“the individual is carefully . . . fabricated in [the system], according to a whole technique of forces and bodies” (Discipline, 298, 217).38 Additionally, Jeremy Tambling explains that in the Foucauldian system “a personality type is thus created; the change Foucault marks is towards the creation of an entity: a mind to be characterized in certain ways” (Dickens, Violence, and the Modern State, 19). Transportation removed the criminals from the environment that motivated their crimes—rural poverty, industrial conditions, or the criminal underworld—and gave them a chance to reform by providing opportunities to support themselves and succeed in a lawful manner once they finished their sentences or even before. Thus, in a subtle way, transportation contested the pseudofeudal social system’s success at managing social problems by instead locating the motivation to commit crime in the social system and not in the individual.
One of the problems with the system of transportation as a method for eliminating dissidents was that, in most cases, transported convicts did not die and thus could return again (legally or not) to challenge England’s notion of social stability and national security by going back to the environments that led them to commit crimes in the first place. Thus, it was important for the convicts to want to stay in Australia, that is, to develop a new identity as Australian rather than English. While exiling convicts to a settler colony could be a way to reinforce or even inspire an English identity,39 at the same time, an identity that was new and different from England’s began gradually to develop over the course of the 113 years between the arrival of the First Fleet in Australia in 1788 and the establishment of the Australian Federation in 1901, when Australia officially gained its own national status and had an easily recognizable nationalist movement.40 However, a potential Australian identity began to appear quite early in the period, well before the Australian Federation and official independence from England at the end of the nineteenth century.41 In fact, as early as the arrival of the First Fleet carrying British convicts, Governor Phillip imagined an Australian nation with its own national identity (qtd. in Hughes, Fatal, 68).
IMAGINING AN AUSTRALIAN IDENTITY
The literary texts about Australian convicts that I discuss in this book worked not only to reinforce an English identity, then, but also to create an Australian national identity that consisted of national feelings—though not yet nationalism as most scholars describe it. Not surprisingly, the first literary works featuring transported convicts mostly functioned to bolster English, not Australian, identity; many of the convict characters in those works do return to England, usually not with much success (except in the broadsides). What I also trace here, though, is the (uneven) growth of an affective Australian national identity in convict literature as it arose at least by the middle part of the century. Works considered authentically Australian, though some were written by English immigrants and others by expatriate Australians, were a necessary precursor to the more strictly defined nationalist works that arose in the last decade of the century as an accompaniment to aspirations for an actual nation separate from England.42
This evolving Australian identity, like England’s, included notions of social class, but in a somewhat different way. Because colonial Australia was, especially at first, mostly a land of people who had failed, in one way or another, in England, class status there was somewhat more fluid, with social mobility common and English status—particularly the lack (or loss) of it—often disguised or deemphasized. For one thing, because such a large percentage of the population were or had been convicts, they and their children had to be assimilated there. As in England, there were conflicts and negotiations between different social groups, especially between former convicts and settlers who had come free to the colonies, with different models of Australianness arising and competing. On one hand, the rough, independent, and resourceful bushman became a symbol for Australianness among many, especially the former convicts and the laboring classes. On the other hand, the large-scale cattle and sheep station owners tried to reinvent themselves as an Australian pseudofeudal gentry with convicts as their serfs.43 Once the convicts’ sentences expired, however, they did not often stay with their masters unless they were paid a good wage, so this model was not overly successful in the long term, especially at defining the “squatters” as the national subject. The majority of the population of Australia lived in the cities along the east coast of the continent, and this urban society exercised the most power both economically and politically; significantly, it included both former convicts and free settlers, not necessarily in the same class configurations one might expect based on their former positions in England.44
One apparent contradiction between the literary history and the historiography of nineteenth-century Australia is that most of the convict literature, especially the novels, did not see print until convict transportation had already been ended or was about to be abolished. Because the whole point of settling Australia in the first place was to get rid of convicts and not hear from them again, there seems to have been not much interest among the British public in reading about these mostly working-class banished people, except among the lowest classes, until free emigration became more common; this came to a head with the advent of the Australian gold rush in 1851. The broadsides, a couple of convict autobiographies, and a few novels were published before that, but for the most part, Australia in English literature before the 1850s appeared as a joke about “Botany Bay.” In the 1850s, however, both journalism and novels about and even set in Australia began to emerge with more regularity. Many of these works featured transported convicts, either freed or still under sentence. By that time, many readers would have been more interested in Australia because they were more likely to have family, friends, or acquaintances who had emigrated or were considering it. Such readers needed reassurance that the Australian colonies were no longer only depots for English felons but desirable places to settle.45 The convicts needed to be portrayed as having died, returned to England, or reformed into respectable or even rich prospective neighbors and citizens for Australia to seem like an appealing place for emigrants to resettle.46
Of course, some of the convict narratives published after 1850 featured convicts, like Abel Magwitch, who still felt themselves to be English and whose greatest desire was to return to their native country.47 However, other material about transported convicts portrayed them as finding a home in Australia. By at least the 1840s, fictional convicts, as well as free settlers, were taking pride in Australia as their homeland. Thus, the novels and other types of writing that featured Australian convicts had two functions: they helped reinforce a notion of Englishness by its difference from convict-ridden Australia, but they also began to construct a positive sense of Australianness, including its former convicts, as distinct from England and the English. This feeling of Australianness was only embryonic at first; even many children born in Australia who had never been to England referred to the mother country as “home.” Nonetheless, the idea that Australia could be its own homeplace did gradually take root, and popular novels and other narratives about transported convicts played a role in this change. In fact, narratives written and published in England held out the promise of a new Australian identity before this was actively imagined in Australia; initially it was England that most needed this new identity for its unwanted subjects. Yet the books published in England were also read in Australia, and Australians, too, began to be proud of their own identity.
Although historically the transported convicts were overwhelmingly male, outnumbering women six to one, in the literature the issue of gender was crucial in forming both English and Australian national identities that included social class as a key component. Gender is relevant to this project in several ways. One is that although women were relatively few in number historically, there are several important literary representations of transported female convicts. Like their male counterparts, they faced the threat of losing their Englishness and their place in the English class system when they were exiled to Australia. However, since female convicts were usually portrayed as fallen sexually, their place in the English social system was even more complicated than for male convicts, though Australian society was somewhat more forgiving, especially for working-class women. Another way that gender is important both historically and literarily is that women are crucial for creating families, which were seen by authorities from the very early days to be the surest
