history is what happened to the convicts themselves — transportation, before it became greatly systematised, gave them a chance to step out of the vicious poverty cycle that many of the urbanised lower orders were doomed to in Britain. In the early years of the new colony, the emphasis was never on punishment or misery. Men and women were frequently given freedom before their terms expired, chiefly as a money-saving measure — if they had the talent or skill to earn their own living, then make them free as soon as possible and get them off the government store and ration books.
In the first few years of settlement in Australia, convicts had about half of their working hours free to themselves. If a convict was assigned to daily task work, that meant no work after lunchtime, even if it spent the whole morning raining. If it was weekly task work, then a convict was generally free by about Thursday. A far cry from work conditions at this time in Britain (minors being sent to work, long working hours, poor conditions, exploitation, and so on).
Convicts were clothed, fed and housed at the expense of the government. Their masters tended to be people exactly like them — ex-convicts who had been granted land along with their freedom and had now been given convict labourers as well. The convicts would often live in the same hut as the family. These masters weren’t just owners of convict labour, weren’t only employers of convicts in their free time, but could be business partners as well: They would frequently offer profit-sharing schemes with the convicts they had living and working for them.
If you are looking for scenes of absolute squalor in this early period, you have to look quite selectively. Yes, plenty of floggings were dished out — for drunkenness, desertion of labour and being generally at large, and stealing — and hangings (like in Britain) remained frequent. But this doesn’t make NSW a place of misery. This makes it normal in the context of the period. Flogging took place everywhere — on ships, in schoolrooms and yards, with apprentices and servants in workplaces — with the Georgian age’s attitude towards corporal punishment being vastly different to most attitudes today.
For those trying to carve out a life on a farm, the conditions were no joke: Small land grants covered in bush and scrub had to be cleared; the soil was often of low fertility, and subject to the vagaries of a new climate — not to mention the often extortionate prices being charged for supplies by various traders and retailers. All of this added to the hardship of living in a frontier environment. Many preferred to sell up and move back into Sydney town (where demand for labour was high and the pay good) and get work there. But some stuck with their land grants, picked up more land, and used their allocated convict labour to run livestock and grow cash crops. Slowly the criminal class that had arrived en masse from Britain were becoming settlers in a new country.
NSW in the early years, then, was a place of casual brutality, squalor and frontier hardship, yet simultaneously a place of remarkable and unprecedented opportunity for the outcasts and criminal ‘refuse’ who were sent here. The colony turned out to be an unexpected jackpot for many convicts, far better than anything they could have reasonably expected if they’d remained in the Britain they knew — either locked in a rural yet landless poverty or the London underclass.
Setting up trading monopolies
When planning the new colony in NSW, the British Government had completely failed to provide it with any coinage or currency, expecting (vaguely) that after a year everyone would be self-sufficient, with the convicts growing enough to meet everyone’s needs.
When this failed to happen, ship captains realised that they had a wonderful captive market in NSW — an isolated outpost dependent on imports to survive. They started arriving with much needed goods but charging prohibitively extortionate prices. While convicts and soldiers could scrape together some money, the officers in the NSW Corps, paid in British pounds sterling, were the only ones who could bargain the ships’ captains down, purchasing an entire ship’s consignment at reduced prices. So they did, but then started charging their own extortionate prices through their convict and common soldier middlemen.
What had originally begun as a meeting of opportunity and necessity, quickly turned into a trade monopoly.
The ascendancy of the ‘Rum Corps’
As head of the NSW Corps, Major Grose started giving land grants to officers, and to emancipists (the ex-convicts) and the few free settlers who were turning up here and there. Suddenly, the gears of the colony shifted. Not only did the new farmers start clearing and growing and reaping and rearing with new energy, but the convict labourers who were assigned to them were also launching themselves into the task with gusto.
Suddenly convicts were working incredibly hard, often putting in overtime to get tasks done. Not having had much chance to get alcohol since they’d left London, now they went after it with a zest that was almost awe-inspiring. One observer who saw it (David Collins, the future founding governor of Van Diemen’s Land) said that ‘the passion for liquor was so predominant among the people that it operated like a mania’.
The convicts kept coming from Britain, so the NSW Corps officers also had a great number of convicts to use. Grose and the Inspector of Public Works, John Macarthur, ensured that the officers were given about ten convicts each. The Home Office wrote to Grose, specifically instructing him that the government would pay for only two convicts per officer for a period of two years, adding that spirits not be sold to convicts (word had started getting back). But the convicts would drink, and alcohol was one of the biggest motivators that had been found to get them to work. So Grose completely ignored these instructions. And a certain degree of chaotic and riotous abandonment ensured.
With proper order and proper morality largely ignored in favour of what you could call a culture of highly productive alcoholism, the colony was no longer an economic basket case, limping along at or below subsistence level. The colony had taken off like a rocket, and was starting to make a lot of people a lot of money very quickly — but not everyone was happy with the trajectory of the rocket.
Upsetting the reverends
Word was beginning to get back to London: NSW was no place of punishment, and was out of control, said the alarmed reports. Many of the reports were written by furious Evangelicals — religious Anglican ministers (such as Reverend Johnson and