labor before being allowed to work for pay for settlers. Transportation to Van Diemen’s Land was stopped in 1846, resumed in 1848, and finally ended in 1853. Overall, about 40 percent of transported convicts were sent to Van Diemen’s Land. Transportation ended there primarily because of major protests from free settlers who felt that the convict presence in their midst was an obstacle to further moral, economic, and civic growth in the colony. The name of the colony was changed to Tasmania in 1856, partly to erase its reputation as a penal colony.
What actually finished transportation, to both Tasmania and the east coast of the Australian mainland, was the Australian gold rush, which began in 1851 and lasted until the late 1860s. Once the gold rush was under way, sending convicts to the region at government expense seemed counterproductive. Many of the expirees and escaped convicts from Tasmania headed straight for the goldfields in Victoria, leading to protests from citizens there to add to the ones already lodged by Tasmanian free settlers. However, transportation continued at a considerable distance from the goldfields in the newer colony of Western Australia. Beginning in 1850 and continuing until 1868, nearly 10,000 convicts were transported there at the request of free colonists who needed the cheap labor.10 Most of the convicts sent to Western Australia were first offenders who had already undergone imprisonment in England. Perhaps because Western Australia was so isolated from the major centers of population in the east, little convict literature focuses on the colony, although one former convict, John Boyle O’Reilly, an American convicted for rebellion in Canada, wrote a novel entitled Moondyne (1879) that is partly set in Western Australia. After 1868, transportation to Australia ceased altogether, although many convicts were still living there under sentence through the rest of the century.
As this brief summary indicates, transportation of convicts to the Australian colonies provoked controversy, especially in Australia.11 It was also a subject of heated discussion in the metropole, both within the government and in the British press, where numerous articles on transportation appeared from at least the 1820s on. Many focused on the question of the basic function of penal discipline: was it to deter crime through harsh punishment or to reform and rehabilitate already-convicted criminals? For instance, a writer for the conservative Quarterly Review in 1838 lists the functions of penal discipline: “first of diminishing crime by the dread of punishment, and secondly of relieving this country from the revisitation of dangerous criminals, without the extremity of capital punishment, and with the reasonable chance of eventual reformation” (“New South Wales,” 501). Here reformation comes last, with deterrence and getting rid of the convicts clearly paramount. For others, the priorities were different despite having the same aims: Archibald Alison, writing for Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, describes “the praiseworthy intentions of the first founders of the system of transportation and assignment, which had no less for its object reformation of character than a just infliction of punishment” (529).
As the Australian colonies prospered and reports of a few convicts achieving great wealth appeared, some worried that the working classes in England would deliberately commit crimes in order to be transported; Thomas Richards in the Westminster Review quotes Mr. James Busby, “late Collector of Internal Revenue in New South Wales,” as claiming, “I have known individuals . . . who have committed crimes to get to New South Wales,” though he is a little less certain about convicts urging others to do so: “I think I have known of people who have endeavoured to induce their relatives or connexions to commit crime, in order to get them sent out” (18). William Molesworth, who later went on to lead the investigation of transportation that resulted in its abolition in New South Wales in 1840, summed up the situation in an article he wrote for the London Review in 1835:
Great difference of opinion exists in this country [England] with regard to the condition of the convict in the colony: by some writers he is described as a miserable being; by others as a most prosperous and happy one; transportation is consequently considered by some as very severe, by others as a very slight, punishment. These apparent contradictions can easily be reconciled, and their origin can be traced to the following circumstances. Transportation is not, as it is generally supposed, the name for one species of punishment, but for a variety of species essentially distinct from each other, some of very slight, some of appalling magnitude. (31)
What everyone seems to have been able to agree on, though, was that “[t]he majority of transported convicts, when all that in strictness can be termed their punishment is at an end, remain in the colonies; and this is the only substantial advantage arising out of the present system” (Grey, 351). While some, like W. R. Greg, objected to “the plan of ‘swamping a new world with the refuse of the old one,’ as it was called” (578), all agreed that England greatly benefited from ridding itself of its troublemaking working-class citizens by sending them somewhere where they might be pioneers of empire but would not come back to bother England.12
Of course, other solutions to the problem of the convict, including the separate-and-silent prisons and penitentiaries, were debated and tried during the same period. Penitentiaries, which were first suggested as early as the 1750s by Henry Fielding and first built in the 1770s at the urging of prison reformer John Howard, gradually replaced transportation as the preferred solution for incarcerating convicted criminals.13 As for Australia, there was much heated debate as to whether the purpose of transportation was to teach convicts to become independent, to be a labor force for the mostly middle-class settlers who had failed to get ahead financially in England, or to punish the convicts so severely that the prospect of transportation would deter crime at home. Not surprisingly, at various times and in different situations, it did all three of these things. From England’s perspective,
