Go South, Young Man
…love, Julie
Theatre Royal Brighton, 1995
‘Prisoners of Mother England’
When the American Revolution deprived the British government of a suitable pit of oblivion into which to sink its criminal classes, the newly discovered continent of Australia was chosen as the nest best thing. On 16 January 1788, the First Fleet comprising some 750 transported felons with their guards and officers landed at Port Jackson, later to be called Sydney Harbour, under the governorship of Captain Arthur Phillip. Although the majority of convicts to be transported over the next eighty years had been sentenced to seven years or less, few of them would ever have the means – or the desire – to return home. They were by default the first immigrants.
To begin with the convicts had little incentive to work. The living was hard and the rewards non-existent. But the colony had the potential to repay astute management, and it was Phillip’s successor, Francis Grose, who first started allotting land to his officers along with enough prisoner-power to make it pay.
Private enterprise was soon doing better business than the government camps, and in 1797 Captain John Macarthur laid the foundations of the continent’s future prosperity by introducing the merino sheep from the Cape. He also planted vines at his farmstead in Parramatta. Laclan Macquarrie, another forceful Scot who became governor in 1809, extended the colony’s fortunes by encouraging exploration, developing townships of Sydney and Hobart, and emancipating convicts to make their own way in their new world. A system of assignment developed whereby convicts would be employed fort ten hours a day in return for food, clothes and lodging.
The Bounty System and Assisted Exile
Under this enlightened regime the colony grew so fast that it was in danger of outstripping its own resources. By 1840 labour in New South Wales was scarce, the land was cheap, and wages were high. Many new immigrants were therefore encouraged to try their luck in Australia under the bounty system which made it easy for free labourers to set up as small independent farmers with every prospect of success. Able-bodied couples under thirty were given £30 to make the trip, with a further £5 for each of their children. ‘Respectable spinsters’ between the ages of fifteen and thirty were offered £15, while settlers could receive £10 for every single man they sponsored. Within a few years this scheme has attracted a further 60,000 new immigrants to the continent. In th4e late 1840os economic depression in England increased the flood by a further 30,000.
Meanwhile, the face of growing opposition from colonists abroad and abolitionists at home, the transportation system continued under the euphemism ‘assisted exile’. Convicts would serve time in Pentonville, only to be shipped down under to complete their sentences. Although this workforce was always snapped up by chronically labour-hungry farmers, the increasingly independent-minded colonists began to object to their perceived role – not only was their burgeoning country being used as a dungeon in the sun for England’s dregs, the immigrants arriving of their own free will were soon grabbing more than their fair share of the country’s riches.
But if the assisted exile system caused friction, the discovery of gold turned the broadening frontier into a free-for-all.
Gold!
On 15 April 1851, Edward Hammond Hargreaves made the first strike in the Blue Mountains, 170 miles west of Sydney. Victoria had not been founded as a convict state, but it instantly became the promised land for newly released prisoners from neighbouring New South Wales, In addition, the further influx of rough and ready miners from all walks of life and from every part of the world outraged the sensibilities of the indigenous population. Not that this made any difference to the hopeful multitudes now swarming in. Within a year, 50,000 prospectors were hauling half a ton a week out of the richest goldfields every discovered.
For the rest of the century, hard work and good luck paid off, and the new continent boomed, But as its confidence grew, the population, both native and immigrant, began to feel the need to be recognised as a land of opportunity, not just as a land for opportunists So subsidised fares continued to be offered to ‘suitable’ immigrants, many of whom were happy to swap the squalor and uncertainty of Victorian England for the wide-open skies and breezy optimism prevalent in Victoria and its bordering states, Following the First World War, the Empire Settlement Act helped a further 210,000 Britons emigrate to the sun.
But if the great War required Australians to fight for the Empire, World War Two taught them they should also learn to fight for themselves. Seven million people in a country the size of Australia, they realised, were not enough when powerful neighbours like Japan were only a missile’s flight away. “We must fill this country or we will lose it,” warned Arthur Calwell, the first Minister of Immigration. And so the £10 Assisted Passage Scheme came about.
A Place in the Sun
It was attractive to a war-weary populace in Britian, where the winters were cols, the rationing harsh, and the towns battered and bomb-damaged. By the start of 1948, nearly half a million applicants were awaiting their rubber stamp from Australia House. By 1973 nearly 3.5 million immigrants had settled in Australia, most of them from the British Isles.
‘White Australia’ had been the ideal up till then, but in the aftermath of the Vietnam War and in the face of the growing industrial and commercial power of Australia’s potential trading partners around the Pacific Rim, this policy seemed self-defeating. Besides, Britain was about to get into bed with the EEC, with every appearance of leaving its colonies to their own devices.
So in 1972, Australia’s new Labor government began to withdraw ethnic bars to immigration and in 1981, the Assisted Passage Scheme was terminated. As the flood of Britons into the antipodes slowed to a trickle, the wheel came full circle. Two hundred years before, the only way to reach Australia had been by breaking the law; nowadays a criminal record is one of the first things that will debar you from settling in the country.
PS
Another early piece on Australia which must have drawn on my recent reading of Robert Hughes’s monumental history of Australia, The Fatal Shore. I really ought to have called it Dungeon in the Sun – and I’d love to think I came up with the phrase myself, though at this remove I can no longer be certain where anything comes from – but that might have been a bit of a downer and not in keeping with the tenor of the play it was accompanying. But I remember we stole some nice pictures for this:
Thomas Rowlandson’s Convicts embarking for Botany Bay, 1787. The gibbet in the background hints at the only other option for those caught committing a crime that today would earn little more than a fine.
A convict ship. The voyage out could take anything up to six months, and it was not uncommon for the appalling conditions to see off a fifth of the prisoners en route.
Australia’s first tycoon, Captain John Macarthur, who introduced the merino sheep onto the lush pastures of the new continent.
The first Australian railway, built by Commandant Booth and powered by convicts, in Van Diemen’s Land (now Tasmania).
In the early days, 80% of the transported felons were men, but as the colony grew, increasing numbers of women were needed to make the population grow with it. Many were attracted by this type of recruiting poster.