‘An indelible imprint’ – Irish Penal Transportation to Australia

The first convicts arrive in Bottany Bay.

By John Dorney

On 26 September 1791, two convict ships landed at Bottany Bay, at Sydney, Australia. One was the Active from England and the other the Queen from Ireland. The later held 126 male and 23 female convicts and three children.

One observer, David Collins recorded that several had died in their passage and ‘and many of those who remained, and were not so ill as to require medical assistance, were brought on shore in an emaciated and feeble condition.’

Mary Ann Parker, remembered; ‘Their appearance … will be ever fresh in my memory. I visited the hospital, and was surrounded by mere skeletons of men – in every bed, and on every side, lay the dying and the dead. Horrid spectacle! it makes me shudder when I reflect, that it will not be the last exhibition of this kind of human misery that will take place in this country, whilst the present method of transporting these miserable wretches is pursued’.[1]

They were the first of nearly 40,000 Irish convicts, about one in three of the total number of convicts, to be forcibly transported from Britain and Ireland to Australia, from that time up to the 1860s.

Transportation as policy

An overcrowded female prison at Grangegorman in Dublin

Transportation from Britain and Ireland to Australia began at the end of the 18th century.

The authorities in Britain and Ireland in the 18th and 19th centuries faced the twin problems of a rising population and rising crime, while at the same time having only very blunt penal instruments to deal with them.

Prisons were rudimentary, and many crimes, such as petty theft, which today would be punished merely by a fine, were deemed worthy of the death sentence.

From 1717, the British authorities, in an effort impose a penalty that was greater than a fine but less severe than hanging, introduced the first Transportation Act, under which convicts were deported to the colonies in North America. Between that date and the outbreak of the American Revolutionary War in 1776, approximately 50,000 convicts were sent there.[2]

With America cut off as a destination for penal transportation, due to the American colonists’ successful war for their independence, a new venue was needed for Britain’s unwanted convicts. The country chosen was Australia, a territory mapped and claimed for the Crown by British surveyors in the 1770s and from the start earmarked as a penal colony. In 1788, ‘the First Fleet’ of convicts landed at Botany Bay, near modern Sydney in New South Wales, with around 1,000 convicts.[3]

The Queen, the first convict ship from Ireland to Australia, Sydney, sailed in 1791, departing from Limerick via Cobh in Cork and then Rio de Janeiro, and landing in Bottany Bay.[4]

Between 1788 and 1868, a total of 825 convict ships transported 167,000 people to penal servitude in Australia, their destinations roughly evenly split between New South Wales and Van Diemen’s Land – modern Tasmania. Approximately 40,000 of those transported were Irish men and women, a disproportionate number per head of population and including far more women their British counterparts.[5]

The idea behind transportation as a policy was two-fold. First, it got rid of unwanted convicts from Britain and Ireland to a far away destination from which most of them would never return. But secondly, it was also seen as a way of settling the sparsely populated new colony of Australia with white British settlers. Alongside the convicts were free settlers who were allocated land and tools and who, it was planned, would be able to use the convicts as labour.

Rebels or thieves? Who was sentenced to transportation?

The Castle Hill rebellion in Australia in 1804. Many of the rebels were United Irishmen

A popular perception exists that many transportees were political activists; in England Chartists – activist for universal suffrage – or early trade unionists, in Ireland, United Irishmen or agrarian rebels. And this is not without some truth.

In the aftermath of the defeat of the 1798 rebellion, in which the republican society, the United Irishmen, attempted, in alliance with revolutionary France, to break the British connections and to secure Irish independence, many thousands of prisoners were taken by the Government forces.

Some were pardoned if they surrendered their weapons and took an oath of allegiance, and many others were forced to serve in the Royal Navy, marines and infantry regiments posted in far off places like the West Indies.

But about 800 United Irishmen were deported to Australia.[6]

It was with some shock that the author of this article found, on the National Archives of Ireland database, a young man of the same name as him, sentenced to Transportation in 1798. John Dorney, aged 16 of Tiglin, County Wicklow, was recorded as being imprisoned in Dublin and sentenced to be sent to Australia on charges of ‘suspected of being a United Irishman’. It was recorded that ‘he prays to be liberated. States he is the sole support of his widowed mother’.

The United Irishmen were often unruly prisoners. On the voyage of the Anne in 1801, which carried a batch of United Irishmen to New South Wales, the rebellious prisoners staged a mutiny on board, in which the first mate was killed and a prisoner Marcus Sheehan, was executed by firing squad as punishment.

Governor King of New South Wales described those on board the Anne as “137 of the most desperate and diabolical characters … together with a Catholic priest (Fr. O’Neill) of the most notorious seditious and rebellious principles, which makes the number of United Irishmen amount to 600 … ready and waiting to put their diabolical plans into action.”[7]

He was not wrong. In 1804, 2-300 Irish convicts, including many United Irishmen, staged an armed rebellion at Castle Hill, near Sydney, seizing arms and ammunition from Government buildings, with the intention of seizing ships and returning to Ireland.  They held out on a hillside for two days before being eventually put down by the local militia. Nine of the ringleaders were hanged and others, including prominent United Irishman Joseph Holt, were flogged.[8]

If some United Irishmen kept up their struggle in Australia, others fared quite well there. Michael Dwyer for instance, who like Holt, had been a County Wicklow guerrilla leader, was transported to Australia after his surrender, in 1806. There he received 100 acres of land at Cabramatta. Although he was briefly imprisoned for ‘sedition’ after running afoul of the Governor William Bligh, after his release he was made chief constable for Liverpool, Sydney.[9]

Less well remembered than the United Irishmen are the ‘Rockites’, rural rebels of 1821-24, who staged an agrarian insurgency against landlords, agents and rent collectors. According to James S. Donnelly’s figures, about 600 men were transported to Australia under the Insurrection Act during the ‘Captain Rock’ rebellion.[10] Further batches of agrarian Catholic rebels were sentenced to transportation during the ‘Tithe War’ of the 1830s – in which Catholic tenant farmers resisted paying compulsory tithes to the Protestant Church of Ireland – under the Coercion Act of 1833.[11]

Finally in the 1860s among the last prisoners to be transported to Australia were Irish ‘Fenians’ or members of the Irish Republican Brotherhood, in the wake of the unsuccessful attempt at rebellion against British rule in 1867. There were 38 Fenians among the prisoners who arrived in Western Australia in 1868 on board the Hougoumont.[12]

The prevalence of various types of Irish rebels among those transported, however, should not blind us to the fact that, like their British counterparts, most Irish convict transportees had no political connections and were convicted of petty crime – usually theft  – a crime usually driven by hunger and poverty.

Convicts escorted by troops in Australia

This is borne out by a detailed study of one ship, the Tasmania, which sailed from Kingstown port, Dublin in September 1845, carrying 138 women and 35 children.

While one had been found guilty of the murder of her infant child and while there were some convictions (8 in total) for ‘vagrancy’, a crime that included prostitution, almost all the rest were guilty of ‘larceny’ or petty theft and had been sentenced to 7 years transportation.[13]

Women could bring one child with them to Australia, which accounts for the 35 children on board.

Their crimes were, in the main, crimes of poverty and for this reason the numbers of women transported surged during the Great Famine of 1845-49. The record number of Irish women transported in a single year was 606, in 1849.[14] Those transported aboard the Tasmania in 1845, were on average aged 29, mostly (78%) Roman Catholic and for the most part illiterate. Dublin was the single largest place of origin, but 31 of Ireland’s 32 counties were represented among the prisoners.[15]

On some occasions, prisoners in Ireland cheered when given the sentence of transportation, as it meant they had been spared the death penalty. But in other cases, ‘bitter lamentation’ was noted among prisoners sentenced to transportation. On occasions, as they were taken under escort to Cork, where they were to embark on convict ship to Australia, relatives of prisoners were seen to walk alongside the prison convoy uttering ‘shrieks and sobs’ for their exiled family members.[16]

Shipping to Australia

The convict ship Neptune

The experience of early convicts who were shipped to Australia appears to have been extremely grim. Aboard the ‘First Fleet’ that landed at Botany Bay in 1788, 267 of the 1,000 convicts died either on the voyage over or shortly thereafter and 500 more had fallen sick. Many had already been in poor health, having been kept aboard the Thames hulks before embarking for Australia.[17]

Similarly, the experience of the first Irish convicts to be transported was onerous. Many were held in hulks (that is old, condemned ships used as prisons) for months before boarding the ship that would take them to Australia.

The Ahern brothers, for instance, United Irishmen from County Limerick, were kept in hulks off Cork for 6 months before being transported. The convict ships took 240 days, or six months to reach Botany Bay and conditions aboard, including food and sanitation were reportedly very bad. Fifteen prisoners died during the voyage of the Anne to Australia in 1801.[18]

Conditions aboard the early ships for female convicts also were very grim indeed. The Lady Juliana, for instance which sailed from England in 1789 with 245 female convicts was nicknamed the ‘floating brothel’ such were the relations between crew and prisoners aboard. Five women died on the 309 day journey to Australia.[19]

By the 1840s, however, while by no means inviting, the convict transport experience seems to have been far better regulated. The women prisoners who sailed aboard the Tasmania in 1845, for example, were first concentrated in Grangegorman penitentiary in Dublin before embarking at Kingstown (modern Dun Laoghaire). Though not comfortable, this was much better than spending months aboard the prison hulks. Six women were judged too unhealthy to travel and remained in Grangegorman.

The Tasmania travelled via Cape Town in South Africa and while one woman aboard did die on the voyage, conditions for the rest were harsh but strictly regulated. By this time every convict ship had a mandatory surgeon aboard. Food was plentiful and the convicts were allowed to walk fairly freely on deck. Discipline was strict however, ‘fraternisation’ with the crew was banned and infractions were punished by confinement in the ‘solitary box’ (a human sized wooden box). The women were kept occupied by making one shirt a day. [20]

 In Australia

Female convicts arrive in Australia.

Once in Australia, the men and women had quite different experiences. In the early days of the penal settlement, both in New South Wales and Van Diemen’s Land, male prisoners were typically kept in an ‘open prison’ giving indentured labour to settlers.

For infractions they were sent to brutal prisons such as that at Norfolk Island, Port Maquerie, Port Artur and Van Diemen’s Land. There, flogging and other physical punishments were common. In 1835 it was found that one in every four convicts in Australia had been flogged at least once that year.[21]

In the period after 1814, this system was replaced by the ‘assignment system’ and from 1843 to 1853 by the ‘probation system’. On arriving in Australia, men were confined for a period of six months, with labour inside the prison. This was accompanied by education and religious instruction, which were deemed by the authorities to ‘reform’ the convict. If they were judged to have behaved well, they would then get a ‘ticket of leave’ to work for free settlers and finally, all going well, a commutation or pardon. Failing that, they would serve out their sentence in indentured or prison labour. [22]

Upon serving out their sentence, male prisoners were granted some land and tools, and livestock to populate the continent.[23]

This extremely regimented existence did not suit everyone. Some male convicts fled the system of forced labour and either before or after their sentences were out, took to the outback and became bandits or ‘bushrangers’.

There were a number of well-known bands of Irish convict bushrangers, notably that of Jack Donahue who was transported to Australia for pickpocketing in Dublin in 1825. He escaped from a settler farm in 1827 and lived a life of crime before being shot dead in a gun battle with troops and police in 1830.[24] Ned Kelly, the most famous bushranger of all, was the son of a free Irish woman settler and a transported Irish convict. He too died in a shootout with the police in 1880. [25]

Women convicts had, if anything an even more restrictive existence than the men. On arrival in Van Diemen’s Land (the majority destination or Irish women), they were detained for six months aboard a hulk named the Anson – a converted naval ship.

There they stayed for six months, in which time they were instructed in domestic skills such as cleaning, sewing and sweeping and like the men, in religion. They were paid half their prison wages for work, the other half later being paid in return for good behaviour. After six months they generally performed indentured labour in the household of a free settler family before finally receiving their ticket of leave and if they were not reported for bad behaviour, a pardon.[26]

However, those who exhibited bad behaviour were confined in ‘female factories’ or ‘houses of correction’, of which there were five in Van Diemen’s Land alone. Along with disobedient convicts, those held for prostitution, pregnant women, women waiting to be hired or waiting for offers of marriage and those ‘weaning infants’ were also confined in the ‘factories’. It is estimated that 75% of convict women spent some time there.[27]

Blathnaid Nolan describes how the ‘female factories’ were dominated by tough gangs of convict women, who frequently made, sometimes welcome, sometimes unwelcome, sexual demands on other inmates. On one occasion after two prisoners engaged in a sexual relationship were split up – they rioted, forcing the authorities to recruit male prisoners armed with crowbars to put the revolt down.[28]

Discipline in the ‘factories’ was indeed brutal. Infractions were punished were punished by shaving the heads of the women. On two occasions, in Paramatta in 1827 and in Hobart in 1842, there were serious rebellions in women’s prisons, which were put down by male police and also by male convicts. Women in the factories could usually only leave, even after the end of their sentence, once they had received an offer of marriage or of domestic service.[29]

Most tragic of all was the fate of the children of women convicts, many of whom travelled with them to Australia. They, including infants over nine months old, were taken from their mothers and put into ‘orphan homes’ away from, as it was thought, the corrupting influence of their convict mothers.[30]

For all the harshness of their treatment at the hands of the prison and colonial authorities, however, most former convicts integrated into Australian life after they had served their sentence.

The end of transportation

A riot outside a workhouse during the famine of the 1840s.

The transportation of convicts continued unabated until 1836 when debate erupted in Britain about its usefulness.

In 1837 a House of Commons Select Committee recommended that those convicts sentenced to seven years’ transportation, or less, should either remain in Britain or be sent to Bermuda or Gibraltar, while some male convicts could be given the option of joining the army or navy as an alternative to being transported.[31]

However, while transportation from Britain itself declined, the 1840s, In Ireland, the 1840s which witnessed the Great Famine and explosion in poverty and petty crime, saw a peak of penal transportation to Australia.

Thereafter, Ireland’s population went into steep decline, first through famine deaths and secondly through massive emigration, mostly to the Americas. As the population fell, so too did the numbers imprisoned for crime in the country. Additionally the first half of the nineteenth century had seen extensive building of prisons in Ireland itself, meaning that transportation was no longer really necessary as a ‘pressure valve’ for convicted felons.

In Australia itself, by the 1840s, the continued transportation of convicts had become very unpopular among the settler community in both New South Wales and Van Diemen’s Land. It was felt that the continual importation of convicts was disturbing the emergence of a normal civil society in Australia. One anti-transportation campaigner, William Molseworth, called the system ‘a perversion of civilised relationships’ and in 1849 an Anti-Transportation League was formed in New South Wales to try to prevent the further shipping of convicts to the colony.

Locals in both Sydney and Melbourne physically tried to prevent the landing of further convict ships, and fearing alienating the settler community, the British government began to end the policy of transportation. The last convict ship arrived in Van Diemen’s land in 1853. While Western Australia took 9,000 more convicts from 1860 to 1868 (including some Irish Fenian prisoners), by 1870 Australia’s role as a penal colony was over.[32]

Changing perceptions

A memorial to convict women in Tasmania today.

In 1856, in an effort try to rid itself of the taint of its past as a reception point for convicts, Van Diemen’s land renamed itself Tasmania, the name it still bears today.

Partly due to their disproportionate share of convict settlers, today many Australians have some Irish ancestry. For many decades, Australia’s origin as a site of exile for convicts was a source of some national embarrassment there and was rarely publicly discussed.

However in more recent times, the public discourse has shifted, with much research and writing having been done on the history of transportation. The experience of women convict in particular have been recovered by modern historians.

Many Australians now profess pride in their ancestors’ triumph over adversity in their new country on the far side of the world.

Kevin Rudd for instance, then Prime Minister of Australia, in a St Patrick’s day speech in 2009, reported that his mother’s family were transported to Australia as convicts: ‘republicans, seditionists, murderers, faction fighters.’ While his father’s side of the family were also convicts by origin, ‘English lumpen Protestants…Crooks, forgers, highway robbers, the lot’ … ‘English, Irish forebears but all making Australia ultimately their home. The Irish imprint on the Australian character is indelible.’[33]

 

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References

[1] Free Settler or Felon, Convict and Colonial History, Convict Ship Queen – 1791 https://www.freesettlerorfelon.com/convict_ship_queen_1791.htm

[2] Mark Peel, Christine Twomey, A History of Australia, Palgrave Macmillan, 2011, P.30-31.

[3] Ibid. p.27-30

[4] http://www.limerickcity.ie/media/some%20transported%20rebels.pdf

[5] Joan Kavanagh, Dianne, Snowden, Van Diemen’s Women, A History of Transportation to Tasmania, p.25

[6] http://members.pcug.org.au/~ppmay/rebels.htm

[7] http://www.limerickcity.ie/media/some%20transported%20rebels.pdf

[8] Peel, Twomey, A History of Australia, p.33

[9] Ruan O’Donnell, Michael Dwyer Entry in Irish Dictionary of Biography, 2009, p.36

[10] James S Donnelly, Captain Rock, The Irish Agrarian Rebellion of 1821-24, p.323.

[11] The details of the 1833 Act are here. Essentially, it empowered the Lord Lieutenant to proclaim a district ‘disturbed’ and then to try suspects my military court martial, with penalties including death, whipping and transportation for life.

[12] http://members.iinet.net.au/~perthdps/convicts/res-13.html

[13] Kavanagh, Snowden, Van Diemen’s Women, p.64

[14] Catherine Fleming, The Transportation of Women from Kildare to Van Diemen’s Land in 1849, Four Courts, 2012. P.7

[15] Ibid. p.94

[16] Donnelly, Captain Rock, p.309-310

[17] Peel, Twomey, History of Australia, p. 30

[18] http://www.limerickcity.ie/media/some%20transported%20rebels.pdf

[19] http://www.pbs.org/wnet/secrets/the-lady-juliana-and-the-new-world/165/

[20] Kavanagh, Snowden, Van Diemen’s women. P.108

[21] Peel, Twomey, p.48

[22] Kavanagh, Snowden, p132

[23] Peel Twomey, p.31

[24] http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/donohoe-john-jack-1985

[25] https://www.nma.gov.au/exhibitions/irish_in_australia/bushrangers

[26] Kavanagh, Snowden, p.133

[27] Ibid. p145

[28] Blathnaid Nolan, ‘Knowing Dissent: Lesbian Sub-culture in the Female Factories of Van Diemen’s Land, In Sexual Politics in Modern Ireland Edited by Jennifer Redmond, Sonja Tiernan, Sandra McAvoy and Mary McAuliffe Published by Irish Academic Press, Dublin 2015.

[29] Peel, Twomey, p.45

[30] Kavanagh, Snowden, p.204-205

[31] https://www.thehistorypress.co.uk/articles/transportation-to-australia/

[32] Peel, Twomey, pp.52,68-69.

[33] Kevin Rudd, Speech to the Queensland Irish Association St Patrick’s Day Eve Dinner Brisbane, Queensland, 2009, https://pmtranscripts.pmc.gov.au/release/transcript-16462

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