The 736 British transported convicts of the First Fleet, as well as the officers and marines who accompanied them, had the barest idea of the place they were going to when they left Portsmouth in 1787 for the nearly unexplored continent of Australia. Even the commander, Governor Arthur Phillip, had only the maps, charts, and descriptions of a very small area on the eastern shore of Australia, made by Captain James Cook, and the advice of Sir Joseph Banks, a naturalist who had accompanied Cook. Almost as soon as they arrived with the convicts, officers such as Watkin Tench and David Collins began to record descriptions of the new land, the indigenous people, and the daily life of the convicts, guards, and administrators; these accounts were soon published in England. Despite the availability of these documents, however, few people in Great Britain knew more about Australia than that convicts were banished there, to the place popularly known throughout the nineteenth century as Botany Bay. In actuality, the First Fleet spent only nine days in Botany Bay before moving on to the harbor they named Sydney after Home Secretary Thomas Townshend, Lord (later Viscount) Sydney, who held authority in England for both prisons and colonial affairs. Nevertheless, from the time the First Fleet set sail in England, the name Botany Bay became synonymous with convict transportation, though it signified a system more than a real place.
Transportation of convicted felons to Australia was instituted because the American Revolution prevented the English government from sending its convicts to the American colonies any longer, as had been the practice since the early seventeenth century. In the eleven years between the Declaration of Independence on the part of the American colonies and the voyage of the First Fleet, various plans for the convicts were debated, including Jeremy Bentham’s now notorious Panopticon. In 1786, however, the Cabinet decided that the best solution to the increasing buildup of convicts, sentenced to transportation and imprisoned temporarily in the abandoned ships known as “the Hulks,” was to resume the practice of transportation by sending the convicts to an unexplored, unmapped, almost unknown continent and using them to build a new colony—if they didn’t die.4 Although most historians have assumed that the primary motivation for the scheme was to get rid of the growing number of convicts by sending them somewhere out of England, the more optimistic officials of the time also hoped that the convicts’ involvement in building a new colony would enable them to reform and become productive citizens of that colony.5 Built into the notion of reform was the possibility of social mobility and a better life for the mostly working-class convicts—as long as they stayed in Australia. After 1815, when free emigrants began to arrive in larger numbers, this opportunity for social mobility for the convicts was hotly contested, and a long struggle ensued over how the convicts would be integrated into Australian society.
The treatment of and attitudes toward convicts changed with the various administrations, both in Australia and in England, that held sway at different stages during the transportation period.6 The first governor, Captain Arthur Phillip, was enthusiastic about founding a new colony in Australia, and most scholars and writers consider him an effective administrator whose policies allowed the two small outposts in Australia—Sydney and Norfolk Island—to survive.7 Although he did not look with favor on the idea of a colony built mostly from the convict population, he was fair to the convicts, insisting on equal rations for convicts, officers, and marines and offering small grants of land to emancipists, or convicts who had fulfilled their sentences or received pardons, to encourage them to become industrious and self-supporting, suggests B. H. Fletcher in his entry on Phillip in the Australian Dictionary of Biography. After Phillip’s departure, the colony came under the control of the newly formed New South Wales Corps, a military body assembled specifically for the purpose of policing the colony. The New South Wales Corps and its leaders, who were at odds with the succeeding London-appointed civil governors, overtly favored its own officers and troops over the convicts and other civilians. As Robert Hughes reports in The Fatal Shore, the corps is considered by many to have been corrupt and self-serving, making huge profits from the sale of rum, but nonetheless managed to make the colony self-supporting (109). In their view, according to Hughes, “the convicts were there to be used, not reformed” (111). In 1808, the New South Wales Corps staged a military takeover and ousted Governor William Bligh, better known for the famous mutiny aboard the HMS Bounty, which he earlier captained. Trying to clean up the illegal rum trade carried on by the New South Wales Corps, Bligh had angered both the corps and many influential settlers, sparking the “Rum Rebellion.” For a short time, the colony was governed by officers appointed by the “Rum Corps.”
In 1809, the New South Wales Corps was recalled and reorganized, and a civilian governor, Lachlan Macquarie, arrived in 1810. Macquarie, whose administration lasted until 1821, was known for his enlightened policies toward the convicts. He employed many of them on public works designed by the convict architect Francis Greenway, whom he patronized along with numerous other convicts and former convicts, even inviting them to dine at Government House and appointing them to such prestigious positions as magistrate. Although he believed in strict discipline and did not lighten the punishments for convicts under sentence (especially those at the penal settlements for secondary offenses), he was in favor of giving well-behaved convicts a wage and expirees a small grant of land to encourage them to become productive citizens (Hirst, Convict, 46). He was also liberal in extending tickets-of-leave and pardons to those considered deserving. Believing that once they were no longer under sentence, convicts should be allowed to work hard and prosper, he antagonized many of the free settlers of the colony. Consequently, though his policies allowed many emancipists, or former convicts, to rise in society, they also led to a long struggle for power between emancipists and the free settlers, especially those who wanted to re-create a pseudofeudal hierarchy in Australia with a new gentry of free immigrants and a subservient peasantry made up of former convicts.8 Governor Macquarie also had a more humanitarian approach to dealing with the indigenous people than any other governor since Phillip. Significantly, many of the convict novels that are the subject of this book are set during Governor Macquarie’s regime, because that was the period that most offered the chance for success and a new identity for convicts that English ideology wanted to believe in.
Responding to complaints from wealthy free settlers, in 1819 the British Parliament sent a commission of enquiry into the state of the colony. The head of the commission, J. T. Bigge, was very critical of Macquarie and his policies toward convicts. Bigge spent eighteen months investigating, relying to a large extent on the opinions of free settlers, especially large landowners, and reported to Parliament that the convict system was not sufficiently punitive and that, if his stricter recommendations about treatment of convicts were accepted, “transportation could be made a matter of dread, and there would be fewer stories of ex-convicts accumulating wealth” (Hirst, Convict, 88). Macquarie was subsequently replaced and Bigge’s suggestions implemented. With the change of regime and increasing numbers of free settlers emigrating, convicts became less likely to become wealthy and experience radical rises in social status. Yet, as historian David Meredith has argued, by 1837, when another parliamentary commission was sent to investigate the convict transportation system, convicts under sentence were still being fed well and paid wages to work and emancipists who worked hard and were frugal could become prosperous and even respectable (23). Summing up a long and contentious debate, Meredith explains that by 1837 the economic and penal motives for transportation, which had always been in conflict in some ways, were both failing: “Transportation had turned a full circle: from an economic perspective it had turned from being an essential element in the development and expansion of the colonies to being an obstacle to further growth of [the Australian] labour force and population. . . . Penally, it had turned from being a dreaded punishment sufficiently terrifying to deter crime, to being held out as a reward for prisoners in Britain who behaved well” (24). Consequently, following the Molesworth Report of 1838, convict assignment to private masters was eliminated; transportation to New South Wales ended altogether in 1840.
During most of this period, convicts were also being transported to Van Diemen’s Land, or present-day Tasmania. Van Diemen’s Land was established as a penal settlement in 1803 and quickly grew to absorb even more transported convicts than New South Wales, especially after transportation to the eastern mainland was abolished in 1840. As in
