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 New South Wales, the treatment of convicts and the way they were employed changed 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