Transported to Botany Bay. Dorice Williams Elliott
His Natural Life (discussed in chapter 6).
Convict transportation continued in Van Diemen’s Land under Arthur’s successors, increasing after its abolition in New South Wales. In the early 1840s it took a different form, known as the probation system, in which convicts underwent a period of government-supervised hard labor before being allowed to work for pay for settlers. Transportation to Van Diemen’s Land was stopped in 1846, resumed in 1848, and finally ended in 1853. Overall, about 40 percent of transported convicts were sent to Van Diemen’s Land. Transportation ended there primarily because of major protests from free settlers who felt that the convict presence in their midst was an obstacle to further moral, economic, and civic growth in the colony. The name of the colony was changed to Tasmania in 1856, partly to erase its reputation as a penal colony.
What actually finished transportation, to both Tasmania and the east coast of the Australian mainland, was the Australian gold rush, which began in 1851 and lasted until the late 1860s. Once the gold rush was under way, sending convicts to the region at government expense seemed counterproductive. Many of the expirees and escaped convicts from Tasmania headed straight for the goldfields in Victoria, leading to protests from citizens there to add to the ones already lodged by Tasmanian free settlers. However, transportation continued at a considerable distance from the goldfields in the newer colony of Western Australia. Beginning in 1850 and continuing until 1868, nearly 10,000 convicts were transported there at the request of free colonists who needed the cheap labor.10 Most of the convicts sent to Western Australia were first offenders who had already undergone imprisonment in England. Perhaps because Western Australia was so isolated from the major centers of population in the east, little convict literature focuses on the colony, although one former convict, John Boyle O’Reilly, an American convicted for rebellion in Canada, wrote a novel entitled Moondyne (1879) that is partly set in Western Australia. After 1868, transportation to Australia ceased altogether, although many convicts were still living there under sentence through the rest of the century.
As this brief summary indicates, transportation of convicts to the Australian colonies provoked controversy, especially in Australia.11 It was also a subject of heated discussion in the metropole, both within the government and in the British press, where numerous articles on transportation appeared from at least the 1820s on. Many focused on the question of the basic function of penal discipline: was it to deter crime through harsh punishment or to reform and rehabilitate already-convicted criminals? For instance, a writer for the conservative Quarterly Review in 1838 lists the functions of penal discipline: “first of diminishing crime by the dread of punishment, and secondly of relieving this country from the revisitation of dangerous criminals, without the extremity of capital punishment, and with the reasonable chance of eventual reformation” (“New South Wales,” 501). Here reformation comes last, with deterrence and getting rid of the convicts clearly paramount. For others, the priorities were different despite having the same aims: Archibald Alison, writing for Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, describes “the praiseworthy intentions of the first founders of the system of transportation and assignment, which had no less for its object reformation of character than a just infliction of punishment” (529).
As the Australian colonies prospered and reports of a few convicts achieving great wealth appeared, some worried that the working classes in England would deliberately commit crimes in order to be transported; Thomas Richards in the Westminster Review quotes Mr. James Busby, “late Collector of Internal Revenue in New South Wales,” as claiming, “I have known individuals . . . who have committed crimes to get to New South Wales,” though he is a little less certain about convicts urging others to do so: “I think I have known of people who have endeavoured to induce their relatives or connexions to commit crime, in order to get them sent out” (18). William Molesworth, who later went on to lead the investigation of transportation that resulted in its abolition in New South Wales in 1840, summed up the situation in an article he wrote for the London Review in 1835:
Great difference of opinion exists in this country [England] with regard to the condition of the convict in the colony: by some writers he is described as a miserable being; by others as a most prosperous and happy one; transportation is consequently considered by some as very severe, by others as a very slight, punishment. These apparent contradictions can easily be reconciled, and their origin can be traced to the following circumstances. Transportation is not, as it is generally supposed, the name for one species of punishment, but for a variety of species essentially distinct from each other, some of very slight, some of appalling magnitude. (31)
What everyone seems to have been able to agree on, though, was that “[t]he majority of transported convicts, when all that in strictness can be termed their punishment is at an end, remain in the colonies; and this is the only substantial advantage arising out of the present system” (Grey, 351). While some, like W. R. Greg, objected to “the plan of ‘swamping a new world with the refuse of the old one,’ as it was called” (578), all agreed that England greatly benefited from ridding itself of its troublemaking working-class citizens by sending them somewhere where they might be pioneers of empire but would not come back to bother England.12
Of course, other solutions to the problem of the convict, including the separate-and-silent prisons and penitentiaries, were debated and tried during the same period. Penitentiaries, which were first suggested as early as the 1750s by Henry Fielding and first built in the 1770s at the urging of prison reformer John Howard, gradually replaced transportation as the preferred solution for incarcerating convicted criminals.13 As for Australia, there was much heated debate as to whether the purpose of transportation was to teach convicts to become independent, to be a labor force for the mostly middle-class settlers who had failed to get ahead financially in England, or to punish the convicts so severely that the prospect of transportation would deter crime at home. Not surprisingly, at various times and in different situations, it did all three of these things. From England’s perspective, though, the key thing about convicts and about Australia itself was that they were best forgotten; convicts were not to return and Australia did not spark much interest, except for the occasional joke, until it became a focus of free emigration, which coincided with the inception of convict literature, especially the genre of the convict novel.14
NATIONAL IDENTITY AND SOCIAL CLASS
The amount of attention focused on national identity over the past four decades demonstrates that though it is a deeply divided and multiple term, with many different definitions, it is something that matters, that is part of people’s sense of themselves at every level of society, but it is always felt in relation to their class position as well. Thus, what needs unpacking is this relation between national identity and social class and the way the two concepts work together in creating subjectivity, for transported convicts, people of various classes in England, and free immigrants in Australia. This can be accomplished only by ignoring the existence of the indigenous Australians, who were considered to be outside of any social system and incapable of ever belonging in one.
Both national identity and social class, of course, are unstable, shifting, and highly malleable terms that have been defined differently by a host of scholars in multiple disciplines. Benedict Anderson’s still-famous 1983 definition of national identity as “imagined community” is especially useful for my purposes. Although Anderson’s Imagined Communities was published many years ago, more-recent scholars, such as John Breuilly (introduction, 4), have pointed out that all succeeding scholarship on national identity follows from Anderson’s book and from Ernest Gellner’s Nations and Nationalism, published the same year. If, as Anderson’s title announces, a nation is an “imagined community,” then it makes sense to pay attention to imaginative literature as a source for and creator of the community that is imagined. Etienne Balibar, for instance, maintains that all social communities are imaginary because they are “based on the projection of individual existence into the weft of a collective narrative” (93) and Patrick Parrinder asserts that novels create this imagined community or collective narrative (14).
Other scholars from a variety of disciplines have used a bewildering number of related terms for national identity, sometimes loosely or antithetically defined.15