Australian prisoners/convicts played a pivotal role in the early history of the colonization and European settlement of Australia in the late eighteenth century and throughout the first half of the nineteenth century. During the eighty years between the arrival of the First Fleet to Botany Bay in 1788 and the last prisoner ship in 1768 approximately 162,000 convicts arrived to Australia from Britain and Ireland, where they were sent to either the New South Wales colony around Sydney, the Van Diemen’s Land prison colony on Tasmania and then from the 1820s either the Queensland colony or the Swan River Colony in Western Australia in what is now Perth. The makeup of this mass of individuals was varied. An unusually large amount (roughly 24%) came from Ireland and many were sent to Australia for little more than acts of petty theft, particularly so during the 1840s when the Great Famine in Ireland led to many people having to steal to survive. After several years of providing free labor most won their liberty and made important contributions to the history of British Australia.[1]
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Australian convicts chronology of events
The early history of Australia as a theater of European colonization was shaped by the penal colonies. The famous First Fleet of 1788, which began the British colonial presence, was a prisoner fleet with nearly 800 of the just under 1,400 people who arrived to New South Wales on it being convicts from Britain and Ireland. This was also the case with the Second and Third Fleets that arrived in 1790 and 1791. The initial project was deemed to have worked and in the early nineteenth century the prison ships continued to arrive, so much so that in 1803 a second penal colony was established on Van Diemen’s Land, modern-day Tasmania.[2]
The profiles of the convicts sent to Australia during this time differed greatly. Approximately 85% were male and 15% or some 25,000 were women.[3] It should be noted here that the concept of teenagerhood is a very modern notion and in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries these ‘adult’ convicts included people as young as fourteen or fifteen who were shipped to the other side of the world often for having committed quite moderate offences. In Australia, whether one was young or old, male or female, could determine what they ended up doing. The convicts were often not placed in prisons, but were effectively bonded laborers kept under loose observation and made to work either as hard laborers, if you were a young man, or as domestic servant, especially if you were female, while people with particular skills were put to work at what they were good at.[4]
It was fairly easy to escape if a person wanted to, but the penal colonies operated on the basis that if you tried to there was little place to go. You could try to carve out a life with the Aboriginals that you probably wouldn’t be able to communicate with, or set yourself up as a ‘bushranger’ outlaw living in the bush or the Outback and robbing from the colonies, but there were few good options. Unsurprisingly, most served out their seven or fourteen years of transportation labor, depending on whether they had committed a minor crime or a capital offence, and then became civilians living in the colonies. However, repeat or violent offenders were sent from the mid-1820s onwards to the Port Arthur colony on Tasmania, a particularly brutal prison system.[5]
There were many former convicts who went on to live prosperous and upstanding lives in Australia after their terms as convicts had been served. One was Mary Reibey, née Haydock. Orphaned in Lancashire in England in the late 1780s, she was arrested and convicted of stealing a horse in 1791 when she was just fourteen years old. She was sent to Australia in 1792 and served seven years as a convict there. Afterwards she married Thomas Reibey and they started numerous businesses together, while Mary effectively opened her home as an orphanage. By the 1820s she had been successful enough in New South Wales that she was able to become a philanthropist who became known for her charity and work with the local church. Today her image is featured on $20 Australian notes.[6] But there was the other side of the convicts as well, those who became outlaws known as bushrangers; figures like Frederick Wordsworth Ward, known by the pseudonym Captain Thunderbolt.[7]
Extent of migration involving Australian convicts
The arrival of prisoners and convicts to Australia and Tasmania peaked during the 1820s, 1830s and 1840s. For instance, in 1833 alone, the very peak of the process, 7,000 convicts were brought to Australia. By then the New South Wales colony around Sydney and its hinterland had reached such a stage of development that it was being phased out as a penal colony in favor of sending prisoners to new penal colonies in Queensland and Western Australia. The last major period of the convict arrivals came in the 1840s when the Great Famine struck Ireland, leading to widespread petty crime as starving Irish people stole from their landlords, even as the British government shipped Irish foodstuffs overseas to sell in Europe and North America.[8] The British government phased-out the sending of prisoners to Australia from the late 1840s as new methods of punishing crime were developed and the modern prison system began to emerge in Britain and Ireland. The last convict ship, the Hougoumont carrying 269 prisoners, arrived to Western Australia in 1868. By then 162,000 convicts had been sent to Australia.[9]
Demographic impact of Australian convicts
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Although 162,000 prisoners might seem like a modest figure in terms of the 25 million plus population of Australia today, these 162,000 formed the basis of much of the colony’s early population and natural increase over time, as well as intermarriage between people who came to Australia as civilians and people who were sent as convicts, has insured that an estimated 20% or five million Australians are descended from the convicts today.[10]
The cultural and demographic impact is greater still. The cities of Sydney, Hobart, Brisbane and Perth, for example, were all established initially as penal colonies, Sydney being the central settlement of the New South Wales colony built by the convicts from 1788 onwards; Hobart in Tasmania was the first major settlement established in the penal colony of Van Diemen’s Land; Brisbane was the center of the Queensland penal colony; and Perth was originally the Swan River penal colony. Eleven major buildings and sites in Australia and Tasmania have been classed as UNESCO World Heritage sites on account of their being intrinsically connected to Australia’s early history as a penal colony - sites such as Old Government House in Sydney, built with convict labor during the first fifteen years of colonial rule. Hence, the visitor to Australia today is often walking through a land that, initially at least, was built by convicts from Britain and Ireland.[11]
See also
Explore more about Australian Convicts
- Australia, New South Wales Convicts Index, 1791-1873 record collection on MyHeritage
- Australia, New South Wales Birth Index, 1787-1916 record collection on MyHeritage
- Australia, New South Wales Death Index, 1787-1986 record collection on MyHeritage
- Settlers, Squatters and Selectors: Land ownership in Australia, 1788-1900 at Legacy Family Tree Webinars
- A Cargo of Criminals: Transportation to Australia at Legacy Family Tree Webinars
- Researching in Australian Archives at Legacy Family Tree Webinars
- Exploring Irish Genealogy in the Aftermath of the Great Potato Famine at the MyHeritage blog
References
- ↑ https://www.digitalpanopticon.org/Convicts_and_the_Colonisation_of_Australia,_1788-1868
- ↑ https://www.migrationheritage.nsw.gov.au/exhibition/objectsthroughtime-history/1790-1830/index.html
- ↑ https://www.australiangeographic.com.au/topics/history-culture/2018/06/the-founding-mothers-the-little-known-story-of-australias-convict-women/
- ↑ https://sites.udel.edu/britlitwiki/the-victorians-and-australian-penal-colonies/
- ↑ https://www.abc.net.au/education/life-as-a-male-convict-port-arthur-and-walter-paisley/13863434
- ↑ https://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/reibey-mary-2583
- ↑ https://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/ward-frederick-fred-4801
- ↑ https://breac.nd.edu/articles/remembering-and-commemorating-the-great-famine-and-emigration-to-australia/
- ↑ https://www.nma.gov.au/defining-moments/resources/convict-transportation
- ↑ https://www.migrationmuseum.org/were-your-ancestors-transported-to-australia-as-convicts/
- ↑ https://whc.unesco.org/en/list/1306/