The University of Edinburgh. College of Humanities and Social Science
Abstract
Knowledge of the convict period in New South Wales has been substantially
expanded and enriched through a number of revisionist scholarly studies in the last
quarter of the twentieth century. The cumulative result has been the establishment of
a number of new orthodoxies. These studies have drawn on a number of analytic
frameworks including feminism and cliometrics, successfully challenging the
previous historiography. The rich archival sources in New South Wales have been
utilised to reformulate the convict period by a number of scholars, demonstrating the
complexity of life in the penal colony.
Academic divisions between what are regarded as “Australian” history and
“British” history have imposed their own agendas on writing about transportation.
This study challenges this imposition through an examination of petitioners’
approaches to the home and colonial administrations. A lacuna in the scholarly
studies has been a lack of attention to transportation’s consequences for married
couples and their children. This study seeks to narrow that gap through these
petitions. The findings of the study demonstrate the continuation of links between
those who were transported and those who remained in Britain. It is argued that
these findings have important implications for future research within Britain, and
that what is disclosed by these petitions and the individuals who were involved in
on-going communications cannot be restricted either to Australian or convict
histories. Our knowledge of what transportation meant to individuals in the
periphery as well as those in the metropole is diminished if the focus remains firmly
on the settler community. Supplementary material from contemporary sources as
well as the official records passing between the two administrations has been utilised
and these supplementary sources suggest that there was a broad division between
official publicly stated policy and practice in respect of transportees’ family
circumstances.
Chapter One establishes the architecture of the thesis and explains the
methodology adopted. Chapter Two offers a reinterpretation of the colony’s
formation in 1788 and inserts the “convict audience” of that day into the
historiography . Chapter Three examines two petitioners writing from different gaols
in Britain prior to their expected transportation. A resolution of the division between
cliometrics and this more qualitative humanist approach is proposed. Chapter Four
is a study of petitioners in Britain and a study of the process required for a reunion
and reconstitution of family units in New South Wales. Chapter Five seeks to a resiting
of male convicts as family members through an examination of a number of
contemporary sources. Chapter Six examines the petitions raised by husbands and
fathers for their wives and families to be given free passages to the colony. Chapter
Seven provides case studies of three transportees and their experiences of the
petitioning process. In Chapter Eight the focus broadens out from married men to
examine and provide a revision of convicts’ correspondence with their relatives and
friends in Britain. Such correspondence has previously provided the basis for
nationalist interpretations; the revision here suggests that such interpretations are
anachronistic. Chapter Nine is an extended metaphor drawing the material together
to the conclusions of the study
