Transported to Botany Bay. Dorice Williams Elliott
may not have continued after the wars were over (289–325), while convict narratives were written throughout the century and after. Also, contrary to Colley’s argument about British national identity, my argument is about a specifically English or Anglo-Saxon identity. Given the fact that convicts were sent to Australia in large numbers from Scotland, Wales, and especially Ireland, some may wonder at my use of the term English, rather than British, national identity. Though many, especially in Scotland and Ireland, would disagree, Kumar claims that “English” was often used by those actually residing in England as a “short-hand expression for the whole of the United Kingdom and its inhabitants” (Making, 186), and Simon Gikandi argues that this is still the case (xi). Almost all of the literary materials I have been able to gather for this project, specifically those featuring the figure of the transported convict, were published in England, most of them in London.32 In addition, aside from a few of the broadsides, these literary works are set almost exclusively in England or Australia.
There are other reasons for using the term “English identity” as well. Colley argues that the various wars with France in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries worked to unite the identities of Scotland, Wales, and Ireland as British by their mutual definition of the French as the Other, making Britishness hybrid because it contained the other members of the United Kingdom as well as the other colonies belonging to the British Empire. However, Englishness, contends Ian Baucom, could be identified with Britishness but could also define itself “against the British Empire” by “privileging the English soil,” or “certain quintessentially English locales, as its authentic identity-determining locations” (12; emphasis in original). Virtually all the literary representations I examine similarly rely either on English soil or on the racial claim about the importance of Anglo-Saxon racial roots to identify Englishness as the island’s true national identity.33 Thus, whether they imagined locale or racial purity as the standard for national identity, the English tended to acknowledge their Britishness but insist on Englishness as their primary identity. Therefore, while the name British is more technically accurate, it does not reflect the way the English generally thought of themselves or imagined their identity, at least as represented in the literary texts I examine, and it was the English reader that most of the texts about convicts implicitly addressed, with Australian readers, in a sense, reading “over their shoulders.”
The reason for my focus on English identity and not Irish identity—given that approximately a third of the historical convicts transported to Australia were Irish—is that the literary representations I examine, with the exception of some of the broadsides, do not generally distinguish between English and Irish convicts. When they do, they tend to represent the Irish as the most brutal and least reformable convicts, with only a few exceptions. Irish identity, given that island’s already colonized status and the distinct economic and political conditions there, was decidedly different and more complicated not only in Ireland but also in Australia, where the Irish often congregated together, when possible, to maintain their Irish identity separate from the other convicts or former convicts. There is considerable historiography on Irish convicts but not much literary discussion of Irish identity in Australia.34 Like the authors of the texts I analyze, I focus on English identity in relation to Australia, though, as in the literary texts, Irish people may occasionally appear as yet one more marginalized group fighting for an identity.
THE TRANSPORTED CONVICT AS A GUARANTOR OF IDEAL ENGLISHNESS
Because dissidents and criminals demonstrated that social relations between the ranks of the social hierarchy were not always harmonious and accepted by all, they posed not only an actual threat to property and peace but also an ideological challenge to the association of what I am calling pseudofeudal class relations with English national identity. The quickest and easiest way to meet both challenges without having to consider changes to the traditional social or economic systems was to get rid of these resistant members of society. Hence, in 1800 there were over two hundred capital crimes that, in theory, permanently disposed of such deviants. However, actually executing the majority of criminals and rebels was not consistent with England’s notion of itself as a just, humane, and civilized society.35 Transportation, or forced exile, to the American colonies (and a few other places) had been an alternative since the seventeenth century but had, of course, become unavailable to the English after the American colonies declared their independence in 1776.36 Because transportation had the advantage of being a way to remove undesirables from England without killing them and even offering them a potential second chance at a new life, English penal officials were hesitant to abandon it. Thus, transportation to Australia replaced earlier methods of disposing of those who jeopardized its supposedly harmonious social relations. This worked to preserve both England’s peace and its national conscience—as long as the convicts agreed to give up their Englishness and stay in Australia.
The English belief that transportation could reform criminals poses something of a challenge to Foucauldian readings of criminality and discipline that are relatively easy to map onto the penitentiaries and separate-and-silent prisons that coexisted with and later replaced transportation.37 Writing on policing and prisons, Upamanyu Pablo Mukherjee mentions that in the nineteenth century “the source of crime [needed to be] inside the individual”; if not, it “negated the possibility of reforming him though punishment” (93; emphasis in original). The penitentiaries and separate-and-silent prisons aimed to work on the criminal’s psyche and turn him or her to penitence (hence the name penitentiary) and thus to abandoning crime and becoming law-abiding citizens. Michel Foucault says it succinctly: “[I]n penal justice, the prison transformed the punitive procedure into a penitentiary technique” whereby “the individual is carefully . . . fabricated in [the system], according to a whole technique of forces and bodies” (Discipline, 298, 217).38 Additionally, Jeremy Tambling explains that in the Foucauldian system “a personality type is thus created; the change Foucault marks is towards the creation of an entity: a mind to be characterized in certain ways” (Dickens, Violence, and the Modern State, 19). Transportation removed the criminals from the environment that motivated their crimes—rural poverty, industrial conditions, or the criminal underworld—and gave them a chance to reform by providing opportunities to support themselves and succeed in a lawful manner once they finished their sentences or even before. Thus, in a subtle way, transportation contested the pseudofeudal social system’s success at managing social problems by instead locating the motivation to commit crime in the social system and not in the individual.
One of the problems with the system of transportation as a method for eliminating dissidents was that, in most cases, transported convicts did not die and thus could return again (legally or not) to challenge England’s notion of social stability and national security by going back to the environments that led them to commit crimes in the first place. Thus, it was important for the convicts to want to stay in Australia, that is, to develop a new identity as Australian rather than English. While exiling convicts to a settler colony could be a way to reinforce or even inspire an English identity,39 at the same time, an identity that was new and different from England’s began gradually to develop over the course of the 113 years between the arrival of the First Fleet in Australia in 1788 and the establishment of the Australian Federation in 1901, when Australia officially gained its own national status and had an easily recognizable nationalist movement.40 However, a potential Australian identity began to appear quite early in the period, well before the Australian Federation and official independence from England at the end of the nineteenth century.41 In fact, as early as the arrival of the First Fleet carrying British convicts, Governor Phillip imagined an Australian nation with its own national identity (qtd. in Hughes, Fatal, 68).
IMAGINING AN AUSTRALIAN IDENTITY
The literary texts about Australian convicts that I discuss in this book worked not only to reinforce an English identity, then, but also to create an Australian national identity that consisted of national feelings—though not yet nationalism as most scholars describe it. Not surprisingly, the first literary works featuring transported convicts mostly functioned to bolster English, not Australian, identity; many of the convict characters in those works do return to England, usually not with much success (except in the broadsides). What I also trace here, though, is the