tag:theconversation.com,2011:/ca/topics/convicts-17666/articlesConvicts – The Conversation2023-07-06T20:21:23Ztag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2085962023-07-06T20:21:23Z2023-07-06T20:21:23ZFriday essay: we knew we were Bundjalung – but I was shocked to discover a pardoned convict slave trader among my ancestors<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/535722/original/file-20230705-23-3ss8n5.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C0%2C4000%2C2000&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption"></span> <span class="attribution"><span class="license">Author provided</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>We’re a superstitious mob, but I don’t think it’s an exclusively Aboriginal reaction to instantly think <em>Who’s died?</em> when the phone unexpectedly rings late at night. </p>
<p>That night in 2008, my trepidation rose quickly when I heard it was my Uncle Gerry from Sydney who was on the line. But instead of sounding mournful, he sounded strangely … incredulous. </p>
<blockquote>
<p>I’ve just been on the phone with a Bostock woman, a “white” Bostock woman from A.J.’s side of the family. You won’t believe what she told me about the white side of the family!</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Immediately I knew he was referring to Augustus John Bostock, my non-Indigenous great-great-grandfather, whom Uncle Gerry had long ago nicknamed “AJ”. Uncle Gerry explained the elderly caller’s name was Thelma Birrell, but her family name, like ours, was Bostock. </p>
<p>He told me Thelma was an avid genealogist who had been researching the Bostock family tree for over 30 years. She told him she knew of her family’s rumour that her great-grandfather’s cousin, Augustus John Bostock, had taken up with an Aboriginal woman in the 1800s, but she didn’t know if there were any descendants from that union.</p>
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<p>
<em>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/he-was-horrific-nearly-two-thirds-of-family-historians-are-distressed-by-what-they-find-should-dna-kits-come-with-warnings-207430">'He was horrific!': Nearly two thirds of family historians are distressed by what they find – should DNA kits come with warnings?</a>
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<h2>‘They were slave traders!’</h2>
<p>Incredibly, after seeing <a href="https://www.fnawn.com.au/members/gerry-bostock-1942-2014/">Uncle Gerry</a>’s photograph online, an obviously Aboriginal man with the Bostock family name, she somehow tracked him down. Uncle Gerry was a writer and film producer who participated in the political struggle surrounding the Aboriginal Embassy in Canberra and helped establish the Black Theatre in Sydney. In their long conversation, Thelma told him she had traced the Bostock family line back to the 1600s in England.</p>
<p>“Guess who our white ancestors were?” Chuckling to himself, Uncle deliberately paused for dramatic effect before he blurted out: “They were slave traders! A couple of generations of slave traders! Can you believe it? Imagine that!” </p>
<p>A deep, loud belly laugh erupted down the line, and he snorted as he added, “Those white ancestors of ours must be rolling in their graves knowing we turned out to be a mob of blackfellas!”</p>
<p>Up until that time, Augustus John Bostock was known to us only as “the whitefella who gave us our family name”, but on hearing this new information about his family history, a burning desire to find out more was suddenly ignited in me. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/535298/original/file-20230703-257464-edbjvx.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/535298/original/file-20230703-257464-edbjvx.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/535298/original/file-20230703-257464-edbjvx.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=457&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/535298/original/file-20230703-257464-edbjvx.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=457&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/535298/original/file-20230703-257464-edbjvx.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=457&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/535298/original/file-20230703-257464-edbjvx.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=574&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/535298/original/file-20230703-257464-edbjvx.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=574&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/535298/original/file-20230703-257464-edbjvx.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=574&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">A late night phone call sparked Shauna Bostock’s desire to learn more about her family history.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="license">Author provided</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Thelma had given Uncle Gerry her phone number, and I was surprised to find she lived only a little over an hour’s drive away from me on the Sunshine Coast. When I rang Thelma we chatted easily on the phone. And by the end of the call, she kindly invited me to come and visit her next time I was up that way.</p>
<p>Thelma was a lovely elderly lady who, years earlier with her husband Matthew, had travelled to England and to Australia’s southern states many times to collect her treasure trove of historical, archival and church records. </p>
<p>We spoke on the phone many times, and I enjoyed my face-to-face meetings with her over several cups of tea and delicious sweet treats. She was thrilled that I was interested in her work, and so proud to gift me a copy of her self-published book <a href="https://books.google.com.au/books/about/Mariners_Merchants_Then_Pioneers.html?id=SdIOtwAACAAJ&redir_esc=y">Merchants, Mariners … then Pioneers</a>.</p>
<p>Thelma thoroughly enjoyed telling me all about the history of the non-Indigenous Bostock family prior to Augustus John’s birth. </p>
<p>She had been able to trace the Bostocks back to an ironmonger called Jonathan Bostock who lived in Chester in late 17th-century England. Jonathan Bostock was the father of Peter, Peter was the father of Robert, and Robert Snr was the father of Robert Jnr. The two “Roberts” were the slave traders.</p>
<p>Thelma explained that after slave trading was abolished, the British government arrested Robert Bostock Jnr and his business partner John McQueen, and sentenced them to “transportation” to the colony for 14 years. </p>
<p>She was quick to tell me that not long after they arrived here, “Governor Lachlan Macquarie pardoned them”. I had never heard of “pardons from the Governor” in Australian history, until Thelma showed me her transcription of the colonial secretary’s documents, in which the last sentence of the pardon declared:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>By virtue of the power and authority Given and Granted unto me the Governor in Chief of the said Territory of New South Wales under such Warrant and conformally to the tenor thereof I do hereby order and direct that Robert Bostock therein named be forthwith discharged out of custody accordingly and he is hereby […] restored to all rights and privileges of a free subject. Signed, L. Macquarie, 1st January 1816.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Confused by the pardon, I remember asking Thelma for confirmation. “But Robert Bostock really was a slave trader, right?” She patted my hand and answered in a hushed voice, “Ooh yes, he was a very naughty boy.” </p>
<p>Silently, Thelma handed me the pretty floral matching teacup and saucer and busied herself pouring us more tea. Then once seated, she enthusiastically told me tales of Robert Bostock’s exploits after he arrived in Australia – about how he became an excellent merchant in Sydney, married a beautiful maiden, then moved to Van Diemen’s Land and expanded his business interests in Hobart, became a very wealthy landowner and lived in a grand mansion.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/535300/original/file-20230703-274753-azdorj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/535300/original/file-20230703-274753-azdorj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/535300/original/file-20230703-274753-azdorj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=373&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/535300/original/file-20230703-274753-azdorj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=373&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/535300/original/file-20230703-274753-azdorj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=373&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/535300/original/file-20230703-274753-azdorj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=468&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/535300/original/file-20230703-274753-azdorj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=468&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/535300/original/file-20230703-274753-azdorj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=468&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Pardoned slave trader Robert Bostock became a wealthy landowner in Hobart.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Wikimedia Commons</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Most precious to Thelma were the stories about his children, who left Van Diemen’s Land and settled in southern Victoria. She was so proud of the white Bostocks’ narrative of dashing pioneers and nation-building settlers – but I wanted to pause the story and go back to understand more about the two “Roberts” who were slave traders. </p>
<p>I had so many questions, but her reluctance to discuss them was palpable. </p>
<p>In her book, she explained that even though Robert Snr had a number of ships and was successful to some degree, he was regarded as a small operator. Thelma wrote that “he exhorted his captains to treat the slaves well at all times” and she pointed out that “Robert [Snr] died 20 years before slave trading was actually abolished”, and that “trading in slaves continued up to the 1860s in different parts of the world”.</p>
<h2>Befriending a slave-trade historian</h2>
<p>Thelma’s writing moved on to present her outstanding genealogical research, and her proud narrative of the pioneering lives of the non-Indigenous Bostocks. </p>
<p>After the initial excitement of finding Uncle Gerry and connecting with me over cups of tea, Thelma and I continued to chat on the phone every now and then, but unfortunately a year or so later contact between us gradually faded away. </p>
<p>But before we lost touch, she introduced me to the <a href="https://theconversation.com/from-the-caribbean-to-queensland-re-examining-australias-blackbirding-past-and-its-roots-in-the-global-slave-trade-158530">slave-trade historian Emma Christopher</a>.</p>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/535455/original/file-20230704-27-eqh5ac.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/535455/original/file-20230704-27-eqh5ac.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/535455/original/file-20230704-27-eqh5ac.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=904&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/535455/original/file-20230704-27-eqh5ac.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=904&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/535455/original/file-20230704-27-eqh5ac.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=904&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/535455/original/file-20230704-27-eqh5ac.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1136&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/535455/original/file-20230704-27-eqh5ac.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1136&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/535455/original/file-20230704-27-eqh5ac.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1136&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption"></span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Emma Christopher's book includes the story of the Bostock slave traders</span></span>
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<p>Emma’s field of expertise is the <a href="https://theconversation.com/african-leaders-in-sierra-leone-played-a-key-role-in-ending-the-transatlantic-slave-trade-207382">transatlantic slave trade</a>, <a href="https://theconversation.com/from-the-caribbean-to-queensland-re-examining-australias-blackbirding-past-and-its-roots-in-the-global-slave-trade-158530">Pacific Islander labour</a>, West African and historical slavery, and <a href="https://theconversation.com/behind-the-boko-haram-headlines-slavery-in-africa-is-the-real-crisis-26379">modern slavery</a>. When a fellow historian told her that a mansion built by a convict transported for slave trading still existed in Tasmania, Emma was astonished. After years of extensive research, she had never heard of any slave traders in Australia.</p>
<p>Her response was like mine: she was gripped by the need to know more about the two Roberts. As the Australian expert on Bostock genealogies, Thelma was a major contributor to a website for Bostock descendants all over the world, and that is how Emma found her.</p>
<p>Being a spiritual person, I paid close attention to the intriguing way we all connected with each other. Seemingly out of the blue, Thelma found Uncle Gerry on the internet, then Uncle Gerry contacted me, and this led to my contact with Thelma. Emma was told about Robert Bostock, then found Thelma on the internet, and this led to her contact with me. My intuition was telling me this synchronicity was somehow orchestrated, that it was all part of God’s plan that I met Thelma and Emma.</p>
<p>Back then, I was focused on filling in the gaps in my family tree chart and finding out how Robert was related to my great-great-grandfather, <a href="https://oa.anu.edu.au/obituary/bostock-john-augustus-135">Augustus John Bostock</a>, whereas Emma, an established PhD historian and a published author, wanted to know all about the global legacy of the transatlantic slave trade. </p>
<p>Despite our contrasting levels of academic knowledge at that time, our common interest in the history of the Bostocks quickly led to us becoming good friends. She helped me to see how interesting history can be when you push through the surface level and delve more deeply.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/from-the-caribbean-to-queensland-re-examining-australias-blackbirding-past-and-its-roots-in-the-global-slave-trade-158530">From the Caribbean to Queensland: re-examining Australia's 'blackbirding' past and its roots in the global slave trade</a>
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<hr>
<h2>‘I feel numb about it’</h2>
<p>When Emma and I met, she was compiling research for a book about Robert Bostock Jnr and his business partner John McQueen, who were the only two convicted slave traders to have ever been transported to Australia. Emma was surprised when Thelma told her about the Aboriginal branches of the Bostock family. </p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/535449/original/file-20230704-17-gd7xns.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/535449/original/file-20230704-17-gd7xns.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/535449/original/file-20230704-17-gd7xns.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=771&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/535449/original/file-20230704-17-gd7xns.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=771&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/535449/original/file-20230704-17-gd7xns.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=771&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/535449/original/file-20230704-17-gd7xns.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=969&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/535449/original/file-20230704-17-gd7xns.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=969&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/535449/original/file-20230704-17-gd7xns.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=969&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Uncle Gerry (left) with George Bostock, 1961.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="license">Author provided</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>I say the plural “branches” because George Bostock, the cousin of my great-great-grandfather Augustus John Bostock, lived in the Northern Territory of Australia and had children with a Jingili woman, who, in the historical record, was only recorded as “unknown F/B” (“F/B” meaning “full-blood”; a child with traditional Aboriginal parents). So, it turned out that my family are not the only Indigenous descendants of Robert Bostock.</p>
<p>In 2018, Emma’s book <a href="https://academic.oup.com/ahr/article-abstract/125/1/204/5721711?redirectedFrom=fulltext">Freedom in Black and White: A lost story of the illegal slave trade and its global legacy</a> was published. It is a meticulous examination of the lives of the two Roberts, their tragic human merchandise and their captive African workers. As with Thelma’s book, I devoured every word. </p>
<p>The fates of the African captives who worked for Robert Bostock Jnr, and his Aboriginal descendants, are essential to Emma’s final discussion on the global legacy of the transatlantic slave trade.</p>
<p>Out of the blue, Emma said, “It must be a shock to be an Aboriginal Australian, a woman of colour, and find out that your ancestors were slave traders.” After what seemed like an excruciatingly long time, I realised I simply did not have the words to describe how I felt. Frowning, I lamely said, “I don’t know what to say … I feel numb about it – I just wish I had better words to say.”</p>
<p>That was over 12 years ago. After advancing my education, and undertaking intense study and archival research, it is only now that I am in the position to be able to present my research and provide answers to complex questions such as the one Emma posed.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/535301/original/file-20230703-187037-sofqxh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/535301/original/file-20230703-187037-sofqxh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/535301/original/file-20230703-187037-sofqxh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=471&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/535301/original/file-20230703-187037-sofqxh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=471&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/535301/original/file-20230703-187037-sofqxh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=471&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/535301/original/file-20230703-187037-sofqxh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=592&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/535301/original/file-20230703-187037-sofqxh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=592&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/535301/original/file-20230703-187037-sofqxh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=592&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">This group photograph (circa 1920) of the people who lived at Box Ridge Aborigines Reserve includes the author’s great-grandmother Mabel Yuke, and other extended family.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="license">Author provided</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>At the beginning of my research journey, I imagined my future book would be exclusively limited to my Aboriginal family history and would not include any of the non-Indigenous side of the family. </p>
<p>It was only when I was completing my PhD, and had read Emma’s extraordinary book, that I realised how integral my slave-trading ancestors are to the conclusion of this history of my multi-generational Aboriginal family.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/why-didnt-we-know-is-no-excuse-non-indigenous-australians-must-listen-to-the-difficult-historical-truths-told-by-first-nations-people-208780">'Why didn't we know?' is no excuse. Non-Indigenous Australians must listen to the difficult historical truths told by First Nations people</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>Our ‘mob of blackfellas’</h2>
<p>It is not known when Augustus John Bostock travelled north to Bundjalung Country, but at around 27 years of age he married my great-great-grandmother, an Aboriginal woman called One My. </p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/535303/original/file-20230703-268117-ub4u9t.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/535303/original/file-20230703-268117-ub4u9t.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/535303/original/file-20230703-268117-ub4u9t.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=918&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/535303/original/file-20230703-268117-ub4u9t.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=918&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/535303/original/file-20230703-268117-ub4u9t.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=918&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/535303/original/file-20230703-268117-ub4u9t.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1153&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/535303/original/file-20230703-268117-ub4u9t.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1153&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/535303/original/file-20230703-268117-ub4u9t.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1153&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption"></span>
</figcaption>
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<p>I know this because on his death certificate, in the section marked “Marriages: Where, at what age and to whom deceased was married”, the corresponding details recorded were “Tweed River … about 27, One My otherwise Clara Wolumbin”. Her name, this record and other archival documents (which name her), as well as confirmation from Bundjalung Elders, indicate that she was a traditional Aboriginal woman from the Wollumbin/Mount Warning people. </p>
<p>Finding One My was incredibly exciting for me, because I actually had the name of one of the traditional Aboriginal ancestors from whom our “mob of blackfellas” is descended.</p>
<p>We always knew we were Bundjalung, and my father had frequently told us, “Our mob are from the Tweed”, but he didn’t know much else. Now I had a starting point.</p>
<hr>
<p><em>This is an edited extract from <a href="https://www.allenandunwin.com/browse/book/Shauna-Bostock-Reaching-Through-Time-9781761067983/">Reaching Through Time</a> by Shauna Bostock (Allen & Unwin, $34.99).</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/208596/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Shauna Bostock-Smith does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>When Shauna Bostock began researching a book on her family, she thought it would be limited to her Aboriginal ancestry. But then a late-night phone call led her down a surprising path.Shauna Bostock-Smith, ANU PhD, Australian National UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1770732022-04-11T19:56:43Z2022-04-11T19:56:43ZHidden women of history: ‘the Buzzwinker’ Ellen Miles, child convict, goldfields pickpocket and vagrant<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/447995/original/file-20220223-17-fulyb6.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption"></span> <span class="attribution"><span class="license">Author provided</span></span></figcaption></figure><blockquote>
<p>—Me name’s Miles; Ellen Miles, remarked an old woman at the City Court yesterday.<br></p>
<p>—And you are charged with vagrancy, stated Sergeant Eason. Can you show the Bench that you have means of support?<br></p>
<p>—'How can I support myself when I’m continually in gaol and not a shilling coming into the house? What is it at all? What are us old people to do? There is no institution in the country,’ replied Mrs Miles.<br></p>
<p>—Sergeant Eason: But the country has been keeping you for years.<br></p>
<p>—Mrs Miles: ‘What! the country supporting me. Why, I’m supporting the country. I’ve scattered my money over the colony for the last 50 years. To tell the truth, I’ve spent thousands and thousands of pounds.<br></p>
<p>Accused, who was found sitting on the hospital steps in Little Lonsdale street, late at night, with a bandage over her eye nearly as large as a pillow, was sentenced to three months, as was also a companion named Bridget Jones.<br></p>
</blockquote>
<p>It was October 1896 and the accused, Ellen Miles, was almost 70 years old. She had indeed been scattering her money across the colony for 50 years. She would live for another 20, still in and out of gaol and benevolent asylums, until she was too frail to escape the Ballarat institution where she died in 1916.</p>
<p>This was fitting, as it was the Ballarat diggers who years before had dubbed her the “Buzzwinker”, an elaboration of the cant for pickpocket. Later, a locomotive from the Phoenix foundry that moved with a “pronounced waddle” was <a href="https://railstory.org/">named Buzzwinker after her</a>. She matters to us today because hers is a rare and unmediated voice from the criminal underclass of Vandemonian women.</p>
<p>She was a child of the 1830s and lived until 1916. How aware she ever was of the Great World outside her tiny one of back lanes, brothels and bars, we have no idea, but her life spanned the history of Victoria from the discovery of gold to Gallipoli.</p>
<p>She did register to vote in 1903, but hers was an underlife as she waddled around Canvas Town, Romeo Lane, the gold fields, Collingwood – and for one mad adventure, to Adelaide, her copious skirts concealing her latest stolen goods. Wherever there was a lurk to exploit and a lark to celebrate, Ellen was there.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="A town of tents against a backdrop of hills in the far distance." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/447999/original/file-20220223-19-1lz7kpf.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/447999/original/file-20220223-19-1lz7kpf.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=291&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/447999/original/file-20220223-19-1lz7kpf.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=291&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/447999/original/file-20220223-19-1lz7kpf.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=291&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/447999/original/file-20220223-19-1lz7kpf.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=366&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/447999/original/file-20220223-19-1lz7kpf.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=366&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/447999/original/file-20220223-19-1lz7kpf.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=366&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Canvas Town, a coloured lithograph by Samuel Thomas Gill.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Copyright Samuel Thomas / Wikimedia Commons</span>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">CC BY</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>'Notorious utterers’</h2>
<p>Her first appearance in the press had been in 1839: Ellen Miles, aged 11, was charged at the Guildhall with passing a counterfeit half-crown to a shopkeeper in Russell Street, Bloomsbury, London. Mr Field, an inspector at the Mint, said that this child was “one of three sisters, all notorious utterers”. </p>
<p>Ellen had already been in custody 30 times and sported three aliases. Her mother was dead. Her <a href="https://www.oldbaileyonline.org/browse.jsp?div=t18390812-2240">father claimed</a> he could not control her and that it might be an act of mercy to transport her. As predicted, her second appearance at the Old Bailey in October resulted in transportation.</p>
<p>Her sister Ruth, when before the Old Bailey herself a few months later, gave the game away: their father, Moses Miles, a costermonger (street trader), wanted all his girls transported so as to be relieved of their support. It was he who gave them the counterfeit coins to pass. His daughters had been in and out of St Pancras Workhouse since 1833, when Ellen was six. She graduated at the age of ten after 14 months in the Children’s Ward on her own. </p>
<p>It was there that she may have learnt to read and write, and it was there, among the toughest, roughest females in London, that she learned to survive. Both sisters were fierce, voluble and violent. They followed each other to Van Diemen’s Land: Ellen transported on the Gilbert Henderson in 1839, sentenced to seven years, Ruth five months later aboard the Navarino, with a sentence of 15.</p>
<p>Ellen had her first experience of solitary confinement six months after arrival. She continued to be insolent and to disobey orders. In July 1841, aged 13, she was punished for being in the company of a Richard Nichols. In May 1842, six months was added to her sentence for absconding.</p>
<h2>Wild nights behind bars</h2>
<p>Two months later in July 1842, she was convicted of riot and breaking a table in the Launceston Female Factory, together with Mary Sheriff and Catherine Lowry, two notorious members of the <a href="https://www.femaleconvicts.org.au/docs/disciplineinquiry/TranscriptofInquirywithtables.pdf">“flash mob</a>, who:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>always had money, wear worked cap, silk handkerchiefs, earrings and other rings they are the greatest blackguards in the building. The other women were afraid of them. They led away the young girls by bad advice.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>To have a good time was to keep offending and remain under punishment in the Female Factory, where the women, once locked in at night, could sing and be as lewd as they liked. They could <a href="https://www.femaleconvicts.org.au/docs/disciplineinquiry/TranscriptofInquirywithtables.pdf">dance naked and have sex</a> with other women — women they loved and women they bullied. </p>
<p>In January 1852, with her only child dead and her husband, a fellow Cockney, in tow, she was off to gold-rush Melbourne, bedecked in ribbons and ready to make her fortune from the befuddled diggers seeking sex and oblivion. Hers was a public life, lived in open sight of the world. Rarely in her long life did she have a home outside gaol.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/hidden-women-of-history-how-lady-swindler-alexandrina-askew-triumphed-over-the-convict-stain-169023">Hidden women of history: how 'lady swindler' Alexandrina Askew triumphed over the convict stain</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>On the town</h2>
<p>She slept where she found shelter: in corners of cottages, huts, shanties, outhouses, stables, public houses; in gutters and lanes, and on the banks of the Yarra. She ate where she could and drank whenever she could afford it.</p>
<p><figure class="align-left ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/448001/original/file-20220223-15-7dtcly.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/448001/original/file-20220223-15-7dtcly.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=856&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/448001/original/file-20220223-15-7dtcly.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=856&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/448001/original/file-20220223-15-7dtcly.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=856&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/448001/original/file-20220223-15-7dtcly.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1076&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/448001/original/file-20220223-15-7dtcly.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1076&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/448001/original/file-20220223-15-7dtcly.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1076&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The King of Terrors and His Satellites, a watercolour depiction of goldfields Victoria from 1851-1852.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">S T Gill, State Library of NSW</span>, <span class="license">Author provided</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
She paid for her food and drink by theft and pilfering and selling her body. Her sex life, both personal and transactional, was rarely private and often conducted in parks and back lanes.</p>
<p>She would rarely have used a privy, instead relieving herself in the street. She bathed mostly in gaol. Her clothes, probably stolen, lasted until they fell off her in rags. When she was arrested in Little Lonsdale Street, she had that bandage "the size of a pillow over one eye” and soon lost the eye completely. She sought invisibility from the law by changing her name, story and religion at whim.</p>
<p>She never admitted she was a transported convict, but claimed she had accompanied her long-deceased mother on the Gilbert Henderson. She generated criminal records under the names Buzzwinker, Ellen Watkins, Ellen Miles, Ann Myles, Ann Watkins, Ellen Burns, Ellen Grimes, Ellen Johnson and Bridget Brady. She did, at one stage, even claim Spanish birth.</p>
<p>She delivered her final words for posterity in December 1902. Charged under the name of Bridget Brady, born in Ireland and of the Catholic faith, she quickly protested her real self and her good character:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>—Bridget Brady at all. My name is Ellen Watkins and I am a decent woman.</p>
<p>Sergeant Eason — Oh we know all about you, Bridget, you’ve been convicted of all sorts of offences—nine times larceny, six times soliciting.</p>
<p>This was too much for Ellen:</p>
<p>—Soliciting is it? And I’m 82 (Laughter) Tis many a year since I was soliciting, I’m thinking. (Laughter).</p>
<p>Sergeant Eason—Yes, the record goes back over thirty years.</p>
<p>Brady (contemptuously)—Thirty grandmothers (Laughter). Why it must be full sixty years ago man. (Laughter)</p>
<p>Accused was sentenced to six months’ imprisonment.</p>
</blockquote><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/177073/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Janet McCalman AC does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Transported to Van Diemen’s Land aged 11, Ellen Miles went on to riot in Launceston’s Female Factory, seek fortune in gold-rush Victoria and live to nearly 90.Janet McCalman AC, Emeritus Redmond Barry Distinguished Professor, The University of MelbourneLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1690232021-10-21T19:10:17Z2021-10-21T19:10:17ZHidden women of history: how ‘lady swindler’ Alexandrina Askew triumphed over the convict stain<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/424404/original/file-20211004-25-1w9l3ox.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=67%2C1%2C885%2C592&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">John Skinner Prout's 1849 painting of the Cascades Female Factory in Hobart, Van Dieman's Land, where Alexandrina bore an illegitimate child.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Wikimedia Commons</span></span></figcaption></figure><p><em>In <a href="https://theconversation.com/au/topics/hidden-women-of-history-64072">this series</a>, we look at under-acknowledged women through the ages.</em></p>
<p>“A LADY SWINDLER”, gasped the Illustrated Australian News in November 1867.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>It appears that for a length of time the lady has been in the habit of visiting lodging houses and inquiring for apartments […] Having agreed to take the lodgings she proceeds to pay a deposit, when, lo! on feeling in her pocket, she cries, ‘I’ve lost my purse; they have stolen my purse,’ and forthwith commences to lament and bemoan her loss, exclaiming, ‘What shall I do; what will my husband say’. </p>
<p>The lady is always accompanied by a little boy, dressed in Highland costume, whose tears mingled with sobs of his mother, are the secret of the facility with which she accomplishes her schemes.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>The lady swindler was Mrs Alexandrina Askew. She didn’t ask for money, loans were offered in her time of crisis. As she collected more funds, her clothes became more ladylike. </p>
<p>Outside Melbourne she would suddenly appear from the bush and de-materialise back into it afterwards. Throughout all her forays, she insisted her husband was a wealthy squatter near <a href="https://www.victorianplaces.com.au/piggoreet">Piggoreet</a> with 30,000 sheep and 900 head of cattle.</p>
<p>One conquest in the Melbourne suburb of Richmond involved the family of a coach-maker, one of whose buggies she fancied buying. They invited her to take sherry and conversation flowed: about the squatter husband, the home property.</p>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/424405/original/file-20211004-17-1flrjk4.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/424405/original/file-20211004-17-1flrjk4.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/424405/original/file-20211004-17-1flrjk4.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=189&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/424405/original/file-20211004-17-1flrjk4.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=189&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/424405/original/file-20211004-17-1flrjk4.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=189&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/424405/original/file-20211004-17-1flrjk4.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=237&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/424405/original/file-20211004-17-1flrjk4.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=237&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/424405/original/file-20211004-17-1flrjk4.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=237&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption"></span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Author provided</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Mrs Askew took particular interest in the daughter of the family, who was feeling poorly and in need of country air, prompting her to invite the daughter to travel with her to Piggoreet and stay awhile to recover her health. Such a pity it was that the new friends should miss each other the next day at Spencer Street Station.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/hidden-women-of-history-wauba-debar-an-indigenous-swimmer-from-tasmania-who-saved-her-captors-126487">Hidden women of history: Wauba Debar, an Indigenous swimmer from Tasmania who saved her captors</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>An imaginary family</h2>
<p>Alexandrina, or Jemima or Alice, as she became in later life, arrived as Alexandrina Grant on the convict ship Tory in Hobart in 1845, along with 30 other Scottish women among a shipload of 170, otherwise from England. </p>
<p>She was 18, allegedly born in Inverness, and had been transported for “falsehoods, fraud and wilful imposition” in obtaining clothes.</p>
<p>Like all convicts transported by the Scottish courts, she had form. She had been convicted in Aberdeen at the age of 17 and had already served 60 days for theft, she reported also that she had done six months for “leaving my place” (that is, leaving her position as a servant while under contract). </p>
<p>When she alighted in Hobart, she recited an imaginary family to the convict clerk: her father John and her brothers William, James, Dennis, Alexander, John and Donald, plus her sister Elizabeth, all in Scotland. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/427398/original/file-20211020-14-1ecb7pp.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/427398/original/file-20211020-14-1ecb7pp.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/427398/original/file-20211020-14-1ecb7pp.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=228&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/427398/original/file-20211020-14-1ecb7pp.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=228&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/427398/original/file-20211020-14-1ecb7pp.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=228&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/427398/original/file-20211020-14-1ecb7pp.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=286&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/427398/original/file-20211020-14-1ecb7pp.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=286&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/427398/original/file-20211020-14-1ecb7pp.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=286&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Alexandrina’s convict record.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Author provided</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>But there is no sign of them in the census: there is no record of a Dennis Grant anywhere in Scotland before 1901. She was, in fact, a bastard child born in gaol to convict parents.</p>
<p>On the voyage out, the perceptive ship’s surgeon described Alexandrina as “orderly but precious”. Under her seven-year sentence she was frequently absent without leave, meeting men at night, and consequently bore an illegitimate child in Hobart’s <a href="https://femalefactory.org.au/">Cascades Female Factory</a> in 1849. </p>
<p>She found no-one presumably good enough to marry her, and domestic service was not to her liking (she was twice dismissed from her places of <a href="https://libraries.tas.gov.au/convict-portal/pages/convict-life.aspx">assigned service</a>), so she spent most of her sentence in the <a href="https://www.utas.edu.au/library/companion_to_tasmanian_history/F/Female%20factories.htm">female factories</a> where women were punished and put to work doing tasks such as laundry “at the tubs”. </p>
<h2>Social dysphoria</h2>
<p>Alexandrina’s story illustrates in extreme personal form the pain of perceived inferiority and stigma felt by those transported to Van Diemen’s Land: the daily humiliations of being a nobody, without a family let alone a lineage. If her secrets and lies were spectacular, they were nonetheless reflective of the desperation of the socially thwarted and ignored. </p>
<p>She felt she deserved to be a somebody, a woman of refinement, respected and deferred to – not an old lag, a former homeless woman of the town. She suffered a form of social dysphoria, born into the wrong social body. Alexandrina knew how to speak and deport herself like a lady, except her secret was that she wasn’t.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/424407/original/file-20211004-13-1xjcvut.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/424407/original/file-20211004-13-1xjcvut.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/424407/original/file-20211004-13-1xjcvut.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=492&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/424407/original/file-20211004-13-1xjcvut.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=492&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/424407/original/file-20211004-13-1xjcvut.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=492&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/424407/original/file-20211004-13-1xjcvut.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=618&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/424407/original/file-20211004-13-1xjcvut.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=618&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/424407/original/file-20211004-13-1xjcvut.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=618&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The Female Factory in Hobart.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Tasmanian Archives and Heritage Office</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The terrible daily burden of the convict stain – of spoiled identity – meant people had to lie and withhold secrets, even from their own partners and children. </p>
<p>There were significant passages of their lives that could not be spoken of, stories that could not be recounted, memories that could not be shared. Always they had to calculate how best to obscure the missing seven or ten years of their servitude in their personal narrative.</p>
<p>Many changed their name and then had to guard against dropping the wrong name, or place of birth, or work history, let alone criminal history. Many, it seems, succeeded admirably in concealing their convict past from their families, only to be found out later by assiduous genealogists.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/hidden-women-of-history-catherine-hay-thomson-the-australian-undercover-journalist-who-went-inside-asylums-and-hospitals-129352">Hidden women of history: Catherine Hay Thomson, the Australian undercover journalist who went inside asylums and hospitals</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>Vandemonians were expected to re-enter society at the bottom of the human ladder and remain there. Over time they might be tolerated as amusing eccentrics, or shunned as people of untrustworthy character, but either way they could not rise and blend in with those who had been received. They had crossed over to “the other side”, and there they were doomed to remain.</p>
<p>But among the convicts of Van Diemen’s Land was a clutch of women whose crimes were yearnings for things above their station: for positions, husbands, lodgings, or finery or jewellery they could not pay for. They had the good fortune to be born good-looking and intelligent and so they could be plausible and ladylike. Alexandrina was tall and attractive and spoke well.</p>
<p>They were also especially vulnerable to seduction and abandonment, and the trigger for crime was often a betrayal or desertion by a lover.</p>
<h2>A success story</h2>
<p>Why is this story worth telling beyond its poignancy? It matters because Alexandrina Grant was a success among Scottish convict women transported to Van Diemen’s Land.</p>
<p>She lived into her ninth decade; was not a conspicuous drunkard; and married a free man, William Askew, who stayed with her. They went to the gold mines at Bulldog (now Bullarook) near Piggoreet. Her swindling career forced them to relocate to Ballarat, then Echuca and finally, Sydney.</p>
<p>She bore ten children, six of whom lived into middle life; and successfully delivered and reared the illegitimate child of her second daughter under the common fiction that the child was her own. </p>
<p>Moreover, two of her daughters, including the one who had a baby out of wedlock at 16, married good providers, even if one was an eccentric Swiss-Italian, self-styled professor who dealt over the years variously in mesmerism, phrenology, homeopathy and marriage guidance. </p>
<p>Alexandrina, who died in 1913, was apparently loved. The final chapter of her life took place in Sydney, where she ran boarding houses at dubious addresses in Redfern, twice going bankrupt. Few of the 1636 Scottish women transported to Van Diemen’s Land achieved anything like this ordinary triumph over poverty, stigma and marginalisation.</p>
<p><em>Janet McCalman’s book Vandemonians is out now (MUP).</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/169023/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Janet McCalman AC receives funding from the Australian Research Council</span></em></p>Deported to Australia as a convict at the age of 18, Alexandrina Askew reinvented herself as a woman of means, with a mysterious habit of misplacing her purse.Janet McCalman AC, Emeritus Redmond Barry Distinguished Professor, The University of MelbourneLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1506152020-11-25T19:02:49Z2020-11-25T19:02:49ZFrom ‘common scolds’ to feminist reclamation: the fraught history of women and swearing in Australia<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/371186/original/file-20201124-13-1o2vx6j.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=14%2C0%2C680%2C609&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Kath and Kim (aka Jane Turner and Gina Riley): the suburban hornbags used swearing in clever ways in their 2002-2007 TV series.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Riley Turner Productions</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Women have had a fraught historical relationship to swearing. Long regarded as guardians of morality and respectability, their use of swear words has been policed and punished in various ways. Yet women have a rich history of using such language as a means of challenging oppression. </p>
<p>These tensions have been evident in Australia <a href="https://www.newsouthbooks.com.au/books/9781742236636/">since the time of colonisation</a>. Convict women were likely to be labelled as “whores” and “strumpets”. Colonial commentators and figures of authority often questioned the moral character of these women; their use of insulting language was taken as confirmation of immorality. </p>
<p>Yet convict women used such language to mock and defy authority. When one woman in the colony of Sydney was threatened with being flogged for using obscene language towards her master, she replied to his threat using more bad language.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/371178/original/file-20201124-15-1h5ieua.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/371178/original/file-20201124-15-1h5ieua.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/371178/original/file-20201124-15-1h5ieua.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=367&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/371178/original/file-20201124-15-1h5ieua.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=367&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/371178/original/file-20201124-15-1h5ieua.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=367&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/371178/original/file-20201124-15-1h5ieua.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=461&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/371178/original/file-20201124-15-1h5ieua.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=461&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/371178/original/file-20201124-15-1h5ieua.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=461&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Augustus Earle’s painting of the Parramatta Female Factory, circa 1826. Convict women often used bad language to mock authority.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Wikimedia Commons</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/whores-damned-whores-and-female-convicts-why-our-history-does-early-australian-colonial-women-a-grave-injustice-4894">Whores, damned whores and female convicts: Why our history does early Australian colonial women a grave injustice </a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>While convicts could be punished for “insolent” language, by the middle of the 19th century, vagrancy laws were used to control the use of “profane” and “obscene” language in public. Colonial newspapers and court records reveal a large number of such cases were brought before police magistrates. And many of those charged were women.</p>
<p>One called her husband a “bloody bugger” while in a pub. Another called her female neighbour “a bloody whore and a bloody bitch”. </p>
<p>While men swore often, women’s bad language was far more likely to be of concern. An 1850 commentary, published in the Moreton Bay Courier, called on husbands to exercise their authority and prevent wives from publicly using “obscene and filthy language”. </p>
<p>Women could also be charged as being “common scolds”, a common-law charge originating in English law often used to control those considered to be “public nuisances”. Colonial newspapers reveal that many of the cases involving these charges were disputes between neighbours. </p>
<p>In 1849, for instance, two women were accused of being common scolds by their neighbours because of their constant quarrelling and use of the “most obscene and blasphemous language”.</p>
<h2>A question of class</h2>
<p>Women charged with these kinds of offences were predominantly working class. Alana Piper and Victoria Nagy’s <a href="https://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/full/10.1162/JINH_a_01125">study of female prisoners in Australia from 1860 to 1920</a> reveals the bulk of women’s offences were minor, and included “disorderly, indecent or riotous behaviour” and obscene and abusive language.</p>
<p>Middle-class women’s speech was not publicly policed. It was, rather, contained through the norms of respectability. An 1885 Australian etiquette manual instructed women to avoid “vulgar exclamations”. </p>
<figure class="align-right ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/371192/original/file-20201125-18-170wse9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/371192/original/file-20201125-18-170wse9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=878&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/371192/original/file-20201125-18-170wse9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=878&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/371192/original/file-20201125-18-170wse9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=878&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/371192/original/file-20201125-18-170wse9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1103&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/371192/original/file-20201125-18-170wse9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1103&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/371192/original/file-20201125-18-170wse9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1103&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Diggers, seen here in a trench at Lone Pine in 1915, were renowned for their swearing.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Wikimedia Commons</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Yet popular culture embraced a masculinist mythology of Australian swearing. By the end of the 19th century, swearing could be a source of humour and even seen as something acceptable if used by certain types, such as the bullock driver (notorious for his swearing), and the bushman.</p>
<p>The hard work required of these men excused such language. This justification (and even embrace) of male swearing culminated in the first world war “digger”. </p>
<p>The bad language of the larrikin digger ranged from the more acceptable “bloody” and “bastard” to words such as “bugger” and “fuck”. The Australian soldier was renowned for his swearing as well as his slang. </p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/from-aussies-to-whizz-bangs-the-language-of-anzac-6320">From 'Aussies' to 'Whizz-bangs': the language of Anzac</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>Liberating language</h2>
<p>If the first wave of Australian feminists sought to operate from a position of respectability, second wave feminists embraced the possibilities offered by flouting such respectability.</p>
<p>Amid the counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s, and the associated women’s liberation movement, bad language was used to challenge prevailing social and cultural norms. Women such as journalist and activist <a href="https://www.wendybacon.com/">Wendy Bacon</a> and feminist author and academic Germaine Greer became known for (and even subject to charges for) their bad language. </p>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/371177/original/file-20201124-24-1dhn7rb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/371177/original/file-20201124-24-1dhn7rb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/371177/original/file-20201124-24-1dhn7rb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=748&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/371177/original/file-20201124-24-1dhn7rb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=748&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/371177/original/file-20201124-24-1dhn7rb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=748&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/371177/original/file-20201124-24-1dhn7rb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=940&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/371177/original/file-20201124-24-1dhn7rb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=940&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/371177/original/file-20201124-24-1dhn7rb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=940&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Germaine Greer in 1972.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">AP</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Bacon was charged initially as an editor of an edition of the UNSW magazine Tharunka that had included the poem “Cunt is a Christian word”. </p>
<p>She protested the trial wearing a sign reading, “I have been fucked by God’s steel prick” and was charged for wearing an obscene publication. She was ultimately sentenced to eight days in prison. </p>
<p>Greer was convicted <a href="https://www.theage.com.au/world/the-feminist-who-fell-foul-of-nz-law-20030824-gdw8g7.html">for saying “bullshit” and “fuck”</a> during an Auckland Town Hall meeting in 1972.</p>
<p>But if words such as “fuck” and “cunt” could be used to shock, they were also part of a feminist reclamation as women claimed control over their bodies and their sexuality.</p>
<h2>Swearing today</h2>
<p>Swearing today can still be seen as more easily claimed by men than women, but this has slowly shifted. </p>
<p>Women comedians, writers, and activists have all played a role in claiming a right to use bad language. For example, women comedians such as <a href="https://thewest.com.au/entertainment/arts-reviews/comedy-review-kitty-flanagan-penny-flanagan-ng-ya-211391">Kitty Flanagan</a> and Jane Turner and Gina Riley (best known as Kath and Kim) have made clever use of swearing in their performances. </p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/iQfiDFq2PtQ?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
</figure>
<p>The use of swearing by women in public has been increasingly normalised. Yet women are still more likely to be judged for swearing, which can still be seen as “unladylike”. And for some, the swear words themselves can be problematic with their references to women’s body parts and objectification of women as sex objects.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/wordslut-a-new-book-aims-to-verbally-smash-the-patriarchy-but-its-argument-is-imprecise-119160">Wordslut: a new book aims to 'verbally smash the patriarchy', but its argument is imprecise</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>Today, women (and even more so, women of colour) are <a href="http://www.jatl.org/blog/2015/5/13/violence-against-women-in-social-media">disproportionately the targets of bad language, slurs, insults, and threats</a> on social media. </p>
<p>If a woman’s swearing can be an act of empowerment, it also continues to risk punishment.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/150615/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Amanda Laugesen does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Long regarded as guardians of morality, women who swore were often policed and punished. But whether protesting or parodying, they have used bad language in creative ways.Amanda Laugesen, Director, Australian National Dictionary Centre, Australian National UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1280022020-04-28T20:32:51Z2020-04-28T20:32:51ZFrom Captain Cook to the First Fleet: how Botany Bay was chosen over Africa as a new British penal colony<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/314391/original/file-20200210-52356-svzc68.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=54%2C243%2C1209%2C779&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">'The Founding of Australia 1788', an oil painting by Algernon Talmage</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales</span></span></figcaption></figure><p><em>Captain James Cook arrived in the Pacific 250 years ago, triggering British colonisation of the region. We’re asking researchers to reflect on what happened and how it shapes us today. You can see other stories in the series <a href="https://theconversation.com/au/topics/cook250-78244">here</a>, and an interactive <a href="https://cook250.netlify.app/">here</a>.</em></p>
<hr>
<p>After Captain Cook’s Endeavour voyage in 1770, the east coast of Australia was drawn on European maps of the globe for the first time. Yet, in terms of European contact with the continent, there was an 18-year lull in between Cook’s 1770 landings and the arrival of the First Fleet in 1788. </p>
<p>The main reason for this was Britain’s preoccupation with subduing its rebellious colonists in the War of American Independence from 1776-83. </p>
<p>Britain’s defeat in that war brought forth an urgent problem that eventually led to the colonisation of Australia: what it saw as a need to dispose of convicts who were overflowing the available prisons at home. </p>
<p>Previously, many British convicts were transported to the American colonies but after independence this option was no longer available. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/310759/original/file-20200119-118343-l0lw70.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/310759/original/file-20200119-118343-l0lw70.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=446&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/310759/original/file-20200119-118343-l0lw70.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=446&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/310759/original/file-20200119-118343-l0lw70.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=446&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/310759/original/file-20200119-118343-l0lw70.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=561&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/310759/original/file-20200119-118343-l0lw70.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=561&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/310759/original/file-20200119-118343-l0lw70.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=561&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Cook’s chart of Botany Bay.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.bl.uk/collection-items/a-chart-of-botany-bay-by-james-cook">British Library</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>The next penal colony: let the search begin</h2>
<p>Discussions about alternative penal colonies meshed with Britain’s larger strategic and commercial goals at the time. Many hoped a new convict settlement would provide a base for extending British power in the wake of the American debacle and be “<a href="https://catalogue.nla.gov.au/Record/324301">advantageous both to navigation and commerce</a>”.</p>
<p>The search began in 1779 when the House of Commons established a committee under the chairmanship of British politician Sir Charles Bunbury. Various locations were considered, in particular, Senegal and Gambia on the west African coast. </p>
<p>But a new destination soon emerged with the testimony of Joseph Banks, the botanist on board the Endeavour, who had recently been elected president of the Royal Society. Botany Bay on the Australian coast, he contended, would be the best site for a penal colony since it had a Mediterranean climate and would be fertile. <a href="https://catalogue.nla.gov.au/Record/324301">Banks added</a>, too, that </p>
<blockquote>
<p>there would be little Probability of any Opposition from the Natives</p>
</blockquote>
<p>It was a prediction that would ultimately prove <a href="https://www.nma.gov.au/defining-moments/resources/pemulwuy">incorrect</a>.</p>
<h2>Why Botany Bay?</h2>
<p>The search for a penal settlement lost momentum during the war, but regained some sense of urgency with its end in 1783. </p>
<p>James Matra, an American-born seaman aboard the Endeavour, circulated a proposal among policy-makers about establishing a new settlement at Botany Bay. It was based on his own first-hand knowledge of the coast, as well as his discussions with Banks, who remained the most influential advocate for the site. </p>
<p>Matra’s most immediate concern was to provide a home for the American loyalists – those, like his own family, who had lost their property in the new United States because of their loyalty to the British crown during the war. </p>
<p>Matra’s proposal also appealed to some key strategic and commercial concerns:</p>
<ul>
<li><p>flax and timbers could be brought from New Zealand to grow in the new colony, providing the British navy with much-needed supplies;</p></li>
<li><p>the planting of spices and sugarcane would reduce Britain’s reliance on the Dutch East Indies; </p></li>
<li><p>the site could be used as a base for those engaged in the lucrative fur trade in America; and </p></li>
<li><p>the settlement could act as a strategic base to challenge the Dutch in the East Indies and the Spanish in the Philippines and even South America. </p></li>
</ul>
<h2>Another serious contender emerges</h2>
<p>After Matra submitted his proposal, another House of Commons committee was established in 1785, chaired by Lord Beauchamp. Both Matra and Banks gave evidence in favour of Botany Bay, with Banks <a href="https://catalogue.nla.gov.au/Record/324301">arguing</a>, </p>
<blockquote>
<p>from the fertility of the soil, the timid disposition of the inhabitants and the climate being so analogous to that of Europe I give the place the preference to all that I have seen</p>
</blockquote>
<p>The committee, however, opted for an African site. It believed Das Voltas Bay, in southwest Africa, could reduce British dependence on the Dutch Cape of Good Hope in what is now South Africa and serve as a refuge for the American loyalists. </p>
<p>Before venturing down the path of establishing a colony, however, an exploratory voyage was sent to the African coast. It concluded the site was unsuitable as it lacked an effective harbour and fertile land. </p>
<p>Botany Bay was back in serious contention.</p>
<h2>Dreams of Pacific trade</h2>
<p>Other supporters soon emerged to sing the praises of Botany Bay. </p>
<p>Sir George Young, a naval officer and former East India Company officer, argued a colony at the site could serve as a base for trade with South America and underlined its strategic importance. If war broke out with Spain in the region, Botany Bay could be a place of refuge for British naval vessels. </p>
<p>Another advocate, John Call, an engineer with the East India Company, saw the advantages of a secondary settlement on nearby Norfolk Island. Flax grew in abundance on the island, he said, and the mighty Norfolk pine tree would be ideal for the masts of ships.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/terra-nullius-interruptus-captain-james-cook-and-absent-presence-in-first-nations-art-129688">Terra nullius interruptus: Captain James Cook and absent presence in First Nations art</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>These observations were based on reports from Cook’s second and third Pacific voyages. The second included a visit to Norfolk Island, while the third ventured to the northwestern coast of America and traded furs in China, further fuelling British aspirations for Pacific trade.</p>
<p>Such arguments eventually led Prime Minister William Pitt and his Cabinet to accept the proposal to establish the settlement at Botany Bay.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/314398/original/file-20200210-52360-1uzg5vd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/314398/original/file-20200210-52360-1uzg5vd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=449&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/314398/original/file-20200210-52360-1uzg5vd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=449&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/314398/original/file-20200210-52360-1uzg5vd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=449&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/314398/original/file-20200210-52360-1uzg5vd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=564&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/314398/original/file-20200210-52360-1uzg5vd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=564&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/314398/original/file-20200210-52360-1uzg5vd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=564&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">A drawing by John Webber depicting the arrival of Cook’s ship in Nootka Sound in April 1778 on his search for the Northwest Passage.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">British Library</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>A costly endeavour</h2>
<p>Such a settlement demanded an unprecedented degree of state planning and financing. </p>
<p>The First Fleet, for example, consisted of 11 ships (no larger than the <a href="http://www.migrationheritage.nsw.gov.au/exhibition/objectsthroughtime-history/ott1788/index.html">Manly ferry</a>) that carried, among other things, a supply of seeds from Banks to help establish a “new Europe” on the other side of the Earth.</p>
<p>The convicts sent to New South Wales also incurred considerable state expense compared to those sent to America. From 1788-89, the new colony accumulated expenses of over 250,000 pounds, which equated to 100 pounds per convict per annum.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/cooking-the-books-how-re-enactments-of-the-endeavours-voyage-perpetuate-myths-of-australias-discovery-126751">Cooking the books: how re-enactments of the Endeavour's voyage perpetuate myths of Australia's 'discovery'</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>The fact it cost considerably more to transport a convict to New South Wales than to keep him or her in a British jail supported the view held by some in England that the penal colony was a subterfuge for broader strategic goals. </p>
<p>Rival nations also thought the British were trying to deceive them. Alejandro Malaspina, who captained a Spanish expedition that visited Sydney in 1793, thought the settlement could be a potential naval base for an attack on Spanish America.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/314387/original/file-20200210-52356-1ss6sak.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/314387/original/file-20200210-52356-1ss6sak.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=466&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/314387/original/file-20200210-52356-1ss6sak.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=466&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/314387/original/file-20200210-52356-1ss6sak.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=466&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/314387/original/file-20200210-52356-1ss6sak.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=585&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/314387/original/file-20200210-52356-1ss6sak.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=585&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/314387/original/file-20200210-52356-1ss6sak.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=585&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">A list of female convicts onboard the Lady Penrhyn in the First Fleet.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Wikimedia Commons</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>A repository for convicts</h2>
<p>And yet, in the end, the settlement at New South Wales did little to advance British strategic goals.</p>
<p>The site lacked a naval base and its defences were so weak, François Péron, a naturalist aboard the French <a href="http://museum.wa.gov.au/fc/aos/dj">Baudin expedition</a> that circumnavigated much of Australia from 1801-03, thought it could be easily captured.</p>
<p>In fact, no naval expedition was mounted from New South Wales during the Napoleonic wars of 1803-15. Nor did New South Wales live up to the commercial benefits some had invested in it. Tropical fruits and spices would not grow in Sydney, and Norfolk Island proved a disappointment as a source for naval supplies. </p>
<p>The American loyalists also chose to resettle in nearby Canada instead of distant New South Wales. </p>
<p>But New South Wales proved to cater to the most immediate reason for British settlement: a repository for convicts.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/128002/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>John Gascoigne is the author of several books on James Cook and Joseph Banks. His most recent book is Encountering the Pacific in the Age of the Enlightenment. </span></em></p>Britain had an urgent problem after it lost its American colonies: where to send its convicts. It settled on NSW after rejecting other options, but the new spot didn’t exactly live up to its billing.John Gascoigne, Emeritus Professor, UNSW SydneyLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1171522019-06-07T11:27:38Z2019-06-07T11:27:38ZConvicts are returning to farming – anti-immigrant policies are the reason<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/278434/original/file-20190606-98054-1vn1smy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Migrant agricultural workers kept out of the US by tough immigration laws are now being replaced by prison labor.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.shutterstock.com/download/success?u=http%3A%2F%2Fdownload.shutterstock.com%2Fgatekeeper%2FW3siZSI6MTU1OTg4NDYwMSwiYyI6Il9waG90b19zZXNzaW9uX2lkIiwiZGMiOiJpZGxfMTEwNjI3MTc2MSIsImsiOiJwaG90by8xMTA2MjcxNzYxL2h1Z2UuanBnIiwibSI6MSwiZCI6InNodXR0ZXJzdG9jay1tZWRpYSJ9LCJrVWN6cUJJN3RidEhjTngzdXh0UW5ydWpUaDgiXQ%2Fshutterstock_1106271761.jpg&pi=33421636&m=1106271761">Shutterstock</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Prison inmates are picking fruits and vegetables at a rate not seen since Jim Crow.</p>
<p>Convict leasing for agriculture – a system that allows states to sell prison labor to private farms – became infamous in the late 1800s for the <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/mar/07/sugar-land-imperial-prison-farm-cemetery-prisoners-remains">brutal conditions</a> it imposed on captive, mostly black workers. </p>
<p>Federal and state laws <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/2210349?casa_token=Ko7PNTxzDzYAAAAA:Th0QwXMGeU9uHhoaPmE4xWQvTNgbP73v1NxaVHTv3ImdvjCJWxyKquIboIlK-GlcobbMTf1ZnBJRqx5VB6jEfO0Ao8MYEj445jTqifCAycm7687bSeC2&seq=1">prohibited convict leasing</a> for most of the 20th century, but the once-notorious practice is making a comeback.</p>
<p>Under lucrative arrangements, states are increasingly leasing prisoners to private corporations to harvest food for American consumers.</p>
<h2>Why now?</h2>
<p>The U.S. food system relies on cheap labor. Today, <a href="https://www.doleta.gov/naws/research/docs/NAWS_Research_Report_13.pdf">median income</a> for farm workers is US$10.66 an hour, with 33% of farm-worker households living below the poverty line. </p>
<p>Historically, agriculture has <a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=jhewDAAAQBAJ">suppressed wages</a> – and eschewed worker protections – by hiring from vulnerable groups, notably, undocumented migrants. By <a href="http://business.time.com/2012/09/21/bitter-harvest-u-s-farmers-blame-billion-dollar-losses-on-immigration-laws/">some estimates</a>, 70% of agriculture’s 1.2 million workers are undocumented. </p>
<p>As current anti-immigrant policies diminish the supply of migrant workers (both documented and undocumented), farmers are <a href="https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/northwest/washington-farmers-tell-trump-we-need-more-foreign-workers/">not able to find the labor they need</a>. So, in states such as Arizona, <a href="https://www.spokesman.com/stories/2017/aug/26/with-labor-shortage-idaho-inmates-learn-farm-work/">Idaho</a> and Washington that grow labor-intensive crops like onions, apples and tomatoes, prison systems <a href="https://foodfirst.org/is-prison-labor-the-future-of-our-food-system/">have responded</a> by <a href="http://www.takepart.com/article/2014/04/14/prison-ag-labor">leasing convicts to growers</a> desperate for workers. </p>
<h2>The racist roots of convict leasing</h2>
<p>Since Reconstruction, states have <a href="https://books.google.com/books/about/One_Dies_Get_Another.html?id=im68YsXbvZ0C">used prisoners to solve labor supply problems</a> in industries such as road and rail construction, mining and agriculture. But convict leasing has also been a powerful weapon of white supremacy, and now, anti-immigrant sentiment.</p>
<p>After Emancipation, southern economies faced a crisis: how to maintain a <a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=lgRYuftJ6wQC&printsec=frontcover&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjS4PmAv6riAhXDqFkKHdhCBCQQ6AEIKjAA#v=onepage">racial caste system</a> and a supply of surplus labor now that blacks were free.</p>
<p>Southern states passed vagrancy laws, Black Codes, and other legislation to <a href="https://theconversation.com/exploiting-black-labor-after-the-abolition-of-slavery-72482">selectively incarcerate</a> freed slaves. For example, under <a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=XRaqQgAACAAJ&dq=Oshinsky+Parchman&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwj2q-3K_PzgAhVST98KHUEZCGIQ6AEINTAC">Mississippi’s vagrancy law</a>, all black men had to provide written proof of a job or face a $50 fine. Those who could not pay were forced to work for any white man willing to pay the fine — an amount that was deducted from the black man’s wage.</p>
<p>During the late 1800s, mass incarceration created an army of cheap labor that could be leased to private businesses for substantial profit. In 1886, state revenues from leasing exceeded the cost of running prisons by <a href="http://time.com/5405158/the-true-history-of-americas-private-prison-industry/">nearly 400%</a>. Between 1870 and 1910, <a href="http://www.moor4igws.org/uploads/3/4/4/2/34429976/us_prison_industry___big_business_or_a_new_form_of_slavery.pdf">88% of convicts</a> leased in Georgia were black. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/278413/original/file-20190606-98022-1bquvx7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/278413/original/file-20190606-98022-1bquvx7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/278413/original/file-20190606-98022-1bquvx7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=475&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/278413/original/file-20190606-98022-1bquvx7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=475&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/278413/original/file-20190606-98022-1bquvx7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=475&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/278413/original/file-20190606-98022-1bquvx7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=597&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/278413/original/file-20190606-98022-1bquvx7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=597&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/278413/original/file-20190606-98022-1bquvx7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=597&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">In this Library of Congress photo from 1903, juvenile convicts are shown at work in the fields, location unknown.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.loc.gov/item/2016818521/">Library of Congress/Detroit Publishing Co.</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Populist response</h2>
<p>But cheap convict labor also suppressed wages for free whites, and by 1900, poor whites began pushing back. </p>
<p>In 1904, James Vardaman was elected governor of Mississippi on a platform of <a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=XRaqQgAACAAJ">returning whites to work and blacks to confinement</a>. These populist white supremacist sentiments dovetailed with national economic concerns during the Great Depression, when agricultural failures led to widespread unemployment.</p>
<p>In the 1930s, the Ashurst-Sumners Act and accompanying <a href="https://heinonline.org/HOL/LandingPage?handle=hein.journals/amcrimlr33&div=20&id=&page=&t=1559791041">state laws</a> prohibited convict leasing and the sale of prisoner-made goods on the open market. Inmates still worked in agriculture, but the food they produced had to be consumed by other prisoners or state workers. </p>
<p>By the late 1970s, with growing competition from foreign manufacturing, U.S. companies <a href="https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1745-9125.2001.tb00923.x">sought out</a> domestic sources of cheap labor. </p>
<p>Under pressure from corporate lobbies like the American Legislative Exchange Council, Congress <a href="https://mulpress.mcmaster.ca/globallabour/article/view/2774">relaxed restrictions on convict leasing</a> with the <a href="https://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/96/hr2061">Justice System Improvement Act</a>. As the manufacturing and service sectors began hiring prisoners, <a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=jhewDAAAQBAJ">agriculture expanded its use of migrant workers</a>.</p>
<h2>Profit and exploitation</h2>
<p>Today, convict leasing offers significant revenues for prisons. </p>
<p>Most <a href="https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/wage_policies.html">wages</a> paid to inmates are garnished by prisons to cover incarceration costs and pay victim restitution programs. In some cases, prisoners see no monetary compensation whatsoever. In 2015 and 2016, the California Prison Industry Authority <a href="https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ZWdBH5zlKbV6K6subbGMm4nUMY3_ZZgJ/view">made over $2 million</a> from its food and agriculture sector.</p>
<p>Growers can reap significant revenues, too. Inmates are <a href="https://www.prisonlegalnews.org/news/2007/may/15/prisoner-not-covered-by-fair-labor-standards-act/">excluded</a> from federal minimum wage protections, allowing prison systems to lease convicts at a rate <a href="http://www.ncsociology.org/sociationtoday/v42/prison.htm">below the going labor rate</a>. In Arizona, inmates leased through Arizona Correctional Industries (ACI) receive a wage of <a href="http://bgc.pioneerinstitute.org/arizona-correctional-industries-partnering-with-private-sector-companies/">$3-$4 per hour</a> before deductions. Meanwhile, the state’s <a href="https://www.dol.gov/whd/minwage/mw-consolidated.htm">minimum wage</a> for most non-incarcerated farm workers is $11.00/hr. </p>
<p>Beyond the unfairness of low wages, inadequate state and federal regulations ensure that agricultural work continues to be onerous. Laborers endure long hours, repetitive motion injuries, temperature and humidity extremes and <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1179/107735203800328858?src=recsys">exposure</a> to caustic and carcinogenic chemicals. </p>
<p>For inmates, these circumstances are unlikely to change. U.S. courts have ruled that <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/07393140902872245?scroll=top&needAccess=true">prisoners are prohibited from organizing</a> for higher wages and working conditions – though <a href="https://psmag.com/social-justice/modern-slavery-the-labor-history-behind-the-new-nationwide-prison-strike">strikes have occurred</a> in recent years. </p>
<p>Furthermore, <a href="https://casetext.com/case/alexander-v-ortiz-4">inmates are not legally considered employees</a>, which means they are excluded from protection under parts of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the Equal Pay Act, the Fair Labor Standards Act, the National Labor Relations Act and the Federal Tort Claims Act.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/278424/original/file-20190606-98033-1s3n221.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/278424/original/file-20190606-98033-1s3n221.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/278424/original/file-20190606-98033-1s3n221.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=524&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/278424/original/file-20190606-98033-1s3n221.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=524&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/278424/original/file-20190606-98033-1s3n221.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=524&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/278424/original/file-20190606-98033-1s3n221.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=658&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/278424/original/file-20190606-98033-1s3n221.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=658&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/278424/original/file-20190606-98033-1s3n221.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=658&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Excerpt from minutes of the regular meeting of the Texas Penitentiary Board, Nov. 12, 1903.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.tsl.texas.gov/exhibits/prisons/convictlease/penboardminutes_nov12_1903.html">Board of Criminal Justice minutes and meeting files, Texas Department of Criminal Justice, Archives and Information Services Division, Texas State Library and Archives Commission.</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Whose labor is being sold?</h2>
<p>The total number – and racial makeup – of leased inmates is difficult to calculate. Not all prison systems report on farming operations or leased labor arrangements. According to one advocacy group, at least <a href="https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ZWdBH5zlKbV6K6subbGMm4nUMY3_ZZgJ/view">30,000 inmates</a> work within the food system. But to the extent that convict leasing reflects overall inmate demographics, prison agriculture is distinctly racial. </p>
<p>Blacks make up 39% of inmates, but only 12% of the general population, making blacks <a href="https://prisonpolicy.org/graphs/pie2018_race.html">six times more likely</a> than whites to be incarcerated. Over the last 50 years – the same period that saw the return of convict leasing – <a href="https://www.brennancenter.org/publication/how-many-americans-are-unnecessarily-incarcerated">the black incarceration rate quadrupled</a>. </p>
<p>Proponents of “prison industries” argue that leasing provides rehabilitative benefits like on-the-job training for reentry. But <a href="https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/002193479702700403?casa_token=nrFu3TZC7psAAAAA:pucOfLOoujRJyudTNstivnmxKuLqg5yOTbdhxGACsxUw8unBuWjwTRxi4KEwKEWadt-o7VzjrfBu">research</a> shows that within the prison system, whites receive better jobs than blacks, with better pay and more beneficial skills.</p>
<p>Whereas migrant workers often benefit home communities by returning a portion of their wages as <a href="https://tradingeconomics.com/mexico/remittances">remittances</a>, the garnishing or nonpayment of convict wages prevents inmates from contributing to their families and home economies. </p>
<p>Since Emancipation, agriculture has moved its focus from one labor source to another in response to shifting currents of populism, nativism and racism. All three benefit from the exploitation of minority populations, and all three justify policies of exploitation in economic terms. </p>
<p>Convict leasing is the first – and now the latest – strategy.</p>
<p>
<section class="inline-content">
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<div>
<header></header>
<p><a href="http://www.aag.org">Stian Rice is a member of the American Association of Geographers</a></p>
<footer>The association is a funding partner of The Conversation US.</footer>
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</section>
</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/117152/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Stian Rice is a member of the American Association of Geographers.</span></em></p>Since Reconstruction, states have leased prisoners to US industries. That diminished in the 20th century, but now it’s resurging, with prisoners leased to harvest food for American consumers.Stian Rice, Food Systems Geographer, Center for Urban Environmental Research and Education, University of Maryland, Baltimore CountyLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1086792019-01-01T19:46:12Z2019-01-01T19:46:12ZWhy archaeology is so much more than just digging<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/250355/original/file-20181212-110253-u3jixz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">The Port Arthur historic site is beautiful today – but its isolation would have been overwhelming for former convict inhabitants. </span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://portarthur.org.au/">Port Arthur Historic Site </a>, <span class="license">Author provided</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>It’s our experience that most people think archaeology mainly means digging in the dirt. </p>
<p>Admit to strangers that you are of the archaeological persuasion, and the follow-up question is invariably “what’s the best thing you’ve found?”. </p>
<p>Start to tell them about a fantastic ink and watercolour plan you unearthed in library archives, or an old work site you stumbled upon in thick eucalypt bush, and their eyes glaze over. </p>
<p>People invariably want to hear about skeletons, pots and bits of shiny metal. It’s this type of stuff that you will often see in the media, giving the misleading impression that archaeological process is only about excavation. </p>
<p>While the trowel and spade are an important inclusion in the archaeological toolkit, our core disciplinary definition – that of using humanity’s material remains to understand our history – means that we utilise many ways of engaging with this past.</p>
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<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/poor-health-in-aboriginal-children-after-european-colonisation-revealed-in-their-skeletal-remains-106616">Poor health in Aboriginal children after European colonisation revealed in their skeletal remains</a>
</strong>
</em>
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<hr>
<h2>A hole in the ground</h2>
<p>Of course, there’s nothing like a tidy hole in the ground to get people’s attention. Yet what often gets lost in the spotlight’s glow is that excavation is the last resort; it’s the end result of exhaustive research, planning and design. </p>
<p>In the research environment, excavations are triggered by having no, or only a low level of, other streams of evidence. </p>
<p>This similarly applies in mitigating the impacts of development, where the threat of an historical site’s partial or complete removal adds an element of evidence recovery. </p>
<p>Should the excavation be ill-thought out, or divorced from proper research goals, the results – and therefore the net benefit of the whole exercise – are lessened, if not completely lost. </p>
<p>This is particularly so for historical archaeologists, where the availability of documentary archives, oral testimony and the remaining landscape itself can reveal so much – before trowels meet dirt.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/essays-on-air-how-archaeology-helped-save-the-franklin-river-95211">Essays On Air: how archaeology helped save the Franklin River</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>Lots of work before digging</h2>
<p>For the historical archaeologist, a huge amount of work must take place before an excavation can even be planned, with invasive investigations sometimes not even considered. </p>
<p>In our particular field, the historical archaeology of Australia’s convict system (1788-1868), there is a vast amount of documentary evidence that requires interrogation before any archaeological process can begin. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/250357/original/file-20181213-110246-vpzg7o.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/250357/original/file-20181213-110246-vpzg7o.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/250357/original/file-20181213-110246-vpzg7o.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=382&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/250357/original/file-20181213-110246-vpzg7o.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=382&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/250357/original/file-20181213-110246-vpzg7o.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=382&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/250357/original/file-20181213-110246-vpzg7o.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=480&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/250357/original/file-20181213-110246-vpzg7o.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=480&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/250357/original/file-20181213-110246-vpzg7o.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=480&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Convicts at work turning the Australian bush into a tamed cultivated field (Thomas Lempriere ‘Philips Island from the N.W. extremity to the overseer’s hut, Macquarie Harbour’ circa 1828.)</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.libraries.tas.gov.au/allport/Pages/Allport.aspx">Allport Library and Museum of Fine Arts, Tasmania Archive and Heritage Office</a>, <span class="license">Author provided</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>As an example, in the Tasmanian Archives and Heritage Office, 35 metres of shelf space is taken up just by the official correspondence records for the period 1824-36. </p>
<p>Correspondence, reports, tables, diaries, newspapers, maps, plans, illustrations and photographs contain a wealth of information about the convict past. These can be used to query how people interacted with each other and the places, spaces and things that were created and modified as a result.</p>
<h2>The experience of convict labour</h2>
<p>We are currently over a year into a research project (called <a href="https://www.une.edu.au/about-une/faculty-of-humanities-arts-social-sciences-and-education/school-of-humanities/research/current-funded-research/landscapes-of-production-and-punishment">Landscapes of Production and Punishment</a>) that uses evidence of the built and natural landscape to understand the experience of convict labour on the Tasman Peninsula, Tasmania (1830-77). </p>
<p>At its peak, nearly 4,000 convicts and free people lived on the penal peninsula. Their day-to-day activities left traces in today’s landscape that we locate and analyse using historical research, remote sensing and archaeological field survey. </p>
<p>LiDAR (<a href="http://www.lidar-uk.com/how-lidar-works/">Light Detection and Ranging</a>, a form of 3D mapping) has been used to great effect, mapping large areas in high detail, which have then been surveyed to find the sites of convict labour. These include quarries, sawpits, charcoal-burning stands, brick pits, tramways, roads and paths, cultivated fields and boundaries.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/250359/original/file-20181213-110231-a16s65.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/250359/original/file-20181213-110231-a16s65.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/250359/original/file-20181213-110231-a16s65.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=439&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/250359/original/file-20181213-110231-a16s65.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=439&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/250359/original/file-20181213-110231-a16s65.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=439&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/250359/original/file-20181213-110231-a16s65.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=551&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/250359/original/file-20181213-110231-a16s65.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=551&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/250359/original/file-20181213-110231-a16s65.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=551&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">LiDAR image of the immediate area around the Port Arthur penal station, showing the.
range of activities carried out in the landscape</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.une.edu.au/about-une/faculty-of-humanities-arts-social-sciences-and-education/school-of-humanities/research/current-funded-research/landscapes-of-production-and-punishment">Landscapes of Production and Punishment, 2017-19</a>, <span class="license">Author provided</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/what-australias-convict-past-reveals-about-women-men-marriage-and-work-99444">What Australia's convict past reveals about women, men, marriage and work</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>No soil was disturbed</h2>
<p>Without turning a sod, we have recreated historic landscapes that have long lain dormant. </p>
<p>These have then been brought to life through the records of the system, which were historically used to account for the convicts and their labour. These include records about the lives of convicts whilst under sentence, as well as statistics on the products and processes of their labour. </p>
<p>This raw data shows us the outputs of industrial operations carried out by the convicts, like brick making, sandstone quarrying, lime burning and timber-getting, as well as the manufactories that produced leather, timber and metalwork goods by the thousand. </p>
<p>The records also locate convict and free settlers back into time and space, reconnecting them to the places and products of their labour.</p>
<p>As the project develops, excavation may be one of the archaeological methods used to retrieve our evidence – but only once we have exhausted all other avenues of enquiry. </p>
<h2>Controlled destruction</h2>
<p>As archaeologists, we have a responsibility to ensure that the controlled process of destruction that is an archaeological investigation has the greatest possible research return. </p>
<p>Without this due process, our work becomes unhinged from research frameworks. The excavations devolve into expensive and directionless treasure hunts from which little research value can be extracted. </p>
<p>The archaeologist’s profession – be it as an academic or working in the commercial and government sector – is more than excavation. It encompasses a diverse range of skills and techniques which can be deployed to aid in our central task of understanding the lives of those who came before.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/a-fresh-perspective-on-tasmania-a-terrible-and-beautiful-place-104248">A fresh perspective on Tasmania, a terrible and beautiful place</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p><em>The authors would like to thank Caroline Homer (Tasmanian Archives and Heritage Office) and David Roe, Jody Steele and Sylvana Szydzik (Port Arthur Historic Site Management Authority).</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/108679/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Richard Tuffin receives funding from the Australian Research Council DP170103642.</span></em></p><p class="fine-print"><em><span>Martin Gibbs receives funding from the Australian Research Council DP170103642.
He is a member of the Australasian Society for Historical Archaeology and the Australasian Institute for Maritime Archaeology</span></em></p>Without due process, archeological digs turn into into expensive and directionless treasure hunts from which little research value can be extracted.Richard Tuffin, Research Fellow, University of New EnglandMartin GIbbs, Professor of Australian Archaeology, University of New EnglandLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/897232018-01-08T15:40:22Z2018-01-08T15:40:22ZThe story of Australia’s last convicts<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/200997/original/file-20180105-26154-cwxaz1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=64%2C0%2C846%2C450&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Swan River Colony. </span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Jane_Eliza_Currie_-_Panorama_of_the_Swan_River_Settlement,_1831.jpg">Jane Eliza, Currie Panorama of the Swan River Settlement via Wikimedia Commons</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>The Hougoumont, the last ship to take convicts from the UK to Australia, docked in Fremantle, Western Australia, on January 9, 1868 – 150 years ago. It brought an end to a process which deposited about 168,000 convicted prisoners in Australia after it began in 1788.</p>
<p>Convicts had ceased to be sent to New South Wales and Van Diemen’s Land (Tasmania) decades earlier, but Western Australia still wanted convict labour to help with building projects. By the time the Hougoumont landed its shipment of 281 convicts, the Swan River penal colony in Western Australia had been reliant on convict labour for 18 years, and received almost 10,000 male prisoners from Britain. </p>
<p><div data-react-class="Tweet" data-react-props="{"tweetId":"559498537789317121"}"></div></p>
<p>The convict system may have ended with the arrival of the final convicts on the Hougoumont and the disbandment of Australia’s penal settlements, but the people who were its legacy lived on. Some prisoners achieved a kind of celebrity status. Mary Reibey, who was transported to Sydney, became a successful businesswoman and charitable benefactor, and is <a href="https://banknotes.rba.gov.au/australias-banknotes/banknotes-in-circulation/twenty-dollar/">commemorated</a> on the Australian $20 note. </p>
<p>In Western Australia some of Britain’s “bad” men made also “good”. Alfred Chopin, transported for receiving stolen goods, became a famed and sought-after <a href="http://digital.slv.vic.gov.au/view/action/nmets.do?DOCCHOICE=488581.xml&dvs=1515403220484%7E662&locale=en_GB&search_terms=&adjacency=&VIEWER_URL=/view/action/nmets.do?&DELIVERY_RULE_ID=4&divType=&usePid1=true&usePid2=true">photographer</a>. Embezzler John Rowland Jones became a reporter for the Western Australian government, and later editor of the West Australian newspaper. Their stories are extraordinary, but they have been used to present a generally favourable narrative which contrasts their heroism against the long-established stain that supposedly blighted those generations of Australians descended from convicts. </p>
<p>It is easy to find thousands of ex-convicts who left crime behind and forged new, ordinary, lives in Australia. Yet, while some ex-convicts became pillars of their communities, got married, and became much-loved and valued friends and neighbours, others struggled. </p>
<p>Our ongoing research shows that the impact of transportation could last a lifetime for those in Western Australia. Many convicts were left struggling with unemployment, personal relationships, and alcoholism, and drifted through both life and the colony. Many re-offended for decades after they were freed in Australia, but only committed low-level nuisance and public order offences – mainly drunkenness and vagrancy – rather than the more serious crimes for which they were initially transported. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/200992/original/file-20180105-26166-avne6w.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/200992/original/file-20180105-26166-avne6w.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=440&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/200992/original/file-20180105-26166-avne6w.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=440&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/200992/original/file-20180105-26166-avne6w.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=440&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/200992/original/file-20180105-26166-avne6w.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=553&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/200992/original/file-20180105-26166-avne6w.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=553&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/200992/original/file-20180105-26166-avne6w.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=553&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Fremantle Harbour in 1899.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Sailing_ships_Fremantle_Harbour.jpg">Nixon & Merrilees via Wikipedia</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The <a href="http://www.sro.wa.gov.au/archive-collection/collection/convict-records">Western Australian records</a> we’ve been using for our recent research and digitised for the <a href="http://www.digitalpanopticon.org">Digital Panopticon project</a> reveal the story of Samuel Speed, the last living Australian convict. He was transported to Western Australia in 1866 and died in 1938, just short of his 100th birthday.</p>
<h2>Speed’s story</h2>
<figure class="align-right ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/201128/original/file-20180108-142334-1mrescp.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/201128/original/file-20180108-142334-1mrescp.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=1228&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/201128/original/file-20180108-142334-1mrescp.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=1228&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/201128/original/file-20180108-142334-1mrescp.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=1228&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/201128/original/file-20180108-142334-1mrescp.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1543&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/201128/original/file-20180108-142334-1mrescp.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1543&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/201128/original/file-20180108-142334-1mrescp.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1543&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Samuel Speed.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/76057785?searchTerm=%22samuel%20Speed%22&searchLimits=">The Mirror (Perth), 1938.</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Speed was born in Birmingham, England in 1841. He had one brother and one sister, but little else about his family or early life is known. He was in his early twenties when he was tried in Oxfordshire in 1863 for setting fire to a haystack. Homeless and begging for food, he had committed arson in order to get arrested and spend some time in a warm cell. He was sentenced to seven years of convict transportation to Australia.</p>
<p>Speed was conditionally released in 1869 and was allowed to live outside of the prison walls and undertake employment, provided he did not commit any further offences. He found work as a general servant in Western Australia and was finally granted his certificate of freedom two years later. He went on to help build bridges across the vast Swan River, and spent the rest of his working life at various companies around the state. He was never re-convicted of any offence and went on to live a perfectly ordinary and law-abiding life, only coming to the <a href="https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/76057783?searchTerm=%22samuel%20Speed%22&searchLimits=">attention of the papers</a> a few months before his death. </p>
<p>By that time, old and frail, and dependent on the care of attendants, Speed’s memories of transportation were faded. Among the few recollections of his former life he remembered that:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Among those unfortunates transported … were men of every walk of life; doctors, lawyers, shirt-soiled gentlemen, and social outcasts tipped together in the hothouse of humanity that was the Swan River Colony.</p>
</blockquote>
<h2>A kind of rehabilitation</h2>
<p>Speed lived long enough to see his former penal settlement become part of the federated commonwealth of Australia. He witnessed the death of an old archaic system, and the birth of a new and confident Australian nation. </p>
<p>To the early 20th-century press, his life was a gratifying confirmation that they system had worked. Western Australia had taken corrupt British convicts and turned them into productive members of society. The report of his death in Perth’s <a href="https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/58995981?searchTerm=%22samuel%20Speed%22&searchLimits=">Sunday Times confidently asserted</a> that Speed’s conduct was all that a reputable citizen should aspire to. </p>
<p>He was not by any means the only ex-convict who stayed out of trouble, however, as our research is showing, his behaviour was far better than most of his fellow ex-convicts. It was also better than the <a href="https://www.australia.gov.au/about-australia/australian-story/austn-gold-rush">rumoured conduct of free settlers</a> who flooded into Western Australia after gold was discovered in the 1880s and 1890s.</p>
<p>Our preliminary research is showing that about 80% of men who arrived on the last convict ship (discounting 67 <a href="https://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/news/our-last-convicts-were-irish-political-prisoners-sent-out-on-the-hougoumont/news-story/887663d4e45faa883a2122d81a0846e8">Irish political prisoners</a>) committed either a regulatory infraction such as absconding, possession of contraband or violent conduct, or a criminal offence during their time under sentence. Given the number of convicts who re-roffended both during and after their sentence, it’s better to think of the transportation system as encouraging enough reform for society to progress. The convicts as a cohort may not all have rehabilitated, but few committed serious offences after they were transported. </p>
<p>As for Speed, he died in Perth’s Old Men’s Home in 1938. Seventy years after the last British convict ship arrived in Australia, the convict period had finally ended.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/89723/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Barry Godfrey receives funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Council. </span></em></p><p class="fine-print"><em><span>Lucy Williams does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>A century and a half after the last convict ship docked in Australia, new research is uncovering what happened to those who were transported.Barry Godfrey, Professor of Social Justice, University of LiverpoolLucy Williams, Postdoctoral Research Associate, University of Liverpool, England, U.K., University of LiverpoolLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/883212017-12-11T19:14:13Z2017-12-11T19:14:13ZDebauchery on the fatal shore: the sex lives of Australia’s convicts<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/198490/original/file-20171211-27693-1i0hadv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">A chain gang of convicts in Hobart</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">State Library of NSW</span></span></figcaption></figure><p><em>Welcome to our series on sexual histories, in which our authors explore changing sexual mores from antiquity to today.</em></p>
<hr>
<p>In 1787, when Arthur Phillip was preparing to lead the First Fleet to establish the British colony in New South Wales he wrote to his superiors to sort out what powers he would have over convicts and the soldiers sent to guard them. At one point, he addressed his power of life and death. Only two offences, he thought, deserved the death penalty – murder and sodomy:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>For either of these crimes I would wish to confine the criminal until an opportunity offered of delivering him to the natives of New Zealand, and let them eat him. The dread of this will operate much stronger than the fear of death.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>It might not look like it, but Phillip was expressing a rather liberal point of view here. In Britain at this time, there were hundreds of offences that attracted the death penalty. In reducing his list to two he was flying in the face of all common sense. But it is striking that sodomy is on his little list.</p>
<p>While the administration took a dim view of same-sex desire, sex between men and between women flourished in Australia’s convict system - and thanks to the watchful eye of the colonial government, we know much about it. </p>
<h2>Crime and punishment</h2>
<p>Phillip’s views on sodomy were not an unreasonable position at the time. The Christian Bible was very clear that men who lay with men as with women were deserving of death; and the law – which had been instituted by Henry VIII, that great defender of the nation’s morals – agreed.</p>
<p>As it happened, Phillip, who served as governor until 1792, never got to put his policy into practice. There were no executions for sodomy; nor was anyone shipped off to New Zealand. Watkin Tench, a First Fleeter, opined that there were few “crimes of a deep dye” in the first four years of the colony and that “murder and unnatural sins rank not hitherto in the catalogue of [the convicts’] enormities”.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/198496/original/file-20171211-27689-1p7iz8f.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/198496/original/file-20171211-27689-1p7iz8f.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/198496/original/file-20171211-27689-1p7iz8f.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/198496/original/file-20171211-27689-1p7iz8f.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/198496/original/file-20171211-27689-1p7iz8f.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/198496/original/file-20171211-27689-1p7iz8f.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/198496/original/file-20171211-27689-1p7iz8f.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/198496/original/file-20171211-27689-1p7iz8f.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The convict ruins at Port Arthur.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Shutterstock.com</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The first prosecution only came in 1796 when Francis Wilkinson, a labourer, was charged with “that most horrid detestable and sodomitic crime (among Christians not to be named) called Buggery”. We don’t know his fate. The first execution for sodomy that we know of was of Alexander Brown in 1828. This execution is perhaps the first sign of a coming storm. Historian Robert French estimates that about 20 men were executed as sodomites between 1828 and 1863.</p>
<p>By the 1830s, the free settlers in NSW were desperate to put an end to the transportation of convicts to the colony. There were many reasons for this, but one most forcefully put was that it was undermining the moral development of the colony. In the thinking of the time, criminality, including sodomy, was seen as a physical degeneracy passed from generation to generation. So convicts were seen by very nature to be poor stock with which to colonise the country.</p>
<p>And the disproportion of men to women was seen as leaving the convict classes prey to the temptation of sodomy. The Chaplain of Fremantle Prison wrote in 1854,</p>
<blockquote>
<p>What will ensue when we have thousands of men cooped up in the colony without wives and unable to seek them elsewhere. Evil will be the result – too humiliating for the mind to dwell upon– too revolting to name. … That moral evil of far greater magnitude, which has of old brought down the signal judgment of Heaven, will result.</p>
</blockquote>
<h2>Love in plain sight</h2>
<p>But if the anxieties of the authorities had unleashed a wave of debate and discussion about the dangers of debauchery, it is important to be aware that there is another way of looking at this – recognising that sodomy was also part of the lived experience of convict men and women, and that their experience was not at all the same as that of the horrified authorities. </p>
<p>Where respectable colonists saw filth and moral evil, there is evidence that convict women and men experienced companionship, affection and attachment, which included sexual love. Consider this letter, written by a convict in 1846 on the eve of his being hanged:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I hope you wont forget me when I am far away and all my bones is moldered away I have not closed an eye since I lost sight of you your precious sight was always a welcome and loving charming spectacle. Dear Jack I value Death nothing but it is in leaving you my dear behind and no one to look after you … The only thing that grieves me love is when I think of the pleasant nights we have had together. I hope you wont fall in love with no other man when I am dead and I remain your True and loving affectionate Lover.</p>
</blockquote>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/198492/original/file-20171211-27683-a2ksbv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/198492/original/file-20171211-27683-a2ksbv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/198492/original/file-20171211-27683-a2ksbv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/198492/original/file-20171211-27683-a2ksbv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/198492/original/file-20171211-27683-a2ksbv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/198492/original/file-20171211-27683-a2ksbv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/198492/original/file-20171211-27683-a2ksbv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/198492/original/file-20171211-27683-a2ksbv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The convicts’ barracks at Hyde Park in Sydney.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/adam_jones/11215659254">Adam Jones/Flickr</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">CC BY-SA</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>We know quite a lot about love between convicts because they were being constantly monitored by the authorities. In 1841 there was an inquiry into a riot at the Launceston female factory (prison/workhouse) which discovered that sexual relationships between women were common – “depraved” behaviour, “unnatural connection” and the like. </p>
<p>One witness identified six female couples by name; others suggested there were anything from eight to 30 such couples. It was said that there were cases where a woman, sent out of the factory and into private service, would reoffend, so as to be sent back to where her lover was. When the authorities tried to break up couples, women would refuse to leave their cells, or even riot.</p>
<p>The medical superintendent of the Ross female factory – who habitually intercepted the women’s letters – reported on “warmth and impetuosity of the feelings excited in women towards each other, when allied in such unholy bonds”. (It is highly likely that he used the term “unholy bonds” having in mind the “holy bonds” of matrimony, suggesting that these women saw themselves as married).</p>
<p>An 1837 British parliamentary inquiry into the transportation system heard much evidence of the extent of debauchery among the convicts. The inquiry came to be believe there was a semi-underground subculture (a “demi-monde”) in existence. </p>
<p>New arrivals at the Hyde Park barracks, including younger men, put themselves selves under protection of older men – and adopted names such as Kitty, Nancy, Bett. On Norfolk Island, Robert Stuart reported as many as 150 male couples, who referred to themselves openly as “man and wife”. (Same-sex marriage is not as new as we might think).</p>
<p>Relationships among the convicts were of course many different things: situational – a desire for sexual outlet in the absence of the other sex - or coercive, expressing power over someone lower down the pecking order. </p>
<p>They may have been about the more desirable trading sex and affection for protection and advancement. All of these applied, of course, just as much to heterosexual relationships. But as with these, love between men or between women was often enough just that – love.</p>
<hr><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/88321/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Graham Willett does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Governor Arthur Phillip regarded sodomy as one of the worst offences that convicts under his charge could commit. But sex between men and between women flourished in convict Australia.Graham Willett, Honorary Fellow, School of Historical and Philosophical Studies, The University of MelbourneLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/858292017-10-26T19:11:20Z2017-10-26T19:11:20ZFriday essay: journey through the apocalypse<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/191750/original/file-20171024-13451-18ph4hm.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Heaven only knows what sort of excursion Wooredy and Truganini thought they had embarked upon on when G.A. Robinson took them to Recherche Bay in 1830 to make an overland trek to the Tasmanian west coast. </span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Cassandra Pybus</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Half buried in the sand, uprooted stalks of kelp are like splashes of dark blood against the white quartzite, ground fine as talc. In the translucent shallows, tendrils of kelp flounce lazily as the water gradually turns to turquoise then a deep Prussian blue at the horizon. Behind the crescent of beach, matted tentacles of spongy pigface disguise accumulated detritus of crayfish, oyster, abalone and scallop shells, rubbish middens thousands of years in the making.</p>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/191559/original/file-20171024-20341-1v5a861.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/191559/original/file-20171024-20341-1v5a861.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/191559/original/file-20171024-20341-1v5a861.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/191559/original/file-20171024-20341-1v5a861.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/191559/original/file-20171024-20341-1v5a861.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/191559/original/file-20171024-20341-1v5a861.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/191559/original/file-20171024-20341-1v5a861.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/191559/original/file-20171024-20341-1v5a861.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Recherche Bay.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Author provided</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Known as Recherche Bay, this exquisite table-shaped body of water in the southeast corner of Tasmania was named by the French explorer Bruni D’Entrecasteaux who rested his ships Recherche and Esperance here in April and May 1792. Before the French arrived, this place was an important ritual site for the Nuenonne people, who journeyed in bark canoes from Bruny Island to meet with the Needwondee and Ninine people, who travelled overland from the west. For millennia they made this trip: the same seasonal migration; the same ritual feast. Not any more. Not since Ria Warrawah was loosed among them.</p>
<p>Wooredy, the last elder of the Nuenonne, saw it with his own eyes. In the cosmology of the original Tasmanians, Wooredy explained, Ria Warrawah was the intangible force of evil that could infest all things. Since the beginning of time, Ria Warrawah was held in check by the great ancestor who lived in the sky, maintaining the world in precarious balance until two avatars of evil fashioned as clouds pulling small islands floated into this very bay. As a small boy he had been transfixed by the sight of the French ships floating in from the ocean, and disgorging onto the land strange creatures just like the returned dead who had been drained of colour by the rigours of their journey. He watched as they walked about to collect water and make a fearsome sound with a stick that spat fire before returning to their floating islands.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/191545/original/file-20171024-20346-1c6wppc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/191545/original/file-20171024-20346-1c6wppc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/191545/original/file-20171024-20346-1c6wppc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=734&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/191545/original/file-20171024-20346-1c6wppc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=734&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/191545/original/file-20171024-20346-1c6wppc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=734&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/191545/original/file-20171024-20346-1c6wppc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=922&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/191545/original/file-20171024-20346-1c6wppc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=922&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/191545/original/file-20171024-20346-1c6wppc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=922&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">A portrait of Wooredy by Thomas Bock, drawn in 1831.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">British Museum</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>He never saw those ships again, but when he was a young man on a hunting trip to the northern tip of Bruny Island, Wooredy observed two more such apparitions of evil float into the river estuary on the mainland opposite. This time the dead men came ashore and remained there, cutting down the trees to build huts and disturbing the ground all about. Plenty more of them arrived. And the Nuenonne began to die.</p>
<p>Thirty years after he watched the ships Lady Nelson and Ocean enter the estuary of the Derwent River, Wooredy was still hunting on his traditional country. He was by then a renowned warrior in his mid-forties who went about naked and wore his hair in the traditional fashion – long greased ringlets coloured with ochre that fell over his eyes like a mop. Wooredy was a cleverman, so knowledgeable in ritual and healing that the white men who came to his island called him the Doctor. Even he proved no match for the epidemic illness that between April and December of 1829 swept away nearly everyone of his clan.</p>
<p>Wooredy was not the last of the Nuenonne. That terrible distinction belonged to his second wife, Truganini, a woman whose name is vaguely familiar to most Australians, having achieved undesired celebrity as “the last of her race”.</p>
<h2>An irresistible force</h2>
<p>For most of my adult life I have been compelled by the story of Wooredy and Truganini, people who lived through a psychological and cultural transition more extreme than most human imagination could conjure. Both were witness and participant in a process of apocalyptic destruction without parallel in modern colonial history. Their experience has invariably been told through the prism of regretful colonial imperative, a rueful backward glance at the tragic collateral damage of inexorable historical forces. That is not a narrative I wish to perpetuate. Wooredy and Truganini compel my attention and emotional engagement because it is to them I owe a charmed existence in the temperate paradise where I now live and where my family has lived for generations.</p>
<p>My great-great-grandfather was fresh off the boat from England in 1829 when he was handed an unencumbered free land grant of over a thousand hectares of Nuenonne hunting grounds. On this land he prospered and put down deep roots, while the traditional owners were repaid with exile, anguish and despair.</p>
<p>Richard Pybus may have been the first white man granted freehold title to a large part of Bruny Island, but other grant holders followed soon enough. Next came George Augustus Robinson, an ambitious tradesman and self-styled missionary who threw over his successful business as a builder to become “conciliator” of the Indigenous Tasmanians. He had lofty ambitions that he could teach these ancient people to shuck off their savage ways and become good Christian serfs.</p>
<p>My ancestor’s neighbour was a most problematic fellow. Tempting though it is for me to despise the man, I remain immensely grateful for his voluminous daily journals that have given me a glimpse into the lived experience of Wooredy and Truganini, who were his close companions for 12 years as guides and intermediaries in the audacious project of conciliation that he called “the friendly mission”.</p>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/191548/original/file-20171024-20397-1fopb8w.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/191548/original/file-20171024-20397-1fopb8w.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/191548/original/file-20171024-20397-1fopb8w.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=898&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/191548/original/file-20171024-20397-1fopb8w.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=898&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/191548/original/file-20171024-20397-1fopb8w.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=898&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/191548/original/file-20171024-20397-1fopb8w.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1129&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/191548/original/file-20171024-20397-1fopb8w.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1129&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/191548/original/file-20171024-20397-1fopb8w.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1129&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Thomas Bock’s portrait of Truganini, also painted in 1831.</span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Heaven only knows what sort of excursion Wooredy and Truganini thought they had embarked upon on 29 January 1830 when Robinson took them from their island to sail to Recherche Bay for an overland trek to the west coast. Since the beginning of time the Nuenonne had taken this journey in their bark canoes, while nomadic treks through the southwest were part of the timeless, seasonal pattern of their traditional life. Such a journey encompassed return, a completion, in accordance with the natural cycles of the environment. A journey for the purpose of reaching a destination was entirely new. Not to return would have been unthinkable.</p>
<p>For more than 40 years, Wooredy had made trips to and from his island and knew Recherche Bay held the malevolent spirit of Ria Warrawah, embodied in a carved tree that was left by the French visitors. The day after their arrival, while hunting he came across a decayed body of a woman that showed no sign of violence. Ria Warrawah had caught her, he was sure of it. When the body was identified as a Ninine woman on a visit from the west coast who had become ill and been abandoned to die alone, Robinson was dismayed that his Tasmanian companions were strangely unmoved by this apparent callousness. It was yet another display of their belief “that no human means can avert the doom to which they are consigned”.</p>
<p>This stubborn fatalism about the irresistible force of Ria Warrawah deeply rankled him, even though Wooredy had given him a potent lesson in the awesome power of Ria Warrawah as they were sailing to this tranquil bay. During the trip Wooredy identified all the land that passed before his eyes as the country of three interconnected clans – the Mellukerdee of the Huon River, the Lyluequonny of Southport and the Needwondee of Cox’s Bight – all of them gone within the span of Wooredy’s adult life. This land was empty, he explained. Nobody left.</p>
<h2>Plunging into the wild</h2>
<p>Mid-morning on 3 February 1830, Robinson set out with his Tasmanian guides as well as a handful of convict retainers to walk overland to the west coast. The sun was shining and he estimated the distance to Port Davey to be about 60 miles, which would take them about three days. Truganini had relatives among the Ninine people of Port Davey and was anxious to get going but Wooredy was not so keen, displaying an inherent hostility toward the toogee – his collective name for people from the west coast — that Robinson found disturbing. It was an enmity he shared with the six other Tasmanian men in the party who were aliens in this country where they did not know the language or customs.</p>
<p>The steady, reliable Wooredy was considered by Robinson to be his “loyal and trusted companion”, and next he looked to the “respectful and compliant” Kickerterpoller, whose command of English and knowledge of European customs made him an ideal negotiator in Robinson’s eyes. This young man was from the Paredarererme clan from Oyster Bay, stolen from his people when he was about nine and given to a settler as a farmhand. As a youth he ran away to join in a guerrilla war before being captured in 1824 when he became a guide for the roving parties.</p>
<p>Kickerterpoller was very familiar with this kind of expedition and knew only too well the coercive, violent ways of white men. Although the mission was not a paramilitary organisation like the roving parties, and no one was openly armed, the convicts all carried guns and the brace of pistols Robinson had hidden in his knapsack told him it was not so friendly. Suspicion aside, Kickerterpoller had reason to cleave to Robinson, at least in the short term. Instead of being confined in a foetid gaol, the Tasmanians were at large in empty country where they could hunt freely. And no one was shooting at them.</p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/191560/original/file-20171024-20346-bayn89.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/191560/original/file-20171024-20346-bayn89.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/191560/original/file-20171024-20346-bayn89.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/191560/original/file-20171024-20346-bayn89.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/191560/original/file-20171024-20346-bayn89.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/191560/original/file-20171024-20346-bayn89.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/191560/original/file-20171024-20346-bayn89.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/191560/original/file-20171024-20346-bayn89.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">An aerial view of the terrain crossed.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Author provided</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>No white man had ever attempted an overland route to the west coast, and Robinson knew nothing of the territory before him. Among the colonists, an enduring perception had taken hold that the southwest was a terrible place, a geographical extension of the inhuman horrors of the penal settlement in Macquarie Harbour. Everyone knew the stories of convicts driven beyond endurance by the cruelties of the penal system who had escaped into the hinterland never to be seen again. One convict bolter who survived his encounter with this terrible land was sustained throughout his ordeal by eating the companions he murdered. If the rigours of this hellish environment could drive a Christian white man to cannibal depravity, why would any white man willingly set foot upon it?</p>
<p>George Augustus Robinson was no ordinary white man. He had a hankering to venture into the heart of darkness and immerse himself in the challenges offered by the vast wilderness of the new world. He would reason to himself that his object in plunging into the wild was to shine the light of God into the darkness, while his wholehearted embrace of untamed nature revealed a passion for elemental experience much at odds with his evangelical posturing. All along the rugged way, his steps were driven by a voracious ambition to be feted and admired by the settler elite who had showered derision upon his enterprise. He was determined to return to their small world as a conquering hero.</p>
<p>Walking in single file, with the convicts bringing up the rear, the party followed the creek westward for a mile or so until they reached a flat plain that stretched for many miles, promising easy walking. To everyone’s dismay, they almost immediately sank into tepid water that rose to their calves. The pretty olive-and rust-coloured grasses that stretched as far as their eyes could see were growing in a porous layer of peat that sat on a hard quartzite base, trapping the voluminous rainfall into a watery bog. For hours the party pulled their legs through marshland that at times sucked them down to their knees. Reaching higher ground they were only slightly less dismayed to find an almost impenetrable belt of thick eucalypt scrub.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/191556/original/file-20171024-20385-12ppxts.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/191556/original/file-20171024-20385-12ppxts.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/191556/original/file-20171024-20385-12ppxts.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/191556/original/file-20171024-20385-12ppxts.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/191556/original/file-20171024-20385-12ppxts.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/191556/original/file-20171024-20385-12ppxts.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/191556/original/file-20171024-20385-12ppxts.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/191556/original/file-20171024-20385-12ppxts.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">A buttongrass plain in south-west Tasmania.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Author provided.</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Just after dawn next day they located “the native track” that led to the south coast. The track had not been used for many months, and in places was completely swallowed up by rainforest – which meant clambering over fallen trees that were slippery with moss, sometimes crawling through on hands and knees, then a steep descent down a cliff face where almost every step caused a cascade of small boulders. After much slipping and stumbling they finally reached the shore, where they made camp just as huge heavy drops of rain began to fall, and persisted all through the night.</p>
<p>At sunrise, greatly disheartened and drenched to the bone, the expedition set off once more, climbing up and over rugged country covered with dense forest, punctuated by huge outcrops of barren rock with jagged edges sharp as knives. When they reached the coast they were sweating profusely under the baking sunshine as they walked for several hours along a wide arc of squeaky, shifting sand pounded by heavy surf. Lagging a mile or two behind Robinson and his guides, the burdened convicts stumbled and cursed. That night, camped at the bottom of a deep coastal ravine, Robinson was very apprehensive. They had covered no more that 20 miles, and supplies were running dangerously low. There were no people around to render assistance. Along the way they had passed many bark huts of the Needwondee, all deserted. Wooredy explained these people were snatched away by Ria Warrawah.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/191558/original/file-20171024-20357-19mc29l.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/191558/original/file-20171024-20357-19mc29l.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/191558/original/file-20171024-20357-19mc29l.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=389&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/191558/original/file-20171024-20357-19mc29l.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=389&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/191558/original/file-20171024-20357-19mc29l.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=389&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/191558/original/file-20171024-20357-19mc29l.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=489&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/191558/original/file-20171024-20357-19mc29l.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=489&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/191558/original/file-20171024-20357-19mc29l.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=489&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">A replica Needwondee hut.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Author provided</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The fourth day involved negotiating a passage across a daunting mountain range that consisted of a series of polished quartz summits. Much of the time they progressed on hands and knees, clinging onto the wiry tufts of grass or pitiful, wind-stunted trees. After persevering all day in this unforgiving terrain without any food, the guides were at the point of total exhaustion. Truganini could barely walk. Kickerterpoller was no longer compliant, boldly remonstrating that this was not the way locals travelled. Even a roving party that moved through cleared country on level ground did not go at such a pace.</p>
<p>The indefatigable Wooredy was the only one not prone with exhaustion. Scanning the ragged, precipitous coastline his sharp eyes located the supply schooner lying offshore in a bay about six miles ahead. White men called this place Louisa Bay, but Wooredy knew it to be where the creator spirit Droemerdeener fell from the sky into the sea. Like Recherche Bay, it was once a ritual meeting place for all the clans of the south-east, and it held extensive shell middens and hidden rock paintings. Here was where his father and grandfather built the sturdy canoes they took to distant Maatsuyker Island to hunt for seals. There was no more hunting for seals on Maatsuyker. In a few short years the seal colony had been wiped out by the same rapacious white men who had stolen so many of the Nuenonne women.</p>
<p>Re-energised by the prospect of food, Robinson followed his guides in a headlong scramble down the mountainside, reaching Louisa Bay by late afternoon. Two hours later the shattered convicts arrived. Watching Truganini gleefully diving for crayfish, he ruefully acknowledged how perilously close they had come to starvation. The rigours of the journey convinced him that he would not survive the trip to Port Davey without reliance on Indigenous food supplies and local knowledge of the bush. He would have to defer to their way of doing things.</p>
<h2>A hideous irony</h2>
<p>For the next six weeks Robinson kept to the meandering, leisurely pace of the Tasmanians, for whom travel was subordinate to the requirements of hunting and gathering. He was growing increasingly frustrated at his failure to make contact with the elusive Ninine. Although evidence of their fires and their grass-covered huts were plentiful, the people kept well out of sight. Truganini knew how to find her relatives, but was in no hurry. Slyly deflecting Robinson’s pursuit, she spent her time diving for crayfish, oyster and abalone or collecting small wild plums, sweet red berries and edible roots. The men went hunting for wallaby, wild duck and an elusive animal somewhat bigger than a dog, with distinctive stripes on its back. It was a kind of hyena, Robinson thought.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/191551/original/file-20171024-20341-1fat3pi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/191551/original/file-20171024-20341-1fat3pi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/191551/original/file-20171024-20341-1fat3pi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=922&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/191551/original/file-20171024-20341-1fat3pi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=922&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/191551/original/file-20171024-20341-1fat3pi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=922&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/191551/original/file-20171024-20341-1fat3pi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1158&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/191551/original/file-20171024-20341-1fat3pi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1158&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/191551/original/file-20171024-20341-1fat3pi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1158&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Bust of Truganini by Benjamin Law, 1836.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Australian Museum</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>As the food became more plentiful, the difficulties of the terrain got greater. Moving further westward toward Bathurst Harbour meant pushing into mountainous country covered with almost horizontal forest. Beset by mizzling rain that never let up, they were forced to crawl along precipices or wade for miles through thigh-high water. Impervious to the brutal terrain and the perpetual rain, Robinson found the experience excruciatingly uncomfortable, yet utterly exhilarating.</p>
<p>Robinson was sticking close to his guides, sleeping around their fires and sharing their provisions of abalone, crayfish and fresh wallaby meat, while the scornful convicts made camp a considerable distance away and spurned the Tasmanians’ fresh food in favour of their Christian food of spoiled potatoes and salted meat. Nor did they want any part of the heathen singing and dancing that went on every night at the Tasmanians’ camp, with Robinson as a fascinated participant. He listened attentively as Wooredy told of the exploits of the creator spirits who made man from the kangaroo, writing up copious notes in his journal. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/191555/original/file-20171024-20335-1ilj3qh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/191555/original/file-20171024-20335-1ilj3qh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/191555/original/file-20171024-20335-1ilj3qh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/191555/original/file-20171024-20335-1ilj3qh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/191555/original/file-20171024-20335-1ilj3qh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/191555/original/file-20171024-20335-1ilj3qh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/191555/original/file-20171024-20335-1ilj3qh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/191555/original/file-20171024-20335-1ilj3qh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The mountainous country was covered with almost horizontal forest.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Author provided.</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>As the stories were sung with a repeated, chanted chorus, Robinson cleverly inserted himself into these nightly rituals by joining in the chanting. And he played his flute, which was a great hit. The Tasmanians were all having a fine time. After years of terror and harassment they were back in the bush, reviving a traditional way of life that revolved around hunting and ritual. And Mister Robinson was there to make sure the surly white men with guns were kept a safe distance.</p>
<p>So began a system of mutual support and protection between Robinson and his Tasmanian guides that for Wooredy and Truganini lasted 12 years. They might not have properly comprehended Robinson’s intentions, but they understood that their relationship with him had undergone a profound change since leaving Louisa Bay. In contrast to his earlier behaviour, where his efforts had been to make them like himself, in the wilderness it seemed as if he was in the process of becoming one of them. </p>
<p>Wooredy took the lead in an overt effort to induct Robinson into the Tasmanians’ way of life, leading the nightly ritual re-enactments of how animal spirits formed the world, how they left their recognisable mark on the landscape and how they emerged in the form of man and other species to inhabit that landscape. In Wooredy’s spellbinding stories, and in their song and dance, the Tasmanians asserted the palpable reality of their world, as opposed to Robinson’s abstract talk of God, heaven and hell.</p>
<p>This reciprocal relationship between Robinson and his Tasmanian guides had all the elements of tragedy. In his detailed accounts of their interactions, Robinson revealed a genuine interest in Tasmanian culture and an affectionate regard for the people. He slept with them, sang with them, hunted with them, learnt their language and marvelled at their mental and physical adaptation to the natural world. The hideous irony was that despite the intense pleasure he took in this elemental experience, which caused his impoverished puritan spirit to soar, Robinson sought to ingratiate himself to secure their trust so he could use them to entice the remaining Indigenous population into his custody. </p>
<p>Fancying himself as an ethnographer, he was also making a study of the curious ways of the primitive Tasmanians in the wild for the book he intended to publish. His journal entries offer not a glimmer of awareness that his travel companions might think they were in a relationship of mutual obligation.</p>
<p>Robinson could invest his companions with fundamental human feelings of sadness and pleasure, even affection and loyalty, but to grant them complex reasoning and intricate social relationships would have destroyed the whole rationale of his activity. The idea that Wooredy and Truganini might have regarded themselves as equal partners in his enterprise would never have entered his head.</p>
<h2>Captives already</h2>
<p>In the middle of March the party reached the vast waterway of Bathurst Harbour. They had been walking for six weeks without making contact. The inhabitants of the southwest proved no more accommodating than the savage landscape, “fleeing before my approach as the clouds flee before a tempest”, Robinson wrote with heavy exasperation. It was at Bathurst Harbour that one of the guides spotted a flag fluttering on the shore, causing Robinson to experience a surge of expectation. The flag was revealed to be a pathetic, desperate signal planted by three escaped convicts from the penitentiary at Sarah Island, many miles to the north. Their bleached skeletons, still wearing tatters of government-issue clothing, were an unsettling reminder of how inhospitable this place could be for white intruders.</p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/191552/original/file-20171024-20346-1g0uixb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/191552/original/file-20171024-20346-1g0uixb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/191552/original/file-20171024-20346-1g0uixb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=922&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/191552/original/file-20171024-20346-1g0uixb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=922&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/191552/original/file-20171024-20346-1g0uixb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=922&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/191552/original/file-20171024-20346-1g0uixb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1158&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/191552/original/file-20171024-20346-1g0uixb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1158&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/191552/original/file-20171024-20346-1g0uixb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1158&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Bust of Wooredy by Benjamin Law, 1835.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Australia Museum</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Squatting on the ground to register this grim find, Wooredy suddenly pointed to smoke rising in the distance hills. The sight of smoke set Robinson’s heart racing all over again – at last the Ninine were in sight. Wooredy and Truganini set off in hot pursuit, and in the following days they made contact with the Ninine time and time again, but could persuade only two young women to come with them to meet Mister Robinson. The rest of the group simply melted away into the bush. These two women were entertained with the baubles Robinson gave to them and were also utterly beguiled by the sound of his flute, but it took days to persuade them to take him to their hiding place.</p>
<p>Pushing through tough scrub, Robinson followed the two women for a very long way, until they reached a hidden clearing. After several loud hoots, ten naked women emerged, with six children in tow, followed a little later by ten men, all of them standing over six feet tall, naked and carrying spears, with dead wallaby thrown over their shoulders. Wooredy told how he had walked all day to meet with them and how Robinson was constantly calling out gozee, meaning “make haste”, which caused great mirth. They kept repeating “gozee” to Robinson, then collapsing into gleeful laughter. Cautiously they sniffed at the biscuit he offered, before handing it back, then they amused themselves stroking and prodding his pale skin and meticulously examining the blue coat he was wearing.</p>
<p>These ten families made an impressive group, with everyone in excellent health and high spirits. This jocular band agreed to accompany Robinson back to his camp, laughing and shouting all along the way, until they breasted the hill above Kelly’s Basin. Suddenly they stopped in their tracks and fell silent. Coming toward them were a group of white men in a boat.</p>
<p>Robinson was livid with anger at the curious convicts who had disobeyed his order to stay out of sight. Knowing he had no hope of inducing the Ninine to take another step, he went alone to his camp. Early next morning he anxiously climbed the same hill and was distressed to see that the Ninine had slipped away. Wooredy and Truganini followed on their tracks for next two weeks, being led in a game of hide-and-seek, making sporadic contact with the Ninine, only to have them disappear at whim.</p>
<p>Palpably frustrated by his failure to effect “conciliation” with the local population, Robinson was equally perplexed by the attitude of his guides. He was alarmed when the Tasmanian men told him they could round up the Ninine for him if only he would give them his pistols. Alternatively, his convict retainers advised that alcohol would be the most effective weapon, explaining “it would only be necessary to make them drunk and you could take them anywhere”. </p>
<p>Robinson expected this kind of response from convicts, which is why he kept them far away from any possible contact, and he was alert to the potential antagonism from the men from other language groups, but it was beyond his comprehension that Wooredy should want to capture a people to whom he was closely related. Robinson began to suspect his loyal and trusted companion could be causing the extreme wariness of the Ninene, especially when he heard Truganini warn them that her husband “did not like toogee”.</p>
<p>It was a genuine shock to Robinson to realise that all his expedition team thought the purpose of their travail in this rugged, wet and wind-ravaged landscape was to capture the inhabitants. No one appeared to understand him when he reiterated that his friendly mission was merely to gain the confidence of the west-coast clans. Taking captives was never his intention, he insisted, oblivious as always to the implicit message he was giving. His Tasmanian guides were already captives. Captivity was the new order in which they lived and it was apparent to them that even the white men who carried the supplies were captives.</p>
<p>To what end had Robinson marched them across the island, his bemused companions might have wondered, if not capture and removal? What other motivation could there be for such an insane expedition through this barely penetrable wilderness?</p>
<p><em>This is an extract from the essay Journey through the apocalypse
published in <a href="https://griffithreview.com/editions/storied-lives-novella-project-v/">Griffith Review 58: Storied Lives</a>.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/85829/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Cassandra Pybus is the recipient of the Peter Blazey Fellowship in the Faculty of Arts at the University of Melbourne and has received funding from the Australian Research Council, The Literature Board of the Australia Council, The Fulbright Foundation, the Leverhulme Trust and the Thomas Jefferson Foundation.</span></em></p>Wooredy and his second wife Truganini set off into the Tasmanian wilderness with settler George Robinson in 1830, on a “conciliatory” mission to find other original Tasmanians. Their stories bear witness to a psychological and cultural transition without parallel in modern colonialism.Cassandra Pybus, Adjunct Professor in History, University of TasmaniaLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/840062017-09-17T19:47:36Z2017-09-17T19:47:36ZChildren of convicts transported to Australia grew up taller than their peers in the UK<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/186061/original/file-20170914-9015-1aztlvb.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Mark Jeffrey, transported prisoner.</span> </figcaption></figure><p>The children of convicts born in the Australian colonies grew up taller than they would have done if their parents had not been sent into exile, our <a href="https://www.digitalpanopticon.org/Intergenerational_Inequalities">latest study</a> shows.</p>
<p>Male Tasmanian-born prisoners, arrested in the second half of the nineteenth century, were over four centimetres taller, on average, than transported convicts. And they were nearly two centimetres taller than free migrants who were born in Britain and Ireland. This height advantage provides a vivid illustration of the difference in conditions experienced by old- and new-world working-class people in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. </p>
<p>The differences in height are the result of <a href="https://www.researchgate.net/publication/276057766_Health_Human_Capital_And_Early_Economic_Development_In_Australia_And_New_Zealand">a number of different public and personal health factors</a>, including the increased availability of food (protein was comparatively abundant and affordable in the Australian colonies, and the comparatively benign environment (lower population density and cleaner drinking water). These factors, which inhibited childhood growth in the UK, enabled the Australian-born children to be taller than their UK-born parents (80% of height potential is genetic, and 20% is determined by environment). </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/186172/original/file-20170915-8086-bb77l6.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/186172/original/file-20170915-8086-bb77l6.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/186172/original/file-20170915-8086-bb77l6.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/186172/original/file-20170915-8086-bb77l6.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/186172/original/file-20170915-8086-bb77l6.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/186172/original/file-20170915-8086-bb77l6.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/186172/original/file-20170915-8086-bb77l6.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption"></span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="license">Author provided</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>This is one of a number of surprising findings to come out of the <a href="https://www.digitalpanopticon.org/">Digital Panopticon</a> project, a survey of tens of thousands of convicts that British courts sent to the Australian penal colonies between 1788 and 1868. The careful piecing together of life histories for transported convicts and convicts who were confined in British prisons, reveals the <a href="https://www.researchgate.net/publication/307571644_The_State_Convicts_and_Longitudinal_Analysis">longer-term impacts of transportation</a> and imprisonment. </p>
<h2>Surprisingly good health</h2>
<p>It is now possible to prove that, while Australian convicts were coerced and subjected to a frightening array of punishments, their health was surprisingly good – at least for those who survived the trip. </p>
<p>After the high rates of mortality on some early convict voyages, the mandatory <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3407954/">inclusion of surgeons on subsequent voyages</a> greatly improved the survival rates of those who sailed. It also helped that sick and weak prisoners were precluded from taking the voyage, so most convicts survived. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/186183/original/file-20170915-8065-1bvy90v.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/186183/original/file-20170915-8065-1bvy90v.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=431&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/186183/original/file-20170915-8065-1bvy90v.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=431&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/186183/original/file-20170915-8065-1bvy90v.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=431&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/186183/original/file-20170915-8065-1bvy90v.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=541&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/186183/original/file-20170915-8065-1bvy90v.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=541&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/186183/original/file-20170915-8065-1bvy90v.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=541&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption"></span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="license">Author provided</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>From the 1850s onwards, every Australian colony routinely printed descriptions of discharged prisoners. Among the identifying details contained in these notices are information on place and year of birth, height, ship that brought an individual to the colony and details of the offence the person was convicted of. </p>
<p><a href="http://www.utas.edu.au/news/2017/6/20/325-delving-into-the-black-books-of-convict-knowledge/">Using those records</a>, our analysis of the heights of prisoners reveals that Tasmanians (many of whom were the children of convicts) not only grew up taller than people born in the UK, but they were also taller than those born in the Australian mainland colony of Victoria. </p>
<p>Although Victoria boomed after the discovery of gold in 1851, and was much wealthier than Tasmania, Tasmania’s slower economic growth protected locals from some of the more pernicious side effects of rapid urbanisation, including deteriorating water quality and a rise in associated childhood diseases. Victorian cities were therefore much more similar to UK cities, and suffered similar disadvantages.</p>
<p>Our analysis also revealed that if your mother had been a convict, you were more likely to be taller than prisoners whose mothers had not been convicts. This could be the result of the small size of convict families. Female convicts weren’t allowed to marry until most of their sentence had been served, so they tended to start families later in life, and this reduced family size. As the families of former convicts tended to be small, it is possible that more resources, especially food, were available per child. </p>
<p>There is little evidence to suggest that Tasmanian children born to convict parents went on to endure repeated spells in local prisons. There is, however, reliable evidence that those transported to Tasmania experienced better lives than those who were imprisoned in the UK – at least in terms of health – and that was also the case with their children and their grandchildren.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/84006/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Barry Godfrey receives funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Council. </span></em></p><p class="fine-print"><em><span>Hamish Maxwell-Stewart receives funding from the Australian Research Council. and the Arts and Humanities Research Council (UK).</span></em></p>A new study highlights the stark difference in living conditions experienced by old- and new-world working-class adults in the Victorian era.Barry Godfrey, Professor of Social Justice, University of LiverpoolHamish Maxwell-Stewart, Professor of History, University of TasmaniaLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/830912017-09-11T19:40:34Z2017-09-11T19:40:34ZA home for everyone? Property ownership has been about status and wealth since our convict days<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/185211/original/file-20170908-9573-1gprv4p.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">A house and land on the River Derwent, Tasmania, 1822</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://nla.gov.au/nla.obj-139503586/view">National Library of Australia</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>While Australia has an egalitarian mythology, where everyone has a chance, the roots of problems with access to housing lie in our history. The first land grants were given to former convicts as a way to control an unfenced prison colony. As free settlers arrived in Australia, priorities changed, land ownership gained prestige, and smaller landholders were pushed out of the market. </p>
<p>When Governor Phillip stepped onto Australian soil for the first time, in 1788, he carried with him a set of <a href="https://archive.org/stream/historicalrecord00aust#page/8/mode/2up">instructions</a> to guide him through the early days of the newest British colony. Included was some authority to grant land, and the number of acres each male convict could receive at the end of his sentence. Eighteen months later, the colony received <a href="https://archive.org/stream/historicalrecord00aust#page/124/mode/2up">further instructions</a> from Home Secretary William Grenville, permitting soldiers and free settlers to receive parcels of land if they chose to stay in the colony.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/185208/original/file-20170908-19097-e6rnr3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/185208/original/file-20170908-19097-e6rnr3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/185208/original/file-20170908-19097-e6rnr3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=444&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/185208/original/file-20170908-19097-e6rnr3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=444&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/185208/original/file-20170908-19097-e6rnr3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=444&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/185208/original/file-20170908-19097-e6rnr3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=558&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/185208/original/file-20170908-19097-e6rnr3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=558&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/185208/original/file-20170908-19097-e6rnr3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=558&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Grants given to former convicts at Norfolk Plains, northern Tasmania, 1814.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://search.archives.tas.gov.au/default.aspx?detail=1&type=I&id=AF396/1/1325">G.W. Evans, held by Tasmanian Archives and Heritage Office, AF 396/1/1325</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Grenville’s instructions also set out the pattern of land granting that would dominate the colony for the next two decades. Groups of grants were to be placed at the edge of a waterway, with each individual property stretching back into the land rather than along the bank. These rules had a long history; the American colony of Georgia received almost <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=aMMOAQAAIAAJ&q=%22One+third+the+length%22+georgia+1754&dq=%22One+third+the+length%22+georgia+1754&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiQnL6qlJPWAhUoL8AKHWYACSkQ6AEIKzAB">identical phrasing</a> in 1754, but other versions had been in place since the early 18th century. </p>
<p>The rules had two specific purposes in Australia: to foster productivity; and to maintain surveillance over the landholding population, which consisted largely of former convicts.</p>
<p>Initially, all land grants were required to conform to these instructions, and status was shown by the amount of land received. Former convicts started at 30 acres, while free settlers got at least 100 acres. </p>
<p>Under this scheme everyone would receive a mixture of good and bad soils, access to a navigable river and the safety of a surrounding community – important in an unfamiliar land. These grants would reduce the colony’s reliance on imported provisions. Instead, it could feed excess produce into the ports that <a href="http://www.jstor.org/stable/3744707">restocked passing ships</a>. </p>
<p>Colonial exploration and expansion could then continue to stretch to the furthest parts of the globe. But the rules also kept the grantees contained and within a dayʼs travel of a centre of governance (Hobart or Launceston, for example).</p>
<h2>Free settlers’ arrival changed the rules</h2>
<p>In 1817, the Colonial Office began to encourage <a href="https://books.google.com.au/books?id=nJhHgYOJH3MC&lpg=PP6&ots=Y7Zc_DbDrB&dq=penetentiary%20system%20van%20diemen's%20land&lr&pg=PA5#v=onepage&q&f=false">voluntary emigration</a> to the Australian colonies, and ambitious free settlers arrived. <a href="http://digital.sl.nsw.gov.au/delivery/DeliveryManagerServlet?embedded=true&toolbar=false&dps_pid=IE3732195">People complained</a> about the failings of the former convicts, as they practised a rough agriculture that did not fit British ideals. </p>
<p>At the same time the <a href="https://books.google.com.au/books?hl=en&lr=&id=Z2dMvxEH6PoC&oi=fnd&pg=PR3&dq=penitentiary+system+van+diemen%27s+land&ots=DjRGAdD7hl&sig=Fxptf7_73MpADwLAKOqhrKyymNM#v=onepage&q&f=false">management of convicts</a> in Van Diemen’s Land (Tasmania) moved towards the harsh penitentiary system today associated with convicts. Using land grants to pin the former convict population to specific locations, while permitting them the freedom to live their lives, conflicted with free settlersʼ aspirations for the colony.</p>
<p>It is no accident that Bothwell, in Tasmania’s Derwent Valley, was not directly connected to Hobart by river and was dominated by free settlers. The spread of Europeans across the land resulted from the mix of an expanding overland road network and the reduced need to keep these higher-status settlers within armʼs reach.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/184969/original/file-20170906-9202-ptltij.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/184969/original/file-20170906-9202-ptltij.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/184969/original/file-20170906-9202-ptltij.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=443&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/184969/original/file-20170906-9202-ptltij.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=443&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/184969/original/file-20170906-9202-ptltij.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=443&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/184969/original/file-20170906-9202-ptltij.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=557&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/184969/original/file-20170906-9202-ptltij.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=557&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/184969/original/file-20170906-9202-ptltij.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=557&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Grants at Bothwell were given primarily to free settlers.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://search.archives.tas.gov.au/default.aspx?detail=1&type=I&id=AF396/1/338">Surveyor and date unknown, Tasmanian Archives and Heritage Office, AF 396/1/338</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Land granting policies that excluded poorer settlers (most of whom were former convicts or the children of convicts) were introduced. Only those people with £500 capital and assets (<a href="http://www.bankofengland.co.uk/education/Pages/resources/inflationtools/calculator/default.aspx#">roughly A$80,000</a>) would be eligible. The minimum grant would be 320 acres. </p>
<p>One writer, the colonial surveyor G.W. Evans, <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=2MgRAAAAYAAJ&dq=G.W.%20Evans%20van%20diemen's%20land&pg=PA114#v=onepage&q&f=false">asked</a> at the time whether this was intended to drive those without means to the United States of America instead. Even if they scraped together the money, the sheer quantity of land would be beyond their ability to cultivate.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/184974/original/file-20170906-17089-mt3b8c.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/184974/original/file-20170906-17089-mt3b8c.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/184974/original/file-20170906-17089-mt3b8c.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=488&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/184974/original/file-20170906-17089-mt3b8c.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=488&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/184974/original/file-20170906-17089-mt3b8c.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=488&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/184974/original/file-20170906-17089-mt3b8c.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=613&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/184974/original/file-20170906-17089-mt3b8c.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=613&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/184974/original/file-20170906-17089-mt3b8c.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=613&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Average grant sizes, taken from specific representative regions to eliminate duplicates in the records.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Author, 2017</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Locating former convicts on the rivers ensured productivity and the reliable transportation of goods, but these grants also kept them under close observation. As the penal system became more punitive convicts lost the hope of gaining a small piece of land after their sentence. </p>
<p>But before this, far from being intended as any kind of reward or enticement, the first land grants given in Australia represented ongoing control over the lowest class of settlers – those who had been “transported beyond the seas”. Since the beginning of our colonial history, land ownership in Australia has been intricately connected with role and status.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/83091/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Imogen Wegman has received funding from an Australian Postgraduate Award to complete research into colonial land granting.</span></em></p>The egalitarian myth behind the great Australian dream of home ownership is at odds with the first rules of land granting in the colonies. Even then, property ownership depended on wealth and status.Imogen Wegman, PhD candidate, History and Classics, University of TasmaniaLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/787602017-07-03T02:55:16Z2017-07-03T02:55:16ZWhat we can learn about fighting inequality from Australia’s convict past<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/175339/original/file-20170623-27915-126mx72.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Analysis shows that while land values per acre rose at 2.2% per annum, land rents fell by 0.3% per annum in the 1800s.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Powerhouse Museum/Flickr</span>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">CC BY-SA</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>In Australia’s first century, from initial convict settlement in 1788 to the post gold rush decades, the economy grew rapidly. And despite all the changes going on, <a href="http://www.nber.org/papers/w23416">we found that</a> during this time Australia gained its equality edge.</p>
<p>In fact, during roughly the same period (1774 to 1870) the United States <a href="http://press.princeton.edu/titles/10670.html">experienced a steep increase in inequality</a>. So looking at this phase of Australian economic history could teach today’s policymakers some lessons.</p>
<p>In the nineteenth century, Australia enjoyed <a href="https://ideas.repec.org/p/cpr/ceprdp/11756.html">the fastest rate of GDP growth per worker</a>, between 1821 and 1871 it was about twice that of the US and three times that of Britain. We started to look at data from the 1820s onwards. This was the time when Australia quickly evolved from a colony where convicts were 55% of the labour force to a more conventional “free” economy by 1870. </p>
<p>While both Australia and the United States used forced labour extensively (slaves in the southern US and convicts in Australia), their share of the labour force was much higher in Australia (more than half) than in America (about a fifth). The difference in the two countries’ trajectories on inequality has to do with the timing of the emancipation of forced labour, the duration of their coerced employment and changing economies.</p>
<h2>How Australia avoided inequality in the past</h2>
<p>In Australia convicts were gradually emancipated following the 1820s. As existing convicts eventually got their freedom, the inflow of new convicts fell sharply after the 1830s (except for Tasmania).</p>
<p>By the 1850s Britain had practically ceased its convict transportation policy. In contrast, the slaves in the American south were used as forced labour for much longer, and emancipated only after the Civil War. </p>
<p>Another key difference between the two countries lies in the fact that while the United States underwent a process of impressive industrial growth, Australia specialised in the export of wool and gold (small scale extraction). </p>
<p>We used a wage to rental ratio to work out income inequality, comparing rental income and land values to workers’ wages. What we noticed is that European settlement in Australia was characterised by labour scarcity and land abundance. </p>
<p>In fact, the ratio of acreage to farm labour rose by a whopping 11.7% per annum between 1828 and 1860 and by 6.3% per annum across the 1860s. This was because land endowments grew very fast after the Blue Mountains were breached in 1815. This trend was also matched by a reduction in the gap between rental income accruing to those who owned land, relative to what unskilled workers were receiving.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/175344/original/file-20170623-27888-1teemhd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/175344/original/file-20170623-27888-1teemhd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/175344/original/file-20170623-27888-1teemhd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=439&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/175344/original/file-20170623-27888-1teemhd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=439&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/175344/original/file-20170623-27888-1teemhd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=439&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/175344/original/file-20170623-27888-1teemhd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=552&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/175344/original/file-20170623-27888-1teemhd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=552&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/175344/original/file-20170623-27888-1teemhd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=552&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Australia specialised in the export of wool and gold (small scale extraction) when the US was undergoing a rapid period of industrialisation.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Powerhouse Museum/Flickr</span>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">CC BY</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Our analysis shows that while land values per acre rose at 2.2% per annum, land rents fell by 0.3% per annum. This difference was driven by the fall in interest rates, because of the partial integration between Australian and British financial markets. </p>
<p>On the other hand, the annual earnings of unskilled labourers soared, pushing the wage-rental rate up. With the end of British transportation policy, the “emancipated” convicts moved up the earnings ranks. They almost doubled their incomes if they remained unskilled, and moved up even higher if they could exploit their skills. </p>
<p>But there is another important reason behind the rise in unskilled workers’ incomes. As Australia did not undergo a process of industrialisation, it did not experience an increased demand for skilled workers, like the US. So the supply of workers kept pace with the demand for skills.</p>
<h2>Lessons to learn for today’s inequality</h2>
<p>While today’s economic conditions are different, there is something that we can learn from this episode of Australian history. Australia’s experience shows that it’s possible to achieve fast growth, and at the same time, a reduction in inequality. </p>
<p>Between 1910 and 1980 inequality trends have been similar across <a href="http://www.oecd.org/social/inequality.htm">OECD countries</a>. As these trends were driven by shared shocks, such as the Great Depression and two World Wars, Australia <a href="http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1475-4932.2007.00412.x/abstract">experienced the same inequality</a>. </p>
<p><a href="http://www.oecd.org/els/soc/growingunequalincomedistributionandpovertyinoecdcountries.htm">Income inequality</a> in Australia has been rising since the mid-1990s. At the start of the 21st century, the income share of the richest 1% of Australians was higher than it had been at any point <a href="http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1475-4932.2007.00412.x/abstract">since 1951</a>. </p>
<p>Greater equality obviously can’t be achieved by emancipating convicts now, but policymakers can mimic the same effect by targeting vulnerable segments of society that experience greater disadvantage. For example politicians could improve equality of access to health, education, housing and other services across the country.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/78760/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Laura Panza does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>The experience of Australia’s first century shows that it’s possible to achieve fast growth, and at the same time, a reduction in inequality.Laura Panza, Economist, The University of MelbourneLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/596762016-05-22T20:06:50Z2016-05-22T20:06:50ZThe science issues this election are as old as the Australian media<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/123160/original/image-20160519-22307-1qldaxk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=280%2C117%2C1017%2C737&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Printer George Howe shows the first edition of the Sydney Gazette to Governor Philip Gidley King, in a feature window at the Mitchell Library.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://acmssearch.sl.nsw.gov.au/search/itemDetailPaged.cgi?itemID=413814">Reproduced with permission of the Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales, Digital Order Number: a6509002</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>The ABC’s <a href="http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-05-13/vote-compass-issues-by-state-territory/7412718">Vote Compass</a> tells us that the environment, education and health are three big election issues this year across Australia.</p>
<p>Climate change and other environmental problems have attracted <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/may/17/saving-great-barrier-reef-climate-change-should-be-central-election-issue-says-tim-flannery">prominent attention</a> in media election coverage. So have advocacy for <a href="http://www.smh.com.au/federal-politics/federal-election-2016/labor-to-invest-400m-to-ensure-all-high-school-stem-teachers-are-qualified-20160512-gotoou.html">STEM education</a>, <a href="http://www.afr.com/opinion/universities-can-be-reformed-but-one-piece-at-a-time-20160517-gowz44">university fees</a> and <a href="http://www.sbs.com.au/topics/science/fundamentals/article/2016/05/16/what-do-scientists-want-2016-australian-federal-election">science funding</a>. And <a href="http://theconversation.com/election-factcheck-has-the-government-cut-80-billion-from-schools-and-hospitals-58988">hospital resourcing</a> always plays a role in election argy-bargy.</p>
<p>These might all seem like issues particular to our time. But they’re not. </p>
<p>As <a href="http://dx.doi.org/10.1071/HR15018">my research shows</a>, we can go back 213 years to Australia’s first newspaper, <a href="http://www.sl.nsw.gov.au/discover_collections/history_nation/justice/establish/supreme/gazette.html">The Sydney Gazette and New South Wales Advertiser</a>, and see thriving public debate about the environment, education and health among colonial Sydney’s residents.</p>
<p>Founded in 1803, the Gazette was primarily intended to disseminate government orders. But voices of the colonial public came through vividly in letters to the editor week after week, including from self-identified <a href="http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-page5953">ex-convicts</a> and <a href="http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-page5974">women</a> as early as 1804.</p>
<p>Australia’s print-based political debate had begun.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/123319/original/image-20160520-10353-rjyo43.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/123319/original/image-20160520-10353-rjyo43.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/123319/original/image-20160520-10353-rjyo43.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=481&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/123319/original/image-20160520-10353-rjyo43.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=481&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/123319/original/image-20160520-10353-rjyo43.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=481&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/123319/original/image-20160520-10353-rjyo43.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=604&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/123319/original/image-20160520-10353-rjyo43.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=604&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/123319/original/image-20160520-10353-rjyo43.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=604&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Front page of The Gazette for March 11, 1804.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">National Library of Australia</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>The environment</h2>
<p>Just three months into the Gazette’s existence, on May 29, 1803, a resident calling herself or himself “A Well-wisher to Posterity” wrote Australia’s first letter to the editor advocating <a href="http://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/page/5703">environmental sustainability</a>.</p>
<p>This sustainability advocate cautioned that over-exploitation of Bass Strait seals for skins and oil was going to kill the industry.</p>
<p>Well-wisher decried the practice of “indiscriminately hunt[ing] down all ages and sexes” of seals, including “females” and “pupps”, warning that “the impolicy of killing the breeding seals will in time discover itself”.</p>
<p>In a depressingly familiar rhetoric of concern for both the present and the future, Well-wisher wrote:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>And some general plan will I hope be speedily adopted, whereby this valuable trade may be found beneficial to our children, as, under certain necessary restrictions, it may be tendered profitable to ourselves.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Then, as <a href="http://theconversation.com/this-election-is-our-last-chance-to-save-the-great-barrier-reef-59381">now</a>, concerns about Australian marine life seemed to go <a href="http://www.textqueensland.com.au/item/article/d796f5464aa74e491337640ad727210e">unheeded</a>, and the <a href="http://www.parks.tas.gov.au/?base=4918">seal industry collapsed</a> in the 1830s as seal populations plummeted.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/123162/original/image-20160519-22310-z7p7cm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/123162/original/image-20160519-22310-z7p7cm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/123162/original/image-20160519-22310-z7p7cm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=517&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/123162/original/image-20160519-22310-z7p7cm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=517&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/123162/original/image-20160519-22310-z7p7cm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=517&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/123162/original/image-20160519-22310-z7p7cm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=650&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/123162/original/image-20160519-22310-z7p7cm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=650&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/123162/original/image-20160519-22310-z7p7cm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=650&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Elephant seals and sealers on King Island, 1807.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Biodiversity Heritage Library</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Education and knowledge sharing</h2>
<p>The unsatisfactory standard of public education due to underpaid teachers didn’t escape the Gazette’s readers either. ‘An Inquisitive Observer’ <a href="http://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/page/5692">wrote many words</a> on this topic on May 8, 1803.</p>
<p>“Is it possible”, asked the Observer about a school teacher, “that so arduous, so laudable a task as yours, should be so ill requited?”</p>
<p>Well may we <a href="http://theconversation.com/why-both-labor-and-coalition-are-wrong-about-their-claims-on-the-economic-value-of-education-59463">continue to ask</a> the same question.</p>
<p>But even earlier, on April 6, Sydneysiders read the first Australian-published opinion piece advocating the public sharing of scientific knowledge for the benefit of society.</p>
<p>“Philomath” <a href="http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-page5675">wrote to the Gazette</a> that week to argue that useful knowledge “should be promulged for the common benefit of mankind”, and it was “a duty, which every member owes to society, to contribute to the advancement of the public good”.</p>
<p>She or he proclaimed:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Men despising private interest have in all ages contributed to the rise of the arts and sciences, by laudably communicating to the world such discoveries as have fallen within their knowledge.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Philomath then discharged that duty by laudably communicating to the residents of Sydney a means of brewing “An excllent manure” [sic]. It was a very Australian moment, when lofty ideals collided with talk about poo.</p>
<p>We might object to the context of the communication, given its aim was to turn native bush on stolen land into a fertile paddock. But Philomath’s letter tells us that sharing knowledge freely with those who can make use of it – and writing to the paper about education, science and research – are old Australian traditions.</p>
<h2>Health</h2>
<p><a href="http://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/page/5728">Home remedies</a> for illness and injury were common topics in the Gazette, but the newspaper also promoted official public health measures.</p>
<p>The paper ran a campaign supporting vaccination against smallpox, with <a href="http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-page5906">a whole page</a> devoted to its advocacy on 13 May 1804.</p>
<p>In scientific style, it printed a table comparing the effects of natural smallpox and two kinds of inoculation, including <a href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1200696/">Edward Jenner’s cowpox vaccine</a>, which was imported to the colony that year.</p>
<p>Despite the poor state of the type, the visual design still made a great point. See if you can figure out which option won’t kill you.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/123155/original/image-20160519-22290-6t4s43.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/123155/original/image-20160519-22290-6t4s43.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/123155/original/image-20160519-22290-6t4s43.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/123155/original/image-20160519-22290-6t4s43.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/123155/original/image-20160519-22290-6t4s43.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/123155/original/image-20160519-22290-6t4s43.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=631&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/123155/original/image-20160519-22290-6t4s43.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=631&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/123155/original/image-20160519-22290-6t4s43.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=631&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Science communication as old as the Australian media.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Courtesy of the National Library of Australia</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Laudably communicating to the world</h2>
<p>The Gazette’s printer and editor from 1803 to 1821, the convict <a href="http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/howe-george-1600">George Howe</a>, created a richly interesting publication that kept the colonial public informed about current events, and current science and technology.</p>
<p>He published <a href="http://dx.doi.org/10.1071/HR15018">lots of science-oriented articles</a> alongside colony gossip, court proceedings, shipping news and commercial advertising. </p>
<p>In its first five months of publication, the Gazette published all kinds of fun science like <a href="http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-page5751">Europeans’ first encounter with the koala</a>, <a href="http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-page5670">the invention of a mechanical toy in China</a>, and <a href="http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-page5715">methods for collecting and preserving birds</a>.</p>
<p>This was in addition to the very practical scientific knowledge it continually communicated in the domains of the nautical, the meteorological, health, agriculture and public works.</p>
<p>In other words, the stuff elections are made of.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/59676/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Lindy Orthia does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>What science issues did Australia’s first newspaper - edited by a convict - discuss in its letter pages? The same ones we talk about today: the environment, education and health.Lindy Orthia, Senior Lecturer in Science Communication, Australian National UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/476362015-09-24T01:28:05Z2015-09-24T01:28:05ZThese walls can talk: Australian history preserved by folk magic<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/96136/original/image-20150925-17062-1wett5s.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">What can concealed objects and engraved symbols tell us about our convict past?</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Ian Evans</span>, <span class="license">Author provided</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>The 160,023 convicts transported to the Australian colonies between 1788 and 1868 left leg-irons and chains a’plenty, but surprisingly little in the way of clothing. Sydney’s Powerhouse Museum <a href="http://www.powerhousemuseum.com/collection/database/?irn=205558">has a jacket</a> and there are just three of the striped cotton shirts that we know the convicts wore.</p>
<p>Were it not for a strange folk magic ritual, unknown and unsuspected <a href="http://www.abc.net.au/local/stories/2012/04/02/3469167.htm">until recently</a>, the number of surviving convict garments would be sparse indeed. The three examples survived because they were carefully concealed within the walls of houses or barracks.</p>
<p>The concealment of the convict shirts and many other objects throughout Australia is part of my PhD thesis, the result of six year’s work in which I located and photographed deliberately concealed objects in old houses and buildings throughout Australia. </p>
<p>But why conceal a shirt in a wall? Read on …</p>
<p>Two of the surviving convict shirts were <a href="http://www.australiandressregister.org/garment/259/">discovered</a> within the structure of Sydney’s Hyde Park Barracks in 1980, found by tradesmen involved in preparing the building for its current use as a heritage flagship for the Historic Houses Trust – or, as it now prefers to be known, Sydney Living Museums.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/95127/original/image-20150917-12726-hgcjgq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/95127/original/image-20150917-12726-hgcjgq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/95127/original/image-20150917-12726-hgcjgq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/95127/original/image-20150917-12726-hgcjgq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/95127/original/image-20150917-12726-hgcjgq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/95127/original/image-20150917-12726-hgcjgq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/95127/original/image-20150917-12726-hgcjgq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/95127/original/image-20150917-12726-hgcjgq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Convict Shirt, National Museum of Australia.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Ian Evans</span>, <span class="license">Author provided</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>A <a href="http://www.nma.gov.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0008/9953/Bridgewater_convict_era_shirt.pdf">third shirt</a> came from inside a wall at a former convict supervisor’s residence at Granton, north of Hobart. This garment, now in the collection of the National Museum of Australia, was found in a wall cavity adjacent to a fireplace. It was probably placed there while the house was being constructed in 1830.</p>
<p>The house was part of a major project to build a causeway across the Derwent River to enable easier access to farms and settlements in the Midlands. Some 200 convicts, under heavy guard and in chains, were employed on the construction of the causeway.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/95138/original/image-20150917-12701-w7i3ky.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/95138/original/image-20150917-12701-w7i3ky.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/95138/original/image-20150917-12701-w7i3ky.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=300&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/95138/original/image-20150917-12701-w7i3ky.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=300&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/95138/original/image-20150917-12701-w7i3ky.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=300&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/95138/original/image-20150917-12701-w7i3ky.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=378&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/95138/original/image-20150917-12701-w7i3ky.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=378&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/95138/original/image-20150917-12701-w7i3ky.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=378&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Many objects have been found at <em>Woodbury</em>, near Oatlands, Tasmania.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Ian Evans</span>, <span class="license">Author provided</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The practice of concealing garments, shoes, toys, trinkets and dead cats in houses and other buildings can be traced back to <a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/property/advice/propertymarket/3302771/What-lurks-behind-your-walls.html">Britain</a> - where it dates back to the 1400s and probably earlier than that. Settlers and convicts carried this ritual to Australia and North America as part of their cultural baggage.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/95130/original/image-20150917-12726-1vohfwc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/95130/original/image-20150917-12726-1vohfwc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/95130/original/image-20150917-12726-1vohfwc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=401&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/95130/original/image-20150917-12726-1vohfwc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=401&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/95130/original/image-20150917-12726-1vohfwc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=401&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/95130/original/image-20150917-12726-1vohfwc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/95130/original/image-20150917-12726-1vohfwc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/95130/original/image-20150917-12726-1vohfwc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Young woman’s boot, from <em>Woodbury</em>, north of Oatlands, Tasmania.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Ian Evans</span>, <span class="license">Author provided</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The journey of this ritual to the United States, England and Australia forms the focus of a book edited by English historian [Ronald Hutton](http://research-information.bristol.ac.uk/en/persons/ronald-e-hutton(3db1ba2d-46a5-4387-8705-a6a3091b14ac.html), titled <a href="http://www.palgrave.com/page/detail/physical-evidence-for-ritual-acts-sorcery-and-witchcraft-in-christian-britain-ronald-hutton/?isb=9781137444813">Physical Evidence for Ritual Acts, Sorcery and Witchcraft in Christian Britain</a> to be published by Macmillan in England this year. </p>
<p>It takes up where projects such as the <a href="http://www.concealedgarments.org/information/">Deliberately Concealed Garments Project</a>, established by the The Textile Conservation Centre in the UK, leave off. Where the DCG catalogues discovered objects and academic writing on the topic in Britain, titles such as M. Chris Manning’s <a href="http://www.academia.edu/9491012/The_Material_Culture_of_Ritual_Concealments_in_the_United_States">The Material Culture of Ritual Concealments in the United States</a> (2014) examine the practice in the US. </p>
<p>So why bury garments, shoes and cats in wall cavities? The purpose of these mundane objects was to decoy evil spiritual forces away from the people who lived and worked in houses and other buildings. </p>
<p>According to folk magic belief of the time, a host of evil beings occupied an invisible realm that intersected and flowed through the world in which we humans live. Inspired and encouraged by the Devil, they sought to do humans grave harm. </p>
<p>At a time when there was little understanding of the way in which the world worked and when science was struggling out of its swaddling clothes, such ideas were widely accepted. So, to distract these otherworldly and malevolent beings from their real targets - actual people - old shoes and tattered clothing were concealed under floorboards, behind fireplaces and in ceilings. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/95129/original/image-20150917-12718-1adq3gx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/95129/original/image-20150917-12718-1adq3gx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/95129/original/image-20150917-12718-1adq3gx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=401&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/95129/original/image-20150917-12718-1adq3gx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=401&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/95129/original/image-20150917-12718-1adq3gx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=401&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/95129/original/image-20150917-12718-1adq3gx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/95129/original/image-20150917-12718-1adq3gx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/95129/original/image-20150917-12718-1adq3gx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Marrickville cat.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Ian Evans</span>, <span class="license">Author provided</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Why cats? A couple of theories: cats were thought to be associated with witches. And their habit of prowling about in the dark did their reputation no good at all. So, bad cat? Perhaps, but cats also guarded a house against vermin. Sent into the other world where they stood guard against spiritual vermin? Good cat? Perhaps.</p>
<p>But why has this only just been discovered? One explanation is the lack of contemporary documentation about the phenomenon. Historians tend to follow the paper trail, researching in documents held in libraries and archives. So, our history has been written from the documentary record.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/95133/original/image-20150917-12695-ul8nnz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/95133/original/image-20150917-12695-ul8nnz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/95133/original/image-20150917-12695-ul8nnz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=737&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/95133/original/image-20150917-12695-ul8nnz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=737&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/95133/original/image-20150917-12695-ul8nnz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=737&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/95133/original/image-20150917-12695-ul8nnz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=926&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/95133/original/image-20150917-12695-ul8nnz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=926&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/95133/original/image-20150917-12695-ul8nnz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=926&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Australia’s largest cache, from <em>Woodbury</em>, north of Oatlands, Tasmania.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Ian Evans</span>, <span class="license">Author provided</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The ritual I describe here did not leave a trace in the archives or in books. There are no references to it in journals, memoirs or letters. It appears to have been conducted in the utmost secrecy. </p>
<p>The only <a href="http://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/queensland/folk-magic-found-in-old-brisbane-basement-20130808-2rkm0.html">evidence</a> is in the form of battered old boots and shoes, tattered garments, scatters of childrens’ toys and trinkets and the bodies of long-dead cats. And these were tucked away in building voids which mostly held their secrets until houses were renovated or demolished.</p>
<p>In some six years of research I’ve travelled throughout New South Wales, Tasmania, Victoria, Queensland and South Australia and inspected numerous sites where concealed objects have been found. </p>
<p>I began the search by asking members of heritage advisors’ mailing lists in NSW and Victoria if they knew of objects found in unusual places in houses and other buildings. It soon became apparent discoveries of such objects were common: reports of concealed shoes came in from cities, towns and rural areas throughout the country. Cats and garments were less common but there were enough to substantiate their inclusion in a national catalogue of concealed objects. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/95131/original/image-20150917-12726-pb0xy4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/95131/original/image-20150917-12726-pb0xy4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/95131/original/image-20150917-12726-pb0xy4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/95131/original/image-20150917-12726-pb0xy4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/95131/original/image-20150917-12726-pb0xy4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/95131/original/image-20150917-12726-pb0xy4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/95131/original/image-20150917-12726-pb0xy4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/95131/original/image-20150917-12726-pb0xy4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The stables at <em>Shene</em> Tasmania.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Ian Evans</span>, <span class="license">Author provided</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Patterns started to appear: the shoes of children and adolescents outnumbered those of adults. My theory on these is that the goodness and innocence of childhood had been harnessed to combat evil.</p>
<p>I then began to look for evil-averting marks or apotropeia. I found the first of these in the great stables at Shene, north of Hobart. Scratched into the sandstone margin of a window was one of the marks commonly found in England: a hexafoil. Apotropaic marks are commonly employed on points of access to a building: adjacent to windows or doors, on the lintel of fireplaces or in the roof cavity. I’m still finding these.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/95124/original/image-20150917-12722-1yw25n3.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/95124/original/image-20150917-12722-1yw25n3.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/95124/original/image-20150917-12722-1yw25n3.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=401&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/95124/original/image-20150917-12722-1yw25n3.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=401&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/95124/original/image-20150917-12722-1yw25n3.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=401&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/95124/original/image-20150917-12722-1yw25n3.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/95124/original/image-20150917-12722-1yw25n3.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/95124/original/image-20150917-12722-1yw25n3.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">What can old shoes and dead cats tell us about Australia’s convict past?</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Ian Evans</span>, <span class="license">Author provided</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The lesson from this is that history exists as much as it does in objects as it does in the written record. The objects in this case, though mute, have an important story to tell – a story of the hopes and fears of Australians in the formative years of our country. </p>
<p>This is the tip of this story’s iceberg. If you’re curious, you can read more about it <a href="http://db.tt/dbiR5JOr">here</a>.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/47636/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Ian Evans received funding from NSW Heritage Office for travel and research within that State.</span></em></p>The discovery of battered old boots, tattered garments, trinkets and dead cats concealed in the walls of historic buildings sheds new light on the lives of Australia’s early white settlers.Ian Evans, Postgraduate Research Scholar, University of NewcastleLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/473632015-09-16T06:59:10Z2015-09-16T06:59:10ZI Go to Rio: Australia’s forgotten history with Brazil<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/94976/original/image-20150916-11961-1o1zed1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Australia's shared past with Brazil enriches understanding of the two former European colonies.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">EPA/Antonio Lacerda</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>As Australia and Brazil celebrate <a href="http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/breakfast/australia-and-brazil-celebrate-70-years-of-bilateral-relations/6764094">70 years of diplomatic relations</a> it is worth reflecting that links between the “<a href="http://www.australiabrazil.com.au/">two powerhouse economies of the southern hemisphere</a>” are as old as European Australia.</p>
<p>Brazil’s tourist capital Rio de Janeiro is famous in Australia for the monumental Christ the Redeemer statue (Cristo Redentor), and for [Peter Allen](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Allen_(musician)’s marvellously hyperactive I Go To Rio (1976), below: </p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/FCYxTg6svXg?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
</figure>
<p>Oz Rock bands were big in Brazil in the 1990s. Australian surfers know its breaks. Australian sporting fans revere its soccer stars. Rio will host the 2016 Olympics.</p>
<p>Less known is that in the past decade Brazil has had the second fastest rate of <a href="http://www.abs.gov.au/ausstats/abs@.nsf/Latestproducts/3412.0Main%20Features32013-14">migration to Australia</a> after Nepal and just ahead of Pakistan and India. </p>
<p>There is much to be gained from closer attention to Brazil.</p>
<p>Australia’s connection with Brazil began in 1787 with the First Fleet voyage. This was thanks to the port of Rio’s location in the South Atlantic and a centuries-long British-Portuguese alliance – unique among European powers in the Age of Empires. </p>
<p>The First Fleet had three layovers on its relatively cautious eight month voyage from Britain: a week in the Spanish colony of Tenerife in the Canary Islands, a month at Rio in the Portuguese colony of Brazil and a month at the Dutch East India Company’s Cape colony in South Africa. </p>
<p>Fleet commander <a href="http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/phillip-arthur-2549">Arthur Phillip</a> had not intended to rest and resupply at Rio but sailing conditions made it prudent to do so. And Phillip’s former service in the Portuguese navy ensured a cordial welcome from Rio’s colonial authorities. </p>
<p>At this time, as Bruno Carvalho writes in <a href="http://liverpooluniversitypress.co.uk/products/60747">Porous City: A Cultural History of Rio de Janeiro</a> (2013), Rio enjoyed rising status within the Portuguese Empire. In 1763 it had been named the new capital of Brazil. In 1808 Portuguese royals fled to Rio to escape Napoleon and remained there at the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815. As a consequence, Rio could boast of being the only American city to serve as a centre of European power.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.sl.nsw.gov.au/discover_collections/history_nation/terra_australis/published_accounts/tench/index.html">One First Fleet official</a> lamented how little the British knew of Rio. This came to be addressed, as Luciana Martins notes in <a href="http://www.jstor.org/stable/41105252?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents">A Bay to be Dreamed Of: British Visions of Rio de Janeiro</a> (2006), as increasing numbers of British visitors ventured there during the 19th century. </p>
<p>Visitors included New South Wales Governor Lachlan Macquarie, and later Charles Darwin – along with thousands of convict and free migrants on board ships calling at the port of Rio.</p>
<p>Writing in Connected Worlds: History in Transnational Perspective (2005), [Emma Christopher](https://www.google.com.au/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&rlz=1C1NCHB_enAU640AU640&ion=1&espv=2&ie=UTF-8#q=E+Christopher,+%E2%80%98Steal+a+Handkerchief,+See+the+World:+The+transoceanic+voyaging+of+Thomas+Limpus%E2%80%99+in+A+Curthoys+and+M+Lake,+Eds.+Connected+Worlds,+History+in+Transnational+Perspective+(Canberra:+ANU+EPress,+2005) observed that in Australian history books, travel from Britain to Australia seemed to have been “covered as if in the blink of an eye”. This inspired her to write of the “watery non-places” of the journey not as voids, but rather as places where much transnational history was lived – rather than a means by which internationalism was achieved. </p>
<p>Yet historians have for the most part overlooked ports of call between the “watery non-places”, such as Rio. </p>
<p>I began to read about <a href="http://localejournal.org/issues/n1/Locale%20n1%20-%2007%20-%20McIntyre.pdf">the Atlantic ports of call</a> such as Rio and Madeira while researching <a href="http://www.publish.csiro.au/pid/7075.htm">historic Australian wine grape varieties</a> and <a href="https://books.google.com.au/books?id=RtoxBwAAQBAJ&pg=PA137&lpg=PA137&dq=drinking+history:+enjoying+wine+in+colonial+new+south+wales&source=bl&ots=kIFgFf5sML&sig=LuQYtCjEPrm_I1p2YXYCyvLiDaA&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0CB0Q6AEwAGoVChMItL3Ii5j4xwIVhiGmCh2dcQsz#v=onepage&q=drinking%20history%3A%20enjoying%20wine%20in%20colonial%20new%20south%20wales&f=false">colonial wine drinking</a>, and continue to do so in my study of the origins of the social and cultural landscape of the <a href="http://www.newcastle.edu.au/research-and-innovation/centre/education-arts/wine-research/research/vines,-wine-and-identity">Hunter Valley wine region</a>.</p>
<p>This has led me to see that <a href="http://www.mq.edu.au/macquarie-archive/lema/1809em/">journals</a> by intending Australian colonists such as Macquarie’s wife Elizabeth allow glimpses of colonial Rio through colonial Australian eyes. <a href="http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/macquarie-elizabeth-henrietta-2418">Elizabeth Macquarie</a> assessed Rio with keen intelligence and, more challengingly – as Jane McDermid has argued in <a href="http://www.palgraveconnect.com/pc/doifinder/10.1057/9781137304186">recent research on histories of the British abroad</a> – a callously casual racism. </p>
<p><a href="http://www.sl.nsw.gov.au/discover_collections/history_nation/terra_australis/journals/index.html">First Fleet journals</a> tell us that, in 1787, convicts confined to ship at Rio witnessed enslaved West Africans rowing Portuguese fruit sellers around the anchored Fleet transports in decoratively festooned boats. </p>
<p>Convicts overheard and exchanged stories from officials permitted shore leave: stories of the songs of captive West Africans awaiting sale at the port marketplace; of colourful Portuguese Catholic institutions and festivities that were exotic to straight-laced British Protestants. Stories of being forbidden, on pain of death, to venture to hinterland jewel mines. </p>
<p>Onshore at Rio, colonial migrants bound for Australia befriended Portuguese colonists, despite the language barrier. They purchased curios. They passed judgement – glowing and harsh – on the people of the Portuguese colony, its natural and built environment, just as Brazilians in turn scrutinised them. </p>
<p>Australian national archives hold many paintings and sketches of Rio. First Fleet surgeon <a href="http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/smyth-arthur-bowes-2674">Arthur Bowes Smyth</a> represented its harbour through the lens of emerging scientific objectivism. <a href="http://www.nla.gov.au/apps/cdview/?pi=nla.pic-an21511992-1">Others</a> captured its natural beauty, and perhaps its naval utility. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/94744/original/image-20150915-31151-dv2jyo.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/94744/original/image-20150915-31151-dv2jyo.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/94744/original/image-20150915-31151-dv2jyo.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=354&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/94744/original/image-20150915-31151-dv2jyo.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=354&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/94744/original/image-20150915-31151-dv2jyo.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=354&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/94744/original/image-20150915-31151-dv2jyo.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=445&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/94744/original/image-20150915-31151-dv2jyo.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=445&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/94744/original/image-20150915-31151-dv2jyo.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=445&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Appearance of the Land about Rio d.Janeiro, to the Sugar Loaf Mountain, Arthur Bowes Smyth - drawings from his journal A Journal of a Voyage from Portsmouth to New South Wales and China in the Lady Penrhyn (1787-1789).</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://acms.sl.nsw.gov.au/album/albumView.aspx?acmsID=430573&itemID=824069">State Library of NSW</a>, <span class="license">Author provided</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Still, Rio is brought most vividly to life in peripatetic American <a href="http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/earle-augustus-2016">Augustus Earle</a>’s 1822 paintings held in the National Library of Australia’s Rex Nan Kivell Collection. In View from a summit, the artist, in top hat, is dazzled by the natural beauty of Rio’s harbour from the elevated peak that now hosts Cristo Redentor. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/94921/original/image-20150915-29636-392ctv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/94921/original/image-20150915-29636-392ctv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/94921/original/image-20150915-29636-392ctv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=358&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/94921/original/image-20150915-29636-392ctv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=358&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/94921/original/image-20150915-29636-392ctv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=358&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/94921/original/image-20150915-29636-392ctv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=449&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/94921/original/image-20150915-29636-392ctv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=449&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/94921/original/image-20150915-29636-392ctv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=449&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">View from the summit of the Cacavada Mountains, near Rio de Janeiro by Augustus Earle (1793-1838).</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://nla.gov.au/nla.obj-134508248/view;jsessionid=l89830fwqm7bqzf1kxj2b16t">National Library of Australia</a>, <span class="license">Author provided</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>According to Martins, Earle lived at Rio in a cottage with Charles Darwin, a cohabitation which no doubt enlivened each man’s perception of this intriguing place. Certainly Earle’s paintings are strikingly unconventional for their time. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/94923/original/image-20150916-29636-bowiv2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/94923/original/image-20150916-29636-bowiv2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/94923/original/image-20150916-29636-bowiv2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=539&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/94923/original/image-20150916-29636-bowiv2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=539&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/94923/original/image-20150916-29636-bowiv2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=539&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/94923/original/image-20150916-29636-bowiv2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=677&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/94923/original/image-20150916-29636-bowiv2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=677&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/94923/original/image-20150916-29636-bowiv2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=677&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Punishing negroes at Cathabouco, Rio de Janeiro by Augustus Earle.
(1793-1838).</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://nla.gov.au/nla.obj-134509360/view;jsessionid=2fcexy4tlg9s12ykou94ksdt6">National Library of Australia</a>, <span class="license">Author provided</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Earle’s empathetic eye for Afro-Brazilians and his caricature of colonists is curiously contemporary. His unblinking gaze at slavery is explored by Sarah Thomas in the edited collection <a href="http://www.ashgate.com/isbn/9781409455882">World Art and the Legacies of Colonial Violence</a> (2013). This, alongside his exuberant portrayals of celebration, affords an intensely nuanced impression of Rio as also experienced by colonial migrants to and from Australia in the 1820s. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/94922/original/image-20150916-29630-f0q90u.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/94922/original/image-20150916-29630-f0q90u.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/94922/original/image-20150916-29630-f0q90u.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=384&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/94922/original/image-20150916-29630-f0q90u.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=384&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/94922/original/image-20150916-29630-f0q90u.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=384&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/94922/original/image-20150916-29630-f0q90u.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=483&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/94922/original/image-20150916-29630-f0q90u.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=483&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/94922/original/image-20150916-29630-f0q90u.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=483&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Games during the carnival at Rio de Janeiro by Augustus Earle (1793-1838).</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://nla.gov.au/nla.obj-134509200/view;jsessionid=9l1kum4dp78a1uzsn7t963ge8">National Library of Australia</a>, <span class="license">Author provided</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>In Games during the carnival at Rio de Janeiro (above), we see a giddy playfulness among colonial Brazilians which elite colonial Australians observed and perhaps participated in during their migration journey. Games infused no doubt with Afro-Brazilian exuberance; a culture also depicted in Earle’s Negro fandango scene, and which Allen – more than a century later – made metaphorical.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/94920/original/image-20150915-29642-16l8f14.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/94920/original/image-20150915-29642-16l8f14.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/94920/original/image-20150915-29642-16l8f14.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=370&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/94920/original/image-20150915-29642-16l8f14.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=370&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/94920/original/image-20150915-29642-16l8f14.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=370&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/94920/original/image-20150915-29642-16l8f14.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=464&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/94920/original/image-20150915-29642-16l8f14.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=464&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/94920/original/image-20150915-29642-16l8f14.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=464&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Negro fandango scene, Campo St. Anna, Rio de Janeiro by Augustus Earle (1793-1838).</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://nla.gov.au/nla.obj-134509040/view;jsessionid=18eu2ems8kgn029jpiduks1bp">National Library of Australia</a>, <span class="license">Author provided</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Now as the world “goes to Rio” for the 2016 Olympics, Australia’s shared past with Brazil enriches understanding of the two former European colonies’ ongoing diplomatic, and present migratory, ties.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/47363/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Julie McIntyre receives funding from the Australian Research Council. </span></em></p>The First Fleet had three layovers on its voyage to Australia – one was Rio de Janeiro. As Australia and Brazil celebrate 70 years of diplomatic relations, it’s worth remembering this encounter.Julie McIntyre, Research Fellow in History, University of NewcastleLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/410972015-06-07T23:18:39Z2015-06-07T23:18:39ZStain or badge of honour? Convict heritage inspires mixed feelings<p>A recent report in <a href="http://www.nature.com/mp/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/mp2014130a.html">Molecular Psychiatry</a> identified a “warrior gene” connected to criminal behaviour. This inspired <a href="http://www.news.com.au/national/crime/australian-convict-history-could-mean-warrior-gene-leaves-a-legacy-of-crime-in-our-blood/story-fns0kb1g-1227272623867">renewed speculation</a> that a convict ancestry might make Australians more predisposed to violent crime. </p>
<p>This fear of genetic contamination from convict ancestors has existed in Australia since early settlement. Between 1788 and the end of transportation in 1868, around <a href="http://www.australia.gov.au/about-australia/australian-story/convicts-and-the-british-colonies">162,000 convicts</a> were sent to the colonies of New South Wales, Van Diemen’s Land and Western Australia. </p>
<p>An estimated <a href="http://www.abc.net.au/news/2007-07-25/online-records-highlight-australias-convict-past/2512534">one in five</a> Australians has convict ancestry. In Tasmania, the figure is even higher. In 2009, <a href="http://www.alisonalexander.com.au/index.php/books/tasmania-s-convicts">74%</a> of Tasmania’s population was estimated to be descended from convicts.</p>
<h2>From source of shame to pride</h2>
<p>Today, a convict ancestor is a <a href="http://www.smh.com.au/national/proud-convict-past-an-evolutionary-lesson-for-snooty-darwin-20090125-7pgq.html">matter of pride</a>, a connection to the rough and tumble of early Australia. But for past generations, including some convicts themselves, it was a shame that had to be hidden at all costs. </p>
<p>Freed convicts celebrated their fresh start by giving false or deliberately mis-spelt names to government officials. Some went to the effort of returning to England, then “emigrating” respectably as a free settler under a new or married name. </p>
<p>Following the end of transportation to Van Diemen’s Land, the colony itself underwent a name change. In 1856, it was <a href="http://www.utas.edu.au/library/companion_to_tasmanian_history/T/Tasmania%20name.htm">renamed Tasmania</a> in an attempt to purge its convict past. The word “convict” was rarely used and access to the state’s convict records was closely guarded. </p>
<p>As late as the 1960s, Tasmania’s Library Board refused permission to doctoral student Peter Bolger to publish convict names for fear of embarrassing their descendants. When he published his thesis as the book <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Hobart-Town-Peter-Bolger/dp/0708100724">Hobart Town</a>, he cited the duplicate British records.</p>
<p>In an attempt to remove the convict stigma, in the early 1900s, the newly federated NSW government <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Australias-Birthstain-Startling-Legacy-Convict/dp/1741756758">planned to destroy</a> its convict records. It was held back only by concerns that the records might be the property of the British government. </p>
<p>Australia celebrated 150 years of European settlement in 1938. It was also the year in which the <a href="http://trove.nla.gov.au/ndp/del/article/76057749">last transported convict</a> died in Western Australia. </p>
<p>Attitudes towards convicts were changing. Australian nationalists began to view the penal past as an era when the British ruling class unjustly persecuted noble workers and revolutionaries. Sent to Australia because of their “struggles for freedom” or trivial offences, they had demonstrated their good character by founding a prosperous democracy. </p>
<p>But not everyone was happy to embrace Australia’s convict heritage. The Chronicle in Adelaide <a href="http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article92471119">reported</a> that officials organising a re-enactment of the landing of the First Fleet in Sydney as part of the 150th-anniversary celebrations had been insisting that the terms “transportees” or “deportees” should be used instead of “convict”. After a fair amount of ridicule, the following announcement was made:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The existence of convicts in early Australia will be officially recognised. Where necessary convicts will be included in the historical scenes, but no special float showing convict life will be included in the pageant. Neither will any attempt be made to single out convicts for special attention.</p>
</blockquote>
<h2>Meet the ancestors, whoever they were</h2>
<p>In the 1950s and ‘60s, historians argued that Australians should not romanticise either the convict system or the people within it. <a href="http://www.thefreelibrary.com/%22Mind-forg%27d+manacles%22%3A+the+mechanics+of+control+inside...-a0230778705">Manning Clark and Alan Shaw</a> viewed the convicts as a “disreputable lot”. They were considered to be perennial petty thieves who made an active choice to supplement their grinding poverty with criminal spoils, rather than suffering virtuously, like the poor people who didn’t have a criminal conviction. </p>
<p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mollie_Gillen">Mollie Gillen</a> memorably described them as:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>… raggle-taggle nobodies … who walked the streets as idle and profligate persons.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>In their book <a href="http://www.cambridge.org/au/academic/subjects/history/regional-history-after-1500/convict-workers-reinterpreting-australias-past">Convict Workers</a>, first published in 1988, Stephen Nicholas and Peter Shergold challenged these assumptions. Their analysis of NSW convict records revealed a greater proportion of literate and skilled convicts than expected.</p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/80627/original/image-20150506-22674-wbjxpm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/80627/original/image-20150506-22674-wbjxpm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/80627/original/image-20150506-22674-wbjxpm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=793&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/80627/original/image-20150506-22674-wbjxpm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=793&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/80627/original/image-20150506-22674-wbjxpm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=793&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/80627/original/image-20150506-22674-wbjxpm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=996&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/80627/original/image-20150506-22674-wbjxpm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=996&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/80627/original/image-20150506-22674-wbjxpm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=996&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Portrait of a Convict by Peter Fraser Gordon.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://trove.nla.gov.au/work/9088200?q&versionId=47645368">National Library of Australia</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Further studies by Tasmanian historians such as <a href="http://iccs.arts.utas.edu.au/colonial/old_caia_site/maxwellstewart.html">Hamish Maxwell-Stewart</a> and <a href="http://www.femaleconvicts.org.au/index.php/about-us">Lucy Frost</a> used the stories of individual convicts to provide insight into the convict system in general, revealing a more nuanced picture of convict lives.</p>
<p>Today, enough distance has passed to allow Australians to look back on their convict heritage with interest rather than repugnance. The former convict settlement of <a href="http://www.portarthur.org.au/">Port Arthur</a> is a tourist attraction that draws more than 290,000 visitors a year. Convict descendants can research their ancestors’ stories through sites such as <a href="http://www.linc.tas.gov.au">LINC</a>, Tasmania’s online archives, the National Library’s <a href="http://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper">TROVE</a> newspapers and genealogy websites.</p>
<p>The proceedings of London’s Old Bailey court, where many convicts were sentenced, are available in a searchable <a href="http://www.oldbaileyonline.org">online database</a>. Some records contain information about convicts’ families, occupations and conduct records. There are detailed descriptions, including distinguishing features and tattoos.</p>
<p>And the fear that we might be cursed with a genetic predisposition towards criminal behaviour? A 2001 Victorian parliamentary <a href="http://www.parliament.vic.gov.au/images/stories/committees/dcpc/Crime_trends/2nd_Crime_report.pdf">report</a> on crime in Australia found that, adjusted for population, Tasmania – with the highest proportion of convict descendants – had the second-lowest crime rate in the nation.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/41097/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Merran Williams does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Today, a convict ancestor is a matter of pride. But for past generations, including some convicts themselves, it was a shame that had to be hidden at all costs.Merran Williams, PhD Candidate, La Trobe UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.