Australian History For Dummies. Alex McDermott

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on appointing ex-convicts along with Exclusives to positions of responsibility — as magistrates, for example, or as fellow board members on public trusts — but also enjoyed their company so much he invited them to receptions at Government House, to pleasant Sunday dinners and christenings.

      This was exciting stuff — for everyone bar the Exclusives. For these people it was frightening. The stigma of coming to a convict colony was bad enough. If word started getting back to Britain that felons and free settlers intermingled easily throughout society, just think of the disgrace! They feared social contamination. And, more than that, they thought, strongly, that if you’d committed a crime and been transported, it just wasn’t right that afterwards you’d be treated like everyone else.

      Creating outrage back home

      The Exclusives in NSW sent impassioned letters about the state of affairs under Macquarie to various people in power and with influence in Britain. And most people in Britain completely shared the Exclusives’ attitudes.

      

Although Macquarie and people in NSW might have thought it perfectly reasonable that an emancipated convict shouldn’t be forever marked, socially and legally, by their previous crime, in Britain it was shocking. There, a person convicted of any of the various larcenies, embezzlements, forgeries or assaults that those transported had committed was ejected forever from respectable society. There could be no coming back. And your legal status was forever altered too — even after serving time, a convicted felon couldn’t give evidence in court or hold property.

      

In NSW, the economic and legal order would simply collapse under the regimen upheld in Britain — convicts owned more than half the wealth in the colony, frequently used the courts to sue and protect their various rights, and were involved with just about every economic transaction that took place. Different realities had bred different attitudes, which Macquarie discovered and then championed.

      While the Exclusives were the singular minority in the colonies, their attitudes reflected what most people thought back home. Members of the British Parliament, and readers of popular periodicals, were duly outraged when they heard and read that a society made up largely of ex-criminals had so lost its sense of respectable decency that ex-thieves not only enjoyed the most luxurious mansions in Sydney town but also served as magistrates and dined regularly with the governor. Had the whole colony gone completely mad?! This was a world too topsy-turvy for good sense.

Big World Changes for Little NSW

      Trouble was brewing for Macquarie among the Exclusives in NSW and those in power in Britain. The situation was then made worse by forces largely outside Macquarie’s control — in particular, the end of the Napoleonic War.

      Coping with the deluge following Waterloo

      If Macquarie might have learned a moral from his time in NSW, it might have been a rueful ‘Be careful what you wish for’. His request for more convicts to keep the engines of prosperity and growth turning over had been roundly ignored for the first five years of his administration. However, from 1816 it was answered with a deluge to make up for the scarcity of the last 25 years.

      

In 1815, the Duke of Wellington combined his British forces with Prussian and other forces at the Battle of Waterloo to defeat Napoleon’s French Army and end, finally, the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. These had been raging, on and off (with more on than off), for some 25 years. Just as an outbreak of peace in the early 1780s led to a rapid rise in crime from returned soldiers and sailors in Britain (refer to Chapter 3) so here, too, the defeat of Napoleon meant 400,000 soldiers found themselves demobbed (stood down from their jobs). They returned to a Britain of stagnant economic growth, with few jobs on offer. A dramatic spike in the number of convictions and transportations ensued, as ex-soldiers took to crime.

      

Macquarie found himself dealing with three or four times the annual number of convicts that previous administrators had received, while simultaneously being dealt an almost biblical set of ecological catastrophes: Droughts, floods and caterpillars destroyed much of the harvests after 1816. He had little choice but to put most convicts back on the public store (for work on public projects) and re-establish large-scale government farms and projects to soak up the surplus convict labour. The increased expenses charged back to Britain reduced Macquarie’s standing with the Colonial Office even further.

      

Male convicts under government charge tripled between 1817 and 1819, while those in the private sector halved between 1818 and 1820.

      Britain starts paying attention again (unfortunately!)

The end of the Napoleonic War meant Britain start paying attention to the penal colony again but, curiously, this wasn’t really a good thing. Scrutiny of the far-off colony of NSW started to increase — and for Macquarie, and most of the convicts and ex-convicts in NSW and Van Diemen’s Land, this scrutiny didn’t bode well.

      

The extended period of neglect previous to 1815 had proved to be largely benign for most colonial inhabitants. In this initial period, no-one insisted that NSW was meant to function as a place of punishment — it was just a place to get sent off to. Once here, governors were mainly concerned with keeping costs down and were quite happy to give convicts conditional freedom if they could pay their way or had a decent trade that was in demand.

      With the end of the wars and the beginning of a long period of peace, Britain began to experience increased economic depression and social turmoil. Increased crime led many to begin asking questions about the current system of crime prevention and punishment. They weren’t greatly impressed by the answers.

      Bringing back terror

      The strange thing about NSW was that it was begun as a place of punishment, yet for many convicts who arrived in the period up to and including Macquarie’s rule, it had proved to be a place of freedom and opportunity. Macquarie’s idea of a society of second chances (building on the reality he’d found on his arrival and undoubtedly popular in a colony chiefly made up of convicts and ex-convicts) cut less mustard in Britain, where the late 1810s saw greater scrutiny and debate about the nature of life in NSW.

      In the House of Commons, a parliamentarian denounced the rule of Macquarie for being both expensive and chronically slack. The story of D’Arcy Wentworth, last seen leaving England after being caught as a highwayman and now the Chief of Police in Sydney, was repeated with anger.

      

Originally, the general impressions most people in Britain had of NSW and Van Diemen’s Land were vague, hazy ones based on the idea of a Botany Bay hellhole. NSW and, later, Van Diemen’s Land, were assumed to be places of hard labour, little food ‘and constant Superintendence’. This made the place ‘an object of peculiar Apprehension’. Now,

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