Pros and Cons of Transportation

Most issues have their pros and cons, and Britain’s policy of transporting convicts to colonial Australia ranks among them.  One positive ‘pro’ was that thereby became effective a more-or-less coercible work-force, enabling colonisation to proceed.  Some of the convicts found opportunity to exercise their resources and skills in the new land.  A more obvious benefit accrued to the established order at empire’s centre.  ‘It is an expense incurred for the Peace and Happiness of the Mother Country, and certainly the benefits derived by the Colonists ... is not to be put in competition with the great and enduring advantages to England’, wrote G.T. Boyes, a senior bureaucrat in Van Diemen’s Land.’[1]

Even these points can be questioned as altogether valid ‘pros’.  Were not convicts an exploited working force, serving the interests of established wealth?  How can we be sure that those convicts who succeeded locally would not have done so at home?  Should not Australians resent rather than approve Britain benefiting from transportation?  Such points begin a ‘con’ argument against transportation, to which it is easy to add.  The very notion of punishing a person, law-breaker though he/she might have been, to the far antipodes offends basic decency and rights, can go one fundamental argument.  The more sensitive and social-worthy a person was, the deeper would be the anguish and suffering consequent upon transportation.  Not that sensitivity and social worth were abundant among the trans­portees—many prostitutes and deep-dyed convicts made up that number.  In the colonies a prisoner’s fate depended more upon resilience and skills than on criminality.  Especially the imbalance between male and female convicts threatened to deny many of the former any chance of long-term unions.  The communities that were to grow in the aftermath of transportation were likely to suffer divide between colonists who had come under bond and those who did not.  Many of the bond were likely to spend their latter lives in denial of their past.  Their progeny, if they had any, would likewise be disposed to deny the convict heritage.  Nothing craven or despicable underlay this: such an approach was the most obvious and effective way of minimising the past’s ugly bequest.  Yet individual lives and society at large would suffer from this inability to acknowledge, let alone celebrate their history.

Obviously in making these latter points, I am thinking of the Tasmanian experience.  ‘The burden of history’ indeed has weighed heavy upon this society; it is not absurd to charge some retrospective guilt upon imperial Britain for having created that situation.  It surely is the supreme ‘con’ against transportation.  The burden has taken long to lift, awaiting the past thirty years or so.  Crucial in the process have been people prepared and even happy to acknowledge convicts in their own genealogy.  That this has happened is not, I believe, due to any particular virtue in our own times.  It is overwhelmingly a factor of the passage of time, dating one might hazard from about the point when passed the last generation of convicts’ grandchildren.  Yet certainly extraneous factors have assisted the process.  Genealogical study has become worldwide, the ultimate reasons mysterious, but with an enormous boost coming from development of electronic communication and data-processing.  The more remote a place is from the great centres, the greater is such technology’s impact upon it, and so there is yet further reason for the genealogical and electronic revolutions to have had extraordinary effect in Tasmania.

All this notwithstanding, it might seem absurd to mark the sesqui-centenary of transportation’s end with an anthology of convict lives.  That event of 1852–3 was a victory for those most insistent in arguing the case against every aspect of transportation, their arguments often exaggerated in blackening the convicts’ repute.  A converse argument could run, that all who honour the convicts should ignore or disparage the anniversary.  Yet further thought suggests another side to this argument.  From one perspective, the occasion is especially appropriate for such a publication as this.  It illustrates that lifting of the past’s burden to which I have referred.  It does so the more impressively because the authors make no exaggerated claims for their subjects.  Simply because they did establish viable families these convicts made a more positive social mark in Australia than did many (I would think, most) of their peers.  Beyond that, however, they seem a pretty ordinary lot of people, pros and cons among them.  Good for the authors, that they make such facts plain while writing with empathy and commitment.  When reading their work, I also had on my book-shelf Julian Barnes’ A History of the World in 10½ Chapters.  ‘We must believe in love, just as we must believe in free will and objective truth’, says Barnes in prescribing the essentials for autonomous and decent life.’[2]  In their own way, the essays that follow uphold that wisdom.

Emeritus Professor Michael Roe

[ 1]    Quoted by A.G.L. Shaw in M. Roe (editor), The Flow, of Culture: Tasmanian Studies (Australian Academy of the Humanities, 1987), page 74.

[2]    Picador, 1990, page 246.