SUSAN CARLAND: Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people should be aware that this series
may contain images, voices or names of deceased persons.
[Music]
This episode, ‘Captivity Narratives’, is
part of the series that deals with people. It examines the origins of white
Australia in the founding of a convict colony. We ask if this new land was a
prison or a paradise. We travel to the places convicts were first sent to
Hobart and Sydney and we end and begin our journey in Canberra.
The object we’re focusing on today is the smallest we’ll consider in this
series. It sits here in the palm of my hand,
a tiny coin worn down with age. It's so old, I’m wearing these gloves to protect it.
And it’s so tiny that it was really rather lost in that impressive display case.
It’s the tiniest object but it’s also the most intimate. Centuries ago,
Thomas Alsop scratched this parting message to his mother on the eve of
transportation to New South Wales and as we turn that coin over we see just how tender that message is:
‘The Rose soon droops and dies, the Brier fades away,
but my fond heart, for you I love, shall never go astray’.
Now Allsop had worked as a labourer in the English Midlands. His work was poorly paid, irregular,
was barely enough to make a living.
In 1833 he was convicted for stealing sheep,
in Staffordshire, and just a year later he boarded a sailing ship rather like this one
for that long and perilous voyage out to Australia.
He was 21 years of age and he would never, ever see his mother again.
SUSAN CARLAND: Thomas Allsop was one of a generation of exiles, White Australia's convict settlers.
From 1788, when the First Fleet made landfall in Sydney, to the mid-19th century,
when transportation finally ended, over 160 thousand
convicts from all over Britain were imprisoned in Australia. Why so many
convicts and how did they end up in Australia, a distant land on the other
side of the globe, a place only just apparent in the European imagination?
In this book there’s a sketch of William Hogarth’s ‘London’. It depicts a society
falling apart at the seams. Poverty, unemployment, immorality and all kinds of
crime are all too evident. It was completed in 1751, not so very long
before British authorities decided to exile felons to Australia.
Britain had been torn asunder by the Industrial Revolution within a matter of decades,
thousands had been cleared, uprooted from their traditional lives in the
countryside and crowded as slum labourers into the cities. The population soared,
the prisons overflowed and that gap between the atrociously poor and the
obscenely rich, grew greater and greater.
BRUCE SCATES: Up until the late 18th century, men like
Allsop might well have been sent off to the Americas. The settlers there needed
cheap convict labour and Britain – Britain was
all too keen to get rid of that surplus population of felons.
But the American Revolution changed all of that. And that's telling you something very
important about Australian history. There’s really nothing new about globalisation.
From the moment of its first foundation, Australia was conceived
within an international context. That battle on Bunker Hill led directly to the founding of a new society.
SUSAN CARLAND: Thomas Allsop may not have had a very deep
understanding of the global politics, international intrigue and greedy grab
for territory that lay behind transportation,
but it is fair to say that he harboured a sense of injustice. Some historians have
read coins like his as an act of protest. To etch that poignant farewell to his
mother, Allsop, and whoever may have helped him, first scratched away the face of the
sovereign, bearing a smooth surface for that neat cursive hand.
BRUCE SCATES: It may have been political,
but it was certainly very practical. Simple and cheap, durable and light,
this defaced coin could be carried virtually anywhere by its owner.
This coin could be your constant companion.
SUSAN CARLAND: Immensely practical and also enduringly emotional.
Coins like this were called ‘love tokens’.
Often they were pressed into a loved one’s hand in that final moment of parting,
and Thomas Allsop’s message still speaks to us across the ages, a gesture of remembrance
reuniting a mother and a son divided by over 12,000 miles of ocean.
BRUCE SCATES: So, what was life like
for Thomas Allsop and the tens of thousands of other convicts who came
out to Australia? We’re standing in front of Hyde Park Barracks in Sydney.
This was a kind of prison-cum-dormitory where convicts were first held on their
arrival in the colony. It’s from here that the chain gangs went out to work,
men bludgeoned into labouring, toiling in their shackles, work as a grisly form of punishment.
Convict Australia was a society based ultimately on terror.
Those who wouldn’t work were flogged, here in this very courtyard; those who challenged
authority, were beaten senseless. And for those who continued to resist or abscond
or simply to misbehave, there was a whole apparatus of what was called ‘secondary punishment’.
Exiled to Australia, a recalcitrant convict could find himself
exiled again, to prison camps, in the isolated outposts of Van Diemen’s land or Norfolk Island.
And you know for much of the time that
Australian history has been written, that compelling caricature of convict
society as a slave society, has denied men like Thomas Allsop their individuality, their agency.
SUSAN CARLAND: In the last 40 years, there’s been something of a
revolution in the way that Australian historians view the convict experience.
We used to see convict society as a form of slavery, not much different to the
plantation economies of the southern states of America. Today, we’re also
mindful that for many, Australia was a land of freedom, of opportunity.
So let's think about that and let’s see how this museum changes our view of convict Australia.
Look at this amazing depiction of early Sydney. It doesn’t show a series
of prison cells – there was no need for a cell when the whole island continent was a prison.
For the most part convicts were assigned to free settlers and allowed to
wander the length and breadth of the township. As the colony developed, they
found themselves better fed, better housed, better clothed and far more
likely to improve their lot than those in starving, class-bound Britain.
And a man with skill, even just a builder’s labourer like Thomas Allsop, had a tremendous advantage.
BRUCE SCATES: A slave is usually born into slavery, as is his or her children.
Convicts like Thomas Allsop, by contrast, saw themselves as free-born
English men and women. One day, one day their sentence would expire – they’d be set free.
Many could hope to own their own cattle, own their own land, something
unimaginable for the poor of urban England.
SUSAN CARLAND: These were men and women who had a sense of their own value.
Every convict knew the rations and the condition he or she was entitled to.
When a master failed to provide these, the convict didn’t
hesitate to petition the Governor. They nurtured what historians have called a ‘moral economy’ ,
a sense of what is fair, and just, and reasonable.
Australians today might call them ‘stroppy’.
BRUCE SCATES: And convicts were acutely aware
that they were really the only viable labour force in the colony.
So from almost the day they arrived here convict settlers organised, they
organised individually and collectively, to improve their conditions.
Listen, you can almost hear them whispering to one another now. What can we get away with tomorrow?
What better deal can we possibly get?
Masters too – masters realised it was much more efficient to give a man incentives than to punish him.
An extra bag of flour, a raw ration of rum, indulgences great and small powered Australia's convict economy.
SUSAN CARLAND: When Thomas finally gains
his freedom he takes to hawking fish, here by the wharves of Hobart.
He also takes wife, Sarah Eliza Kirk, a convict from Ireland 15 years his junior.
They raise two children – a son, Thomas, and a daughter, Sarah – and they lay the future of the colony.
Instead of thinking of Thomas Allsop as a slave or an exile,
let’s see him rather as a settler. And when you think about it, he was the ideal
settler for a place such as this. The men and women who came here were relatively
young, reasonably fit to survive the rigours of the voyage and a very high
proportionate were literate. And even Thomas Allsop, a man of very few written
words, had that eloquent message made for his mother. Convicts brought with them
the skills that were needed to build a new society; they cleared the land, they
bridged the rivers, and they laid out the towns. And here in Hobart, where
Thomas also ends up, they planted pretty Georgian cottages on a new and
unfamiliar landscape. And this was to be a reproductive as well as productive
force – through marriage to convict and free man alike, through all manner of
complex sexual transactions, female convicts mothered the nation, their
domestic skills essential as Thomas Allsop to the
survival and the growth of the colony.
BRUCE SCATES: So what has convict Australia left us?
Much more than a handful of damaged coins though that as we’ve seen is
really something of a treasure. Many Australians attribute their strong sense
of justice to the injustice all too evident through so much of our early history –
a sympathy for the underdog, a suspicion of authority and a willingness
to assert one’s worth and bargain and organise.
Perhaps we owe all of that, a lot of that to our roots in convict Australia.
For Australians of Irish descent – and around a quarter of the men and women
transported to Australia were Irish – a convict heritage fuses with a much
larger legacy of Irish republicanism and the struggle against British colonialism.
And you know we should remember that hundreds of convicts transported to
these shores from Ireland and elsewhere were in fact political prisoners.
They were radicals, they were trade unionists they were men and women who rallied
against the inequality of an old world and who hoped to build a better one in the new.
SUSAN CARLAND: But we also need to be careful not to replace one caricature of
convict Australia with another. The truth of it is convicts were a diverse and complex cohort.
They were villains as well as victims, accomplished artisans and rude unskilled labourers;
there were those who thrived in a new society and those who languished.
Most importantly of all perhaps, is that convicts were
complicit – willingly and unwillingly – in the whole project of colonialism.
They were in the front line of the white invasion of Aboriginal country.
Ironically, the dispossessed played their own grim part in the work of dispossession.
BRUCE SCATES: And yet none of that diminishes the eloquence of Thomas Allsop's
humble love token. In this tiny object we can still hear his voice,
a voice seldom heard in an archival record that usually privileges those with power
and with authority.
SUSAN CARLAND: And the themes Thomas alerts us to,
of separation and exile, anguish and incarceration, tenderness and hope,
we'll encounter again as we explore Australia.
[Music]
If you’d like to learn more about the issues raised in this episode
why not catch ‘Susan Carland: In Conversation’. This time Susan’s talking
to historian Rae Frances in the remains of the female convict factory in Hobart.
[Music]