Transported to Botany Bay. Dorice Williams Elliott
by those who had just been banned from there. This idea of a country whose earliest European population was composed of England’s rejects, and their achieving a measure of redemption through literature, fascinated me. The next day I went to the campus library to discover whether more literary texts existed about transported English convicts in Australia. I found—somewhat to my surprise, since the only one I had heard of was Great Expectations—that there were a quite a few of them and that our library had several on the shelves, plus online editions of others. As I began reading, I discovered that each of them, in one way or another, engaged the way that social class functioned in the gradual process of forming a national identity, not only in an evolving Australia but also in England.
Also intriguing to me was the way in which this convict past had been repressed. I knew that all of the settler colonies had violently displaced indigenous people to establish first colonies and then nations and that forming new nations involved repressing the violence done to these indigenous people. But in Australia there were two groups who had been repressed—the indigenous people and the convicts. I was vaguely aware that Australia had taken a lot of transported convicts once the American Revolution made it impossible to send them to Georgia or Maryland (as I had seen represented in Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders). And I was, of course, familiar with Dickens’s Magwitch, though I had never thought about the Australian implications of the character or the novel. I was not alone in my lack of knowledge about the Australian convicts: when I later taught a course on Australian convict fiction, my exchange student from the United Kingdom was outraged: “Why have I never heard of this? I went through the entire British school system without every hearing a word about it! It’s a disgrace!”
The nineteenth-century novels I explore in this book, as I discovered when I visited Australia, seem not that familiar even in Australia, as suggested by their absence from the bookstores I visited in several areas of the country while trying to buy copies of some of them—though of course they can be found on library shelves and have been discussed by Australian literary critics. And they are not well-known in America, even by Victorianists. Thus, one of my intentions for this book is to introduce a new array of intriguing literary texts to a much wider international audience. But I also want to demonstrate how literary texts about nineteenth-century convicts transported to Australia were part of a significant transnational social experiment: creating a new society 10,000 miles away from the old one, out of the dregs of that old society.
Historically, approximately 160,000 men and women convicted of crimes ranging from poaching hares to murder—but mostly theft—were transported to one of the new English colonies in Australia between the years 1787 and 1867. Minor crimes such as shoplifting, which today would merit some community service and a fine, yielded a sentence of seven years, while more serious felonies brought sentences of fourteen years or life in exile. Literature featuring these transported convicts demonstrates how this figure could be deployed in the service of covering over English social problems related to class. This literature, of course, mirrored the way that convicts actually transported were banished from the nation. This left the ideal of a harmonious traditional system of class relations—part of England’s idea of itself—in place without having to confront the radical changes that were actually occurring in the “mother” country.1 For this “solution” to work, though, a new identity had to be developed in the Australian colonies that was somewhat more egalitarian so that the exiled convicts would be content to stay there and not return to England, as Magwitch does. Convicts who returned, in fact, would undo the social work that their banishment was supposed to accomplish.
When the convicts were transported from Britain to Australia, the new continent was to the British a desolate land populated only by the world’s most savage of savages. This combined those defined as the lowest people of England and the lowest of the world’s native races. Unimportant as both might have been deemed, though, they were part of a transnational negotiation that helped define both English and nascent Australian identity. Of course, the British defined themselves as civilized by their difference from indigenous peoples in many parts of the world. In Australia, though, even those British people who were rejected from England because their supposedly depraved natures threatened English social harmony were usually considered superior to the savages and could thus potentially be recuperated. Hence the convicts could both solve English social problems by being banished and be reformed by learning to be more civilized than indigenous Australians.
This banishment of convicts began during the Revolutionary period, when, as a result of the French and American Revolutions, some members of Britain’s working class began to question the naturalness of their subordinate positions in the traditional social hierarchy that characterized England and its early form of national identity. In addition, the transportation of British convicts to Australia roughly coincided with the Industrial Revolution, which resulted in the uprooting of many among the working classes from their long-established places in rural society and sent them to the cities or, if they stayed, condemned them to poverty in a capitalizing agricultural economy. Convict literature, which almost always included several working-class characters, tended to reinforce the social hierarchy and encourage working-class people to identify with it, even while the middle classes were successfully striving for a position of more respect, power, and wealth within a changing social system.2 People of both classes in the Australian colonies, meanwhile, were trying to find—or preserve—a national identity in a place that was not anchored to the geography and traditional social relations of England. In Australia, especially at first, the estrangement of Australian immigrants from England actually reinforced their identification with their homeland, in a process Benedict Anderson explains in “Long-Distance Nationalism.” In some of the literature I examine, especially the transportation broadsides, this distancing effect is fictional, with English readers imagining convicts looking back from Australia and thus reinforcing the Englishness of both convicts and readers. Gradually, however, a new and different national identity began to emerge in the Antipodes, one that was recognizably Australian yet definitely did not include the indigenous people. This need for a new national identity was especially true among those who had been officially expelled from England, and it happened decades before there was any real prospect of an Australian nation.3 Thus, transported convict literature filled somewhat different functions for English and Australian readers at different times.
CONVICT TRANSPORTATION TO AUSTRALIA
The 736 British transported convicts of the First Fleet, as well as the officers and marines who accompanied them, had the barest idea of the place they were going to when they left Portsmouth in 1787 for the nearly unexplored continent of Australia. Even the commander, Governor Arthur Phillip, had only the maps, charts, and descriptions of a very small area on the eastern shore of Australia, made by Captain James Cook, and the advice of Sir Joseph Banks, a naturalist who had accompanied Cook. Almost as soon as they arrived with the convicts, officers such as Watkin Tench and David Collins began to record descriptions of the new land, the indigenous people, and the daily life of the convicts, guards, and administrators; these accounts were soon published in England. Despite the availability of these documents, however, few people in Great Britain knew more about Australia than that convicts were banished there, to the place popularly known throughout the nineteenth century as Botany Bay. In actuality, the First Fleet spent only nine days in Botany Bay before moving on to the harbor they named Sydney after Home Secretary Thomas Townshend, Lord (later Viscount) Sydney, who held authority in England for both prisons and colonial affairs. Nevertheless, from the time the First Fleet set sail in England, the name Botany Bay became synonymous with convict transportation, though it signified a system more than a real place.
Transportation of convicted felons to Australia was instituted because the American Revolution prevented the English government from sending its convicts to the American colonies any longer, as had been the practice since the early seventeenth century. In the eleven years between the Declaration of Independence on the part of the American colonies and the voyage of the First Fleet, various plans for the convicts were debated, including Jeremy Bentham’s now notorious Panopticon. In 1786, however, the Cabinet decided that the best solution to the increasing buildup of convicts, sentenced to transportation and imprisoned temporarily in the abandoned ships known as “the Hulks,” was to resume the practice of transportation by sending the convicts to an unexplored, unmapped, almost