‘A Free and Easy Life?’ Transportation of British convicts to Australia during the eighteenth and nineteenth century.

Article by Katherine Cooney. Edited by Hannah Lyons. Additional Research by Jack Barnes.

We’ve all heard the jokes, watched the television dramas, maybe even worn the fancy dress costume, but what was reality really like for those British and Irish convicts transported to Australia throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries? Although the transportation officially ended in 1868, it is far from irrelevant. Currently there is a page dedicated to the topic on the Australian Government website and to me it still seems to be of great importance to the national identity of both Britain and Australia. What can the actual daily experience of those transported to Australia tell us about crime and punishment? 

Between 1788 and 1868, around 160,000 criminals from Britain and Ireland were shipped to the penal colonies of New South Wales, Van Diemen’s Land (modern day Tasmania) and Western Australia. What distinguished these colonies from those established in America was that – as the name itself suggests – they were ‘penal’ colonies. This change, both in name and function, indicated a shift in government policy towards punishment. For example, rather than being executed, one was now exiled. This, in turn, became a compulsory sentence in exchange for a pardon. 

It is easy for us to get distracted by the more interesting stories of convicts working in leg irons from dawn until dusk than it is to get bogged down in the legal history of the colonies. In reality, once convicts arrived, the colony seemed to transform into what modern day commentators would call an open prison. One way in which convicts were ‘punished’, particularly after 1825, was by being assigned to a private household to serve out their indenture. However, during their afternoons free from this servitude they could undertake paid employment elsewhere to earn a wage. Further, convicts could be issued with a ‘ticket of leave’ which was essentially an 1801 version of parole. This ticket was given to convicts who had served around four years of a typical seven year sentence and who no longer had to undertake compulsory labour despite still formally serving out their sentence of transportation. A little different to the traditional pictures of cruel and imaginative punishments usually portrayed. It seems that lives were lived in relative freedom. The contemporary observer Robert R. Torrens has described how the prisoner Redpath, sentenced for life for his criminal offences, arrived in Western Australia in 1858. After undergoing some punishment, including nine months in solitary confinement, he was issued with a ‘ticket of leave’ three years later and went on to become a clerk in the Government offices. Torrens concludes that eventually Redpath earned the freedom to go wherever he chose. 

So why is this all relevant? Well, the original motivations for transportation were threefold: to deter, to reform, and to found colonies. It appears that the apparent benefits of going to the colonies rendered the former a failure; Torrens’s view that those in the colonies enjoyed a ‘free and easy life’ can be seen as indicative of views of those left back in England at the time. Compared to the problems of overcrowding and ‘debauchery’ in British and Irish prisons of the time, exile to Australia seemed like an attractive alternative. (It must be acknowledged that from around 1832 the British government did strive to control the use of ‘tickets of leave’ due to opposition.) However, to the British civilian starving in the streets, witnessing somebody arriving back from servitude with money in their pocket may not have been the greatest deterrent from committing a crime yourself! 

What I find particularly interesting is the way in which women were involved in the foundation of this new society. Women’s crimes were of a different nature compared to crimes committed by men. Indeed, the transportation of women in the penal colonies was an indicator of wider attitudes towards the female sex in the eighteenth and nineteenth century. Although only around 20 per cent of females transported were sentenced for crimes relating to prostitution, common conceptions would place the figure much higher. Essentially, all women were judged against a constructed ideal of the virtuous, moral female. The crimes committed by women therefore, became not just a legal issue but a moral one; their crimes were a rejection of the moral foundation of society. Women who fell into prostitution were the ultimate rejection of the ideal, instead they simply confirmed fears of the only other alternative – the ‘fallen women’. Thus women committed a crime on two levels, legally and morally. 

Prostitution was held as proof that female convicts were corrupt; any woman who had committed a crime and offended this popular morality was labelled a ‘whore’. But surely this ignores the fact that some of these women successfully fulfilled their roles as mothers and wives and contributed to the establishment of a new social system? Surely this could not have been achieved by a cohort of ‘whores’? Convict women were often seen to belong on one level to a society of professional criminals but arguably this was created from the social system they were leaving behind. After all, prostitution was another way of obtaining economic support from a male-dominated world.

Once arrived in the colony, the patriarchal system rooted at home seemed far away. In New South Wales, from 1816 onwards, convict husbands could be assigned to work for their non-convict wives; they and their labour essentially became the property of the female. Does this sound a little different to the system back in England? This is a complete rejection of the traditional concept of women becoming the ‘property’ of their husbands once married. Free women could even handpick their husband from the new cohorts of criminals stepping off the ship. Although once the male was free, he could once again own his wife’s property. (In the context of the nineteenth century the idea that the female could have any power over her husband was still a radical step.) I would suggest that this shows how females had an essential role in the creation of the new colonial society. Equal rights for men and women is a topic which still evokes heated debate to this day and it is striking that Australia was the first country which allowed women to stand in elections. In Southern and Western Australia women attained the vote from 1901. Comparatively, in Britain, restricted female suffrage was only achieved in 1918 and in other countries not until much, much later. The tradition of females participating in society has been an integral part of Australian national identity. I think that it started here. 

Gradually, enthusiasm for transportation began to wane, indeed, in the first half of the nineteenth century even the colonies were reluctant to take British convicts. An increasingly centralised government was being pressurised by people from all levels of society, particularly philosophers, to protect the people by creating a fairer and more regulated system of punishment. Commentators such as Charles Bowyer Adderley, writing in 1850, called for an appreciation of the causes of crime, such as poverty. Once Adderley had set this in motion it was realised that Britain was not being overrun by a criminal ‘class’ and so transportation, with its variations in punishment and laws, became obsolete to this new, democratic way of thinking. 

The title of this issue is ‘crime and punishment’, terms which should have fitted this topic perfectly. Looking into the ‘crimes’ committed by women shows how we can see the moral codes of society played out in law and punishment. No matter what the crime, being branded as a prostitute for any crime seemed inescapable; to be labelled as such was the punishment. 

Was transportation truly an effective punishment? Well, Redpath certainly wouldn’t have thought so.

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