A Source Book of Australian History

by Unknown

As soon as a convict vessel reaches its place of destination, a report is made by the surgeon-superintendent to the governor. A day is then appointed for the colonial secretary or for his deputy to go on board to muster the convicts, and to hear their complaints, if they have any to make. The male convicts are subsequently removed to the convict barracks; the females to the penitentiaries. In New South Wales, however, regulations have lately been established, by which, in most cases, female convicts are enabled to proceed at once from the ship to private service. It is the duty of an officer, called the principal superintendent of convicts, to classify the newly-arrived convicts, the greater portion of whom are distributed amongst the settlers as assigned servants; the remainder are either retained in the employment of the government, or some few of them are sent to the penal settlements.

On the whole, your Committee may assert that, in the families of well-conducted and respectable settlers, the condition of assigned convicts is much the same as the condition of similar descriptions of servants in this country; but this is by no means the case in the establishment of all settlers. As the lot of a slave depends upon the character of his master, so the condition of a convict depends upon the temper and disposition of the settler to whom he is assigned. On this account Sir George Arthur, late Governor of Van Diemen's Land, likened the convict to a slave, and described him "as deprived of liberty, exposed to all the caprice of the family to whose service he may happen to be assigned, and subject to the most summary laws; his condition" (said Sir George) "in no respect differs from that of the slave, except that his master cannot apply corporal punishment by his own hands or those of his overseer, and has a property in him for a limited period. Idleness and insolence of expression, or of looks, anything betraying the insurgent spirit, subject him to the chain-gang or the triangle, or hard labour on the roads."

On the other hand, a convict, if ill-treated, may complain of his master; and if he substantiate his charge the master is deprived of his services; but for this purpose the convict must go before a bench, sometimes a hundred miles distant, composed of magistrates, most of whom are owners of convict labour. Legal redress is therefore rarely sought for, and still more rarely obtained by the injured convict.

With regard to the general conduct of assigned agricultural labourers, there was a considerable diversity of opinion. The evidence, however, of Sir G. Arthur, appears to your Committee to be conclusive on this point, with regard to which he wrote to the Secretary of State for the Colonies in the following terms:

"You cannot, my Lord, have an idea of the vexations which accompany the employment of convicts or of the vicissitudes attendant upon their assignment. Their crimes and misconduct involve the settlers in daily trouble, expense, and disappointment. The discipline and control of the convicts in Van Diemen's Land is carried, perhaps, to a higher degree than could have ever been contemplated. Many of the convicts have been greatly reformed when in the service of considerate and judicious masters; but, with all this abatement, there is so much peculation, so much insubordination, insolence, disobedience of lawful orders, and so much drunkenness, that reference to the magisterial authority is constant, and always attended with loss of time and expense to the settlers. There can be no doubt things appear better in the colony than they really are; for, in numberless instances, masters are known to submit to peculation rather than incur the additional expense of prosecuting their servants. Two hundred felons, after having been for a longtime under confinement in the gaols or hulks of England, and subsequently pent up on board a transport, are placed in charge of the masters or their agents to whom they have been assigned. The master has then to take the convict to his home (either to the other extremity of the island, a distance of 140 miles, or nearer, as the case may be), and well would it be if he could get him quietly there, but the contrary is of too frequent occurrence. Either with some money the convict has secreted, or from the bounty of some old acquaintance, the assigned servant, now relieved for the first time for some months from personal restraint, eludes the vigilance of his new master, finds his way into a public-house, and the first notice the settler has of his servant, for whom he has travelled to Hobart Town, for whose clothing he has paid the Government, for whose comfort he has, perhaps, made other little advances, is, that he is lodged in the watch-house with loss of half his clothing, or committed to gaol for felony."

The members of the anti-emancipist party in New South Wales attribute the increase of crime in that colony partly to alleged relaxation of convict discipline under Sir Richard Bourke; partly to the action of the Jury Laws, which permit persons who have been convicts to become jurors; and lastly, to the increasing number of emancipists.

The first-mentioned cause of the increase of crime in New South Wales refers to the Quarter Session Act, passed in 1833; by that Act, the summary jurisdiction of single magistrates over convicts, was somewhat diminished, and a magistrate was prevented from inflicting more than 50 lashes for a single offence, instead of 150 which he might have given before at three separate inflictions. These complaints do not seem to your Committee to have the slightest foundation in fact, and Sir Richard Bourke appears to have acted with wisdom, justice, and humanity in his treatment of the convict population.

With regard to the second alleged cause of the increase of crime, namely, the jury laws, your Committee need hardly repeat, that the well-proven effect of transportation is to demoralize, not to reform an offender; therefore, in a community like New South Wales, wherein so large a proportion of the population are persons who have been convicts, to permit such persons generally to sit upon juries must evidently have an injurious effect. Your Committee, however, must observe, that under a good system of punishment, an offender should, at the expiration of his sentence, be considered to have atoned for his crimes, and he should be permitted to commence a new career without any reference to his past one.

With regard to the last alleged cause of the increase of crime, namely, the increasing number of emancipists; little doubt, your Committee think, can be entertained of the pernicious consequences of annually turning loose a number of unreclaimed offenders on so small a community as that of New South Wales.

One of the supposed advantages of transportation is, that it prevents this country from being burthened with criminal offenders, after the expiration of their sentences. It is now, however, evident that transportation does not tend to diminish the sum total of offences committed in the British Dominions; it may, perhaps, relieve Great Britain and Ireland from a portion of their burthen of crime; though, from the little apprehension which transportation produces, that fact may be reasonably doubted. On the other hand, it only transfers and aggravates the burthen upon portions of the British Dominions, which, like New South Wales, and Van Diemen's Land, are least able to bear it.