Van Diemen’s Good Citizens

Alison Alexander, Tasmania’s Convicts: How Felons Built a Free Society, Allen & Unwin, 2010, 304 pages, $45.
Tony Moore, Death or Liberty: Rebels and Radicals Transported to Australia, Pier 9, 2010, 423 pages, $34.95. 

The unfashionable little secret is out. Britain’s convict gulag, Guantanamo and hell-hole thief colony of Van Diemen’s Land was actually a marvellous success. Exile there transformed most of perhaps 70,000 thieves into honest and useful Australian pioneers. They mainly joined the battler class of manual workers, small farmers and tradesmen but quite a few were sufficiently socially mobile to become wealthy or community leaders, including politicians and the chief Hobart newspaper proprietor.

This is the main message of Alison Alexander’s fine history of her home state’s pioneer population. Unlike most writers on the convict era, she follows the outcome through to modern times. She estimates that about 75 per cent of present-day Tasmanians are descended at least in part from convicts, and quotes one recent study suggesting that only sixteen of the babies born on the island in 2009 would be descended entirely from free settlers.

Also, she points out, as others have also done, that many of the free settlers there in colonial times were family and friends of transported convicts, since the notoriety of Van Diemen’s Land deterred those without a good reason for emigrating there.

On her estimation, about 10 per cent of the convicts were chronically troublesome and gave the colony its horrendously bad name. These were the “secondaries”, who re-offended after arrival and were sentenced to the harsh jails such as Macquarie Harbour and Port Arthur. Similar proportions had been professional thieves or became the conspicuously rough “old lags” of later times.

The great evergreen and best-selling melodrama of Van Diemen’s Land, Marcus Clarke’s For the Term of His Natural Life, bettered Power Without Glory as horrifically bad publicity for its target, but the accident-prone misplaced gentleman hero’s fate said more about the mid-Victorian imagination than it did about the island of a generation before.

The great majority of prisoners went on assignment to local farmers and graziers, themselves often of earlier convict heritage. There they learnt to be farm and bush workers—skills that kept them gainfully employed when within about three to seven years of arrival, depending on the severity of their crime, they went on “ticket-of-leave” probation and soon afterwards regained normal freedoms.

Most convicts had been from the English working classes, supplementing meagre incomes with petty theft and were transported when young on the second offence.

The disproportion of about five males to every female convict slowed down marriage for the men, but the women were snapped up and highly valued. The resulting colonial families were big and healthy—many of double figures—and better fed and housed than they would have been in the urban and rural slums of the British Isles. Few were ever in serious trouble again.

The system changed after 1840 when transportation to New South Wales ended. About half the total convict numbers sent to the island came between then and the end of transportation to Van Diemen’s Land in 1853. More also went at that time into the road gangs, where life was harsh—but healthy and socially useful—for the few years it lasted. There was a big Irish minority then, as earlier transports were nearly all from England.

Several local factors helped Van Diemen’s Land to assimilate its prisoners. It was often the most stable who stayed there, who married and modestly prospered, or those who had come in earlier times. It helped to have energy, brains, good looks or skill. About half the convicts moved to the mainland when freed (some escaped to it), chiefly to what became Victoria from the mid-1830s. Little has been recorded of these people. The rough element derided as “Van Demonians” were conspicuous but most seem to have reinvented themselves, sometimes with a change of name, to become sturdy British settlers melting into a new immigrant society.

They probably numbered of the order of 25,000. Progeny ranged from Ned Kelly to the Boyd artistic clan. Other ex-convict contingents went to New South Wales, New Zealand and a South Australia which liked to boast of being without the taint.

Once the last convict ship anchored at Hobart in 1853, Van Diemen’s Land quickly became the free self-governing colony of Tasmania, with an enveloping craving for both respect and respectability. Cover-up, denial and constructive shame worthy of Germany after 1945 brought respectability rushing in, even though the last surviving transported convict lived until 1926.

Respect in the eyes of Britain, the world and the mainland came more slowly. The island of Port Arthur, convict cannibals and For the Term of His Natural Life made just too good a story. But in time it came. About a century after the last convict ship tied up, Tasmania began to remember its past again, value the tourist potential and even become proud of it. Microscopic study has shown Tasmania to be a very normal society, given that it is relatively small and more rural than other states.

Much of what Alexander depicts for Tasmania would also be true of New South Wales, where convict era experience was similar, but bigger, older, wealthier and with much more influence from free immigration. 

Tony Moore’s account of the 3600 convicts transported to the Australian colonies for political offences between 1791 and 1868 is another welcome addition to understanding the era. Some of the episodes are better known than others, but this book gathers them together, with abundant context. “Politicals” were about one in forty-five of the total convict intake in the Australian colonies, most of them rural rebels, including English machine breakers and Irish fighters in the uprisings around 1800.

Moore conveys a warm glow about radicals, revolutionaries, republicans and “ordinary working people”, but his heroes are neither as culpably “forgotten” nor as critical to Australian development as he seems to think. Nevertheless, he has done important work and there is a lot of solid information there.

Moore’s “politicals” also, like the less heroic Van Demonians, usually seemed to come out the other end of transportation fairly well, for all the hardship, heartbreak and injustice on the way.

Both Alexander and Moore give the usual token reference to the dismal fate of the Aborigines under the white advance, relying on the old cliché about the “black wars” of the 1820s destroying the Tasmanian race. None of the varying estimates of numbers killed then justify this regrettable period as more than part of that story. Historians should try harder. 

Robert Murray is a historian and a frequent contributor to Quadrant over many years.

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