Convict Lives

The significant role that the largely unknown men and women who were sent to Australia in the eighty years from 1788-1868 have played in defining Australia’s national identity has long been a fascination for both historians and the wider Australian public. While Australia’s colonial obsession with its international image meant that convicts were for a long time resented, in recent years a convict ancestor has become something to be celebrated. Yet the nature of those transported here and the impact of their identities on our nation remains a controversial issue.

Convicts being put to work under the close guard of British soldiers. [Source: http://www.smh.com.au/ffximage/2007/07/25/convict2_wideweb__470x295,0.jpg]

Historian Manning Clark argues that convicts were members of a ‘professional criminal class’, a hypothesis sympathetic to the contemporary views of the period that created such intense anxiety of a ‘birth stain’ amongst Australian colonists for decades. Clark draws upon the informed opinion of the eighteenth and nineteenth century, which associated theft with a criminal class and saw it as arising not from unavoidable want or destitution but  instead from a temptation for property obtained without enduring the hardships of labour. He asserts that George Arnold Wood’s notion of convicts as ‘more sinned against than sinning’ ignores crucial facts in favour of upholding nationalist sentiment.

However, whilst this perhaps explains the actions of later convicts who arrived at a time when crimes that were previously capital offences were now largely commuted to transportation, others would argue that the conditions of social inequality and injustice within the British legal system were indeed responsible for many of the convicts’ crimes. This is particularly the case in the early years of the penal colony. For example, the women aboard the Pyramus, which sailed in 1836, were almost exclusively working-class Irishwomen convicted of various forms of theft. The fact that people in these circumstances were predisposed to conditions of social inequality and injustice within the British legal system, while not ruling out that some of the convicts amongst their number had acted specifically for their own ends, does suggest that social circumstances did account for the actions of many transported to Australia.