Essay Australia

British policy in the colonisation of Australia

For a long time, Britain was facing a problem of overcrowded prisons. The initial idea of transporting criminals overseas lay in law of 1597, "An Acte for Punyshment of Rogues, Vagabonds and Sturdy Beggars" and they began to be shipped to the New World. By 1775, England has shipped almost 50.000 convicts to America where they usually worked as servants on tobacco plantations. Tired of England deporting unwanted criminals to America, Benjamin Franklin suggested sending rattlesnakes to England in return, and many colonial leaders would agree with him.

Beginnings of the transports
After America declared independence, a new solution had to be found. Lots of prisoners were kept in "the Hulks", old naval transport vessels that were anchoring and rotting in various southern naval ports. But security and disease became serious issues. Because those vessels were largely uninhabitable, Britain needed to find a new place to relocate the prisoners.
After James Cook found Botany Bay in 1770 and Britain claimed Australia as a new colony, they made use of the opportunity and decided to set new penal colonies there. 17 years later, 775 convicts banished from Britain and 645 others (families, crew and officials) were sent on 11 ships to Australia. They set sail on 13th May and landed in Botany Bay on 20th January, which means that they had to survive for almost 9 months on board of crowded ships in insufficient living conditions.
The convicts were chained beneath the deck during the entire voyage. Nearly 10 percent of the prisoners died, which was still a remarkably good rate, because on later trips, up to a third of the convicts died before they arrived to Australia.
After reaching Botany Bay, the officials found out it was not a good place to stay, so the prisoners were relocated to Port Jackson. This new colony set up on 26th January 1778 became known as New South Wales and this day later became known as Australia Day.
In 1790 and 1791 arrived two more convict fleets, in 1793 arrived the first free settlers. Between 1788 and 1823, New South Wales was officially a penal colony, consisting mainly of convicts, soldiers, and their wives. By the 1850s, they were also being sent directly to places as Norfolk Island, Van Diemen's Land, Port Macquarie, and Moreton Bay.

Setting up colonies and prisons
In the first years, convicts typically served their sentence building roads, bridges, and buildings for free settlers. Governor Philip founded an organised system of labour: People, whatever crime they committed, were employed according to their skills. For example as carpenters, brick makers, nurses, servants, cattlemen, shepherds, or farmers. Those who were educated were able to get much easier work, such as record-keeping and administration of the convicts. This procedure had a positive impact on effectivity of the workers.
Almost 20 % of the passengers of the first fleets were women. One of the British goals in Australia was to populate the country. Women were assumed to be most useful as wives and mothers, and if a woman married, she was legally freed from her servitude.
After 1810, the British government started to see the transported convicts even less as criminals who had to be kept behind the bars, and more as a source of labour to advance and develop the British colonies. Convicts were working on development of the public facilities in Australia, such as roads, causeways, bridges, courthouses, and hospitals. They were also working for free settlers and small farmers. Even more of them were assigned to private employers in the 1820s and 1830s to do rural labour, and this gradually became the major form of employment.
For the first decades, the colonies' population consisted mainly of convicts, but by 1821 the number of freed convicts was growing and they were gradually being appointed to positions of trust, gaining responsibility, and being granted land. In the mid-1930s, only around 6 % of the convict population were locked in prisons. They were mostly working for free settlers and the authorities. 3

Terra nullius
According to British "invaders", the continent's aboriginal inhabitants had no conception of property or of owning the land they inhabited. The colonists soon proclaimed the legal doctrine of terra nullius, as if the Aboriginals did not even exist. It is surprising and disturbing that this attitude was not overturned until 1992, when the High Court made a decision in the Eddie Mabo land right case.
Life of convicts was tough. They had to work very hard, often 12 to 14, somewhere even 18 hours a day. Their discipline was also harsh. Those who committed further offences in the colony had to face brutal punishments, for example fifty lashes or time on the chain gangs (making new roads, shackled in ankle irons or chains weighing ten pounds or more). If they continued to cause trouble, they were sent to more isolated penal colonies or prisons, for example Norfolk Island, or Port Macquarie, where they were forced to work from dawn to dusk. The conditions were so harsh that rebellions and uprising were quite regular.
Convicts who attempted to escape were sent Norfolk Island, 600 miles east of Australia, where the conditions were even more inhumane. The only hope of escape "game" in which groups of three prisoners drew straws. The short straw was killed as painlessly as possible and a judge was then shipped in to put the other two on trial, one playing the role of killer, the other as witness.
On the other side, well behaved prisoners could be freed from the rest of their sentence, and even apply to have their families brought from England. In some cases they could be also assigned to work for their free newly-settled families.

System of pardons
Positive motivation proved to be often more successful than punishment, therefore Britain introduced a policy that enabled convicts to be freed after serving their sentence, or a certain part of it: Convicts who were given a "Ticket of Leave" could work, be self-employed, own land, and live within a given district before their sentence expired. They also needed to have served a portion of their sentence (4 years for 7-year terms, 6 years for 14-year terms, and 8 years for lifers).
"Conditional Pardons" freed convicts, but they were granted on the condition that the former prisoner did not return to England or Ireland. "Absolute Pardons" totally cleared the convicts' sentences, and also allowed them to return to Britain, and "Certificates of Freedom" were issued to convicts who completed their sentence and could return home or start a new life as a free person in Australia.

Criminals returning home
The British government did not make it easy for the criminals to come back home. If someone managed to escape from prison, still a lot of problems lay ahead of him or her. The merchants and ship owners were prohibited from helping any convict to return to Britain. However, there were some ships, willing to take passengers who had enough money to buy their passage back to Britain, or were willing to work on board the ship as a compensation. Any convict returning to Britain had to remain in hiding. If caught, he or she could automatically receive the death penalty, and the reward offered by the government for identifying and turning in a convict who returned too early was significant, about 40. Given all these conditions, it is not surprising that the numbers of transported convicts returning to Britain were quite low.
Convicts who managed to escape or found freedom after their ship encountered problems at sea through shipwreck, piracy, or mutiny before they could be sold would not have had advertisements run in colonial newspapers for their capture, and these early escapees were more likely to return to England. Another reason convicts caught returning to England did not show up in runaway ads could be that returned convicts were either skilful in avoiding detection or the methods of detecting them were in reality inadequate.

Reasons for transporting convicts
The upper classes in the 18th and 19th century England believed that criminals were fundamentally defective and could not be rehabilitated, therefore they needed to be separated from the good and law-abiding citizens. Prisons were too expensive to maintain, and so the lawbreakers had to be either executed or exiled.
Most of the convicts were transported from England and Wales (about 70 %), 24 % from Ireland, 5 % from Scotland, but the rest of them came from various other cultures, such as British outposts in India and Canada, Maoris from New Zealand, Chinese from Hong Kong, and Caribbean slaves.
Surprisingly, only a small minority were transported for violent offenses. Most of them were thieves caught in the big English cities. Those sentenced in Ireland were more likely to have been convicted of rural crimes.
Transportation of prisoners became a basic part of the system of punishment in England and Ireland. It was a very effective way of dealing with rising poverty and sentences for larceny. For a simple theft or robbery, a person could be transported for seven years. Compound larceny, which meant stealing goods worth more than a shilling (about $50 nowadays) was punished by death by hanging.
Men were still prevailing in the Australian society, so they had usually been before the courts for a few times before they were transported, while women were more likely to be transported after a first crime. For example, among the first group was a 70-year-old woman who had stolen cheese to eat. Some of the transported were children, some did little more than steal a bag of sugar, some were political prisoners and some were falsely accused.

Most common convicts' crimes
Today, 22 % of Australians are descended from British exiles who served their sentence and remained in Australia. The British government found then transportation a just punishment for various crimes from marrying secretly to burning clothes. Larceny and burglary described the vast majority of crimes, but people were transported also for deeds as obtaining money by false pretences, stealing heifers, privately stealing in a shop, etc.
The convict records usually contained convict's name, date and place of sentencing, length of sentence, which was mostly 7 years, 14 years, or life, and the crime they committed. In comparison to today's standards, many of the crimes are only minor misdemeanours, or are no longer illegal. Many of the crimes were committed by very poor people trying to survive in complicated living conditions, so the sentences seem to be exaggerated nowadays.

The end of the transports
On 1st October 1850, transportation to New South Wales was officially abolished, and in 1853 the order to abolish transportation to other colonies was formally announced. Convicts in South Australia and the Northern Territory were never accepted from England, but they were transferred from other States. After being given limited freedom, many convicts were allowed to travel as far as New Zealand to make a fresh start, even if they were not allowed to return home to England.
Only a small part of the convict population was actually locked up in jail, many people believed that transportation to Australia was an inappropriate punishment which was too harsh and did not deliver "a just measure of pain" for the crimes committed. Moreover, the Australia's rising population needed employment, and Church constantly protested against those procedures, therefore the transports were finally abolished.
During the 80 years, more than 160,000 convicts were transported to Australia. At that time, convicts made up 40 % of Australia's English-speaking population. Today, 22 % of Australians are their descendants. Webs ancestry.com.au and members.iinet.net.au enable current citizens of Australia to find information and stories about their transported ancestors.
It is hard to decide whether this forced mass emigration was primarily caused by British need to get rid of all the criminals endangering their society, by their effort to deal with rising poverty, or their fear that some parts of Australia could be taken by other countries before Britain.
Without the penal colonies, they Britons would be hardly able to colonise Australia so quickly. Extreme weather, unknown environment, long dry seasons, dangerous animals, long distance from Britain, not very safe and comfortable transport… those were one of the main reasons why very few free citizens wanted to move to Australia and start a new life there.

Competition between European colonial countries
French colonisation worried Britain, although it was not so successful. Their navy annexed the Marquesas in 1841, Tahiti the next year, and New Caledonia ten years later. Although those colonies depended on Australian supplies, Australian and French settlers began to compete for resources and each became anxious about the others' ambitions. Another problem was the expansion of German commerce based in Samoa. Both German and Australian trading firms recruited labour in New Guinea, which caused clashed between those countries.
It is interesting that the British government was able to create an effective and highly organised system for judging, transporting, and supervising prisoners, which required a lot of time, financial resources, and people involved, but they took much more time to invent a more effective system of dealing with criminals in their own country. The "Ticket of Leave" licences were initially introduced to save money, but later they became a basic part of the convict system which later provided a model for system of probation for prisoners in Great Britain.



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Ludmila Štěpánová
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2AJ502




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