British Convict Transportation to Australia: Punishment and Legacy

Origins and Rationale for Convict Transportation

The concept of transportation as a punishment for criminals dates back to before the establishment of the Australian colonies. The first British law establishing transportation as a means of dealing with criminals was the Transportation Act of 1718. This imposed sentences of transportation to the American Colonies for offences considered too serious to be adequately punished by whipping, but not serious enough to merit the death penalty. The American War of Independence effectively ended trans-Atlantic transportation, and felons sentenced to be transported were confined within Britain by means of prison hulks, in which conditions were appalling. Transportation overseas began again with the departure of the first convicts for the new Australian penal colony of Botany Bay in 1787. For nearly eighty years after that date, British convicts were sent to penal colonies in Australia; penal transportation was not abolished until 1857, and even after that date, until 1868, convicts were in some circumstances still sent to Western Australia. It is estimated that during this period some 160,000 individuals were sent from Britain to Australia as convicts. Why was such a large population of convicts sent to the other side of the world in this expensive and administratively complex way? Why were they not simply imprisoned and punished within Great Britain?

The fundamental reason is financial. However expensive the transportation system was, providing sufficient jails to house the rising number of convicts was more expensive still. There was no ideological problem with jails — as the Penitentiary Act of 1779, with its provisions for the building of prisons to hold inmates in conditions of varying severity according to their crimes, indicates — but no government was prepared to spend money on the scale of prison construction that would be required. By 1811 more than £2.5 million had been spent by the British government on the administration of the Australian convict colonies, but compared to constructing and maintaining largely non-productive domestic prisons, transportation was cheap. It also had the advantage of removing criminals permanently from British society, thus (it was hoped) reducing crime, and it provided a workforce for developing the colonies. Instead of being a drain on the public purse, the convicts would feed and clothe themselves by cultivating their own farms and producing their own necessities. At least one historian has concluded that the policy of transportation did produce a significant net financial benefit for Great Britain: "Not only was transporting convicts justified on the basis of cost alone but, more importantly, the net returns were very large."

With the American War effectively ending transportation across the Atlantic, the British government sought other potential locations for convict settlements. After considering and rejecting West Africa as too unhealthy, the government put forward a plan:

for effectually disposing of convicts, and rendering their transportation reciprocally beneficial both to themselves and to the State, by the establishment of a colony in New South Wales, a country which, by the fertility and salubrity of the climate, connected with the remoteness of its situation (from whence it is hardly possible for persons to return without permission), seems peculiarly adapted to answer the views of Government with respect to the providing a remedy for the evils likely to result from the late alarming and numerous increase of felons in this country, and more particularly in the metropolis.

The government's view was that the country's overcrowded jails were both socially dangerous and unhealthy. Botany Bay, on the south-east coast of Australia, was sufficiently remote to make the deterrent effect of transportation real and to deny any absconders the opportunity to return home, but it also had the potential for economic development of a particularly valuable kind. The penal colonies, it was suggested, could cultivate hemp and flax to supply the Royal Navy with rope and sailcloth, thus sustaining British naval supremacy and removing Britain's dependency on possibly unreliable European sources for these vital raw materials: "It may not be amiss to remark in favour of this plan that considerable advantages will arise from the cultivation of New Zealand hemp or flax-plant in the new intended settlements, the supply of which would be of great consequence to us as a naval power." In more general terms, the occupation and development of land in Australia, and related claims on adjacent territories in the Pacific and Indian Oceans, would represent an extension of British influence in that region of the globe and a consequent weakening of the positions of other European colonizing powers, at a time of imperial competition and intermittent open warfare between those powers.