Colonial Australia’s Strange Convict Society
By: Adam M Wakeling
Tags: Society, Australia, History, United Kingdom, Criminal Justice

Colonial Australia’s Strange Convict Society

How felons built a successful community

The founding of Sydney, 26 January 1788 (Wikimedia Commons)

On a sultry summer day in January 1788, beside the languid waters of Sydney Harbour, Great Britain began a truly strange, unprecedented experiment. It would build a colony using convicted criminals as colonists. Under the plan, Britain would turn Australia into a profitable and strategically-important colony, and the felons who would otherwise be hanged under harsh Georgian penal laws would be given a second chance at life.

James Mario Matra, one of the champions of the scheme, described it as “a most desirable and beautiful union […] economy to the public, and humanity to the individual”. Everyone would win, that is, except for the Aborigines whose lands had been seized for the experiment.

Britain transported 160,000 convicts to its Australian colonies of New South Wales, Western Australia, and Tasmania (then called Van Diemen’s Land) between 1788 and 1868, building a felon-majority society. Throughout the 1820s, convicts outnumbered free settlers to New South Wales three to one. In 1823, convicts made up 58% of the non-Aboriginal population of Tasmania. As late as 1837, 32,000 of New South Wales’ 97,000 non-Aboriginal residents were convicts under sentence, and many of the rest were emancipists (convicts who had been pardoned or whose sentences had expired).

The Australian colonies could not be run like a jail, and the governors London sent to Sydney and Hobart quickly realised they would need to win the co-operation of their disreputable colonists. They built a ladder to freedom, where a convict could earn a ticket-of-leave, entitling them to earn a living, then a conditional pardon, allowing them to live freely in the local district under the supervision of a magistrate. An unconditional pardon could follow.

Convicts not working for the government were assigned to settlers, and if they earned their freedom, could then have more convicts assigned to work for them, creating a cycle. Almost all work in the colonies was done by assigned convicts. Convict labourers cleared land and built roads, convict shepherds minded sheep, and wealthy settlers had convict servants keeping their houses. Educated convicts called ‘specials’, often convicted of white-collar crimes like fraud and blackmail, worked as clerks, civil servants, and schoolteachers. Each convict owed their master a certain number of hours of work a day — usually until four in the afternoon — after which they could work for themselves and make a small income. The system worked. The last major convict uprising was in 1804, at Castle Hill west of Sydney. After that, convicts usually preferred to work within the rules. So the Australian colonies became a functional society, and eventually, a flourishing one. Here are some examples of their success stories.

The Castle Hill convict rebellion of 4–5 March 1804, the last major convict uprising in Australia (Wikimedia commons)

Convict Lawyers

Of all the ways convicts could be employed, practising the law was the most controversial. Still, the Australian colonies initially had no choice but to use them — the only qualified lawyers they had were those who had been convicted of crimes, disbarred, and transported. One was George Crossley, convicted of perjury, imprisoned, pilloried, and then transported in 1799. Conditionally pardoned in 1801, he became a successful businessman, landowner, and lawyer.

Crossley’s moment came during the lead-up to the Rum Rebellion of January 1808. Governor William Bligh, of the Bounty mutiny fame, was locked in a legal dispute with the insubordinate officers of the New South Wales Corps, commonly known as the Rum Corps (Rum was used as unofficial currency in early New South Wales). Bligh, not sure how to deal with the officers, called on Crossley to advise him. Crossley had no copy of Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England to refer to, but luckily for him, he was able to borrow one from Simeon Lord, a wealthy merchant. Lord, then one of the most successful businessmen in the colony, had originally been transported for stealing cloth.

Crossley’s efforts on behalf of the Governor went nowhere. Before Bligh’s dispute with the officers could be resolved in court, they overthrew him in the Rum Rebellion of 26 January 1808. The officers of the Corps had no truck with convict lawyers. “Lieutenant-Governor Foveaux has learned, with equal indignation and surprise, that men who have been prisoners in the colony have so far forgotten their former condition as to obtrude themselves into the courts of justice in the character of counsellors and advocates…” began their declaration on the matter. Crossley was found to have broken the law prohibiting convicted perjurers from practising law and was transported again — this time up the New South Wales coast to the coal mining settlement at Newcastle.

But all was not lost. The new Governor, Lachlan Macquarie, who arrived in 1810, was open-minded regarding convicts. Crossley was released, returned to Sydney, and successfully sued his persecutors for trespass and false imprisonment, winning £500 in damages. He lived out the rest of his life in Sydney, sometimes prospering, sometimes in trouble again. As historian K. G. Allars wrote, he was:

“…a colourful if somewhat shady character, not possessing all the virtues ordinarily required of attorneys, but sometimes unnecessarily maligned.”

Convict workers in colonial New South Wales (National Archives of Australia)

Convict Doctors

Sydney’s original hospital was a tent. In 1810, Governor Macquarie began building a new one. It was badly-designed for want of the attention of a proper architect, but fortunately for Macquarie, he had one. Architect Francis Greenway had been sentenced to death in Bristol for forgery. His sentence was commuted to transportation for fourteen years, and he arrived in Sydney in 1806. Macquarie commissioned him to look over the building, and he found it badly wanting. Under Greenway’s direction it was rebuilt and Rum Hospital, as it was called, began taking patients in 1816. Macquarie used Greenway for many more projects, and the architect’s face appeared on the first Australian $10 banknote — an ironic distinction for a convicted forger.

Management of the hospital was taken over by businessman and doctor D’Arcy Wentworth, Chief Surgeon of the colony. Wentworth was not a convict, although this may have simply been a matter of luck. Wentworth came from a wealthy aristocratic family, yet apparently still had a penchant for highway robbery. He was tried and acquitted four times. Facing court for the fifth time, and learning that the Crown had a witness willing to identify him, he volunteered to go to New South Wales as a surgeon in exchange for the prosecution dropping the case. He became extremely successful in the colony, was popular with the convicts assigned to work for him, and kept his convict mistresses in style. His son, William Charles Wentworth, became the dominant figure in colonial politics.

Sydney needed more than one doctor, though, and the criminal justice system gave it two very good ones. One was William Redfern, a young naval surgeon. During the mutiny at Spithead in 1797, he told the men to “be more united among yourselves.” For this remark, he was sentenced to hang. As he was only nineteen, the courts took mercy on him and commuted his sentence to transportation. He earned acclaim in New South Wales for his efforts to improve the health of the convicts. Macquarie recommended that he succeed Wentworth, but the British Government baulked at appointing a mutineer as chief surgeon. So Macquarie made him a magistrate instead. He went on to become a director of the Bank of New South Wales.

The other was William Bland, also a naval surgeon. Something of a volatile character, he was convicted of murder after he shot the ship’s purser in a duel. His sentence commuted, he arrived in Sydney in 1814. He was tasked with caring for convicts at Castle Hill, but after being pardoned the next year established a successful practice and became the doctor of choice for many of Sydney’s leading citizens. He would spend another year in prison for slander, before resuming his business permanently. He was elected to the New South Wales legislature in 1843.

Old Australian ten-dollar note featuring architect and convicted forger Francis Greenway with examples of his work (Wikimedia Commons)

Convict Schoolmasters

The colonial authorities were determined to educate the children of convicts to stamp out any hereditary tendency towards crime. As social commentator Reverend Sydney Smith wrote in England, “nothing but the earliest attention to the habits of children can restrain the erratic finger from the continuous scrip, or prevent the hereditary tendency to larcenous abstraction”. This task fell to Laurence Hynes Halloran, a very intelligent and erudite yet violent and disturbed man whose criminal convictions spanned three continents. He joined the Navy as a midshipman but was jailed for stabbing another midshipman to death in a fight. He founded a school that went bankrupt. He was charged with immorality and then went around England passing himself off as a curate. He moved to the Cape Colony in South Africa to start a new school but was expelled from the colony for criminal libel. Finally, convicted of forgery in England, he was sentenced to seven years of transportation, arriving in Sydney in June 1819.

Governor Macquarie and the leading emancipists recognised his potential value to the colony and he was granted a ticket-of-leave and tasked with founding a school. Called ‘Doctor Halloran’s Institute for Liberal Education’, it was Australia’s first grammar school, or academic high school. It provided a few select students with a pathway to Oxford and Cambridge Universities. Halloran, by all accounts, was a gifted teacher, although he remained in trouble with the law for the rest of his career.

Sydney hospital, built with convict labour between 1810 and 1816 and improved by convict architect Francis Greenway (Wikimedia Commons)

Conclusion: A Convict Country

Appointing felons to positions of power and responsibility was deeply-troubling to nineteenth-century sensibilities. Macquarie had little sympathy for those who felt this way:

“In my humble opinion, in coming to New South Wales, they should consider that they are coming to a convict country” he wrote. “And if they are too proud, or too delicate in their feelings, to associate with the population of the country, they should consider it in time and bend their course to some other country, in which their prejudices in this respect would meet with no opposition”.

Subsequent governors usually (but not always) adopted the same view.

As the Australian colonies became more successful, penal transportation quickly lost its value as a deterrent. A prison official at Newgate complained to the police commissioner in 1818 that convicts were viewing transportation “as a party of pleasure, as going out to see the world, they evidence no penitence, no contrition, but seem to rejoice in the thing.” With the opening of Pentonville Prison in 1842, the British government had a cheaper alternative to sending convicts halfway around the world. Transportation was scaled back, finally ending in 1868.

By then, the British colonies in Australia were wealthy, successful, and democratic. The children of convicts, schooled by convict teachers like Dr Halloran, could now read and write well enough to follow public affairs in newspapers, participate in public debate, and vote in elections by secret ballot. The first modern election in the world, using ballot boxes and government-printed ballot papers, was held in the Australian colony of Victoria in 1856. So the convict society succeeded.