Transported to Botany Bay. Dorice Williams Elliott
as “savages,” like the Aborigines, and were often even represented in racial terms, with a convict “stain” or “taint” that was supposedly ineradicable. This extension of racism to convicts, alongside the indigenous people, erased Englishness as a possible identity for both of them, but it still left the convicts with the option of adopting a new national identity, even if at first this was only vaguely imagined. Aborigines, in contrast, according to Bruce Buchan, were not considered as potential citizens of an Australian nation nor as having any sovereignty with which to negotiate self-determination until at least the late twentieth century.51
The figure of the convict transported to Australia was, as one might expect, used in multiple ways in literary representations of various types, just as there were multiple and competing racial, gender, class, and national identities among the diverse groups of settlers who went there in the nineteenth century. This figure, of course, was obviously only one of many representations involved in imagining a national community in England or Australia. In most accounts, the national community imagined for England was led by a British gentleman who could be trusted to be honorable and humane. Most English people believed that their society was held together by the interlocking bonds of a paternalist pseudofeudal class hierarchy. The convict banished to Australia could be used to represent and solve challenges to this system by creating a new identity within a different class system elsewhere for those who threatened the imaginary stable national community in England. This system removed the threatening figure from England and resituated it in a new environment where what was a problem in England could become a productive force that was still part of Britain but was not English. A problem arose, however, when Australia became a destination for free English settlers who did not want to be defined as deviant or as working class but instead wanted to create an Australian identity free of the taint of “convictism,” which many commentators called it, as its defining quality.52 This led eventually to the abolition of transportation, which began to happen in the late 1830s and was finally accomplished in 1868. Even so, the cultural work accomplished by the figure of the transported convict did not end with the cessation of criminal transportation. Certainly transportation was still a vital issue in Australia, where living convicts and convict descendants were a reality that had to be incorporated into its emerging we-identity. But English and Anglo-Australian writers continued to write convict literature for English audiences that represented the creation of Australian identity as a solution to British social problems well after the historical practice of enforced exile had been abandoned in the major settlements of the Australian colonies. Doing so enabled readers in England to continue to imagine England as free of poverty, dissent, and crime, even though by the 1830s there were more voluntary emigrants arriving in Australia than forced ones. In other words, voluntary transportation of problematic English people still served a similar function to forced transportation, and the two could be represented in similar terms in fiction.
THE LITERARY FIGURE OF THE CONVICT IN AUSTRALIA
I mention Dickens’s Great Expectations, the most famous nineteenth-century representation of the figure of the transported convict, at the beginning of this introduction, and I focus on it in more detail in the next chapter. This novel is, however, by no means the first or the last portrayal of this figure. Many other cultural productions, including broadsides, poetry, memoirs, letters, travel narratives, journalism, and popular novels, featured convicts banished to Australia. Most of these works struggle with the interrelated issues of class and national identity.53 The chapters that follow explore the questions I have outlined here in some of these cultural texts, mostly produced in England, which was the center of the publishing industry, but shipped to Australia for Australian readers as well. Texts written in Australia usually appeared only in serial form in local journals or newspapers until quite late in the century, when novels began to be published there more regularly.54 As in the history of nineteenth-century Australia, representations of the convict in popular culture there varied at different times and in different places. Despite such variety, a historical narrative does gradually arise when looking at these texts, one in which Englishness as the predominant and desired national identity is gradually supplanted by a new and separate identity for Australians in both English- and Australian-produced texts.55 By midcentury at least, around the time that England began to grant self-government to the Australian colonies, fictional narratives began to imagine Australianness not as a colonial identity but as a national one.56 This was a crucial step in preparing the way for an actual independent Australian state some fifty years later, though one that would still be closely allied with Britain. Beyond the period that I discuss in this project, from 1788 to 1881, the figure of the convict became less prominent in Australian literature until the late twentieth century; yet the central issue of the relation of social class to national identity remained as Australia was officially founded and nationalism imagined it as a less socially stratified society than England.
While the figure of the transported convict and how he or she is represented in the various texts I examine is my primary focus, I am also concerned with the forms in which this figure was presented. Many of the narratives I explore are novels with familiar novelistic conventions. The earliest printed representations of transported convicts, however, took other forms, including broadsides and autobiography or memoir. These forms accomplished cultural work in terms of constituting national identity through their assumptions about or representations of social class relations. Even the novels about transported convicts used generic conventions in particular and distinctive ways such that a new genre—or at least a subgenre—of convict novels arose in midcentury England. These novels assimilate existing novelistic conventions with new ones unique to this genre or subtype, and these new conventions convey meanings that further emphasize the interrelation of social class with national identity. Although a large body of unpublished convict narratives exists, mostly located in Australia, I focus on those that saw print and thus are arguably a part of print capitalism, because I am interested more in the cultural work these texts accomplished than I am in documenting what the convict experience was like for those who experienced it.57 Thus, the literary form in which transported convicts appeared is a central focus of several of the chapters that follow.
Several notable scholars have addressed Australian convict literature, especially the novel. Coral Lansbury’s Arcady in Australia: The Evocation of Australia in Nineteenth-Century English Literature was published in 1970 but is still relevant and often quoted. Lansbury shows how representations of Australia in English literature, including many works from or about the convict period, changed across the course of the century depending on the historical and cultural context, though her focus is not primarily on convicts. A. W. Baker’s Death Is a Good Solution: The Convict Experience in Early Australia (1984) treats convict literature specifically. The charts in his appendixes are especially useful because he carefully lists the plot conventions associated with convict narratives, both autobiographical and fictional. Noted Australian scholar Laurie Hergenhan’s Unnatural Lives: Studies in Australian Convict Fiction (1983) was the first book-length critical study of the convict novel. It considers in some depth a few of the major nineteenth-century convict novels, as well as several twentieth-century ones, although Hergenhan does not consider the cultural work these novels helped accomplish, especially in terms of class and national identity. A chapter (109–33) in Patrick Brantlinger’s Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism, 1830–1914 (1988) was the first major consideration of Australian convict literature in what could be called a postcolonial context, which Bob Hodge and Vijay Mishra also do in their 1990 Dark Side of the Dream: Australian Literature and the Postcolonial Mind. These important books have provided the building blocks for my more-extensive study of published transported convict literature in a transglobal framework.
Since the 1970s, numerous articles dealing with individual novels or other works featuring transported Australian convicts have been published by Australian critics, especially on the most famous nineteenth-century convict novel, Marcus Clarke’s His Natural Life, as well as Henry Kingsley’s The Recollections of Geoffry Hamlyn. A good selection of Australian literary criticism, edited by Delys Bird, Robert Dixon, and Christopher Lee, appeared in 2001, though its focus is not so much on individual novels, especially convict novels. Most histories of Australian literature have a section or two on nineteenth-century novels about or written in Australia, though only a few