Seeking to pre-empt the French colonial empire from expanding into the region, Britain chose Australia as the site of a penal colony, and in 1787, the First Fleet of eleven convict ships set sail for Botany Bay, arriving on 20 January 1788 to found Sydney, New South Wales, the first European settlement on the continent ...
Between 1788 and 1868 more than 162,000 convicts were transported to Australia. Of these, about 7,000 arrived in 1833 alone. The convicts were transported as punishment for crimes committed in Britain and Ireland. In Australia their lives were hard as they helped build the young colony.
The British government believed that Australia would be an ideal place to send their convicts because it was so far away from Britain. They also thought that the climate would be better for their health. The First Fleet was a group of 11 ships that set sail from Portsmouth, England, in May 1787.
The transportation of convicts from Ireland to Australia began when the first shipload of convicts left Ireland for New South Wales at the beginning of April 1791. Before this, convicts were transported to North America, but transportation to that destination ceased after the American War of Independence.
On 9 January 1868 the convict transport Hougoumont arrived at the port of Fremantle. On board were 269 convicts, the last to be sent to Western Australia. The ship's arrival marked the end of 80 years of continuous penal transportation to the Australian continent.
The Last Convict is an historical novel based on the life of Samuel Speed, who believed himself to be – and is widely accepted as – the last transported convict to survive in Australia. He died in November 1938, on the eve of the Second World War and within the lifetime of many people still living.
Overall, there were very few Scottish convicts and they were some of the most notorious convicts in Australia, and the women especially so. Their reputation was mostly undeserved, however, for the majority of them were petty thieves and burglars, driven to crime out of desperation more than habitual criminality.
Convict life
Opposition to transportation grew with increasing numbers of free settlers in the 1830s, but it took until 1868 for the last convict ship to pull into Western Australia. By then, Australia's population had reached one million, and could sustain itself without relying on convict labour.
Nevertheless, by 1840, 150 so-called Patriots (or Patriotes, in French) had been transported from Canada to Australia. Their houses had been burnt as extra punishment, which left their dependents without a roof over their heads or a breadwinner.
They carried around 1400 convicts, soldiers and free people. The journey from England to Australia took 252 days and there were around 48 deaths on the voyage.
Many people didn't have a job and were very poor. People stole things to survive. Minor crimes such as stealing items worth more than 1 shilling (about a day's wages for a working person), cutting down a tree in an orchard or stealing livestock were punishable by transportation.
Cockatoo Island prison opened in 1839, a year before convict transportation to New South Wales ceased, and was intended to punish the most recidivist and violent of the transported convicts. This archetype has prevailed in historical discourses, and they have been described as 'criminal lunatics...
While Indigenous Australians have inhabited the continent for tens of thousands of years, and traded with nearby islanders, the first documented landing on Australia by a European was in 1606. The Dutch explorer Willem Janszoon landed on the western side of Cape York Peninsula and charted about 300 km of coastline.
Its purpose was to find a convict settlement on the east coast of Australia, at Botany Bay. The First Fleet sailed from England on 13 May 1787 and arrived at Botany Bay eight months later, on 18 January 1788.
Convict women were employed in domestic service, washing and on government farms, and were expected to find their own food and lodging.
South Australia and Victoria, established in 1836 and 1850 respectively, officially remained free colonies. However, a population that included thousands of convicts already resided in the area that became known as Victoria.
“The convict men were transported first and soon outnumbered women nine to one in Australia. You can't have a colony without women so the female convicts were specifically targeted by the British government as 'tamers and breeders'.”
Hudson, John (c.
Recaptured, he was sent to the Dunkirk hulk in June 1784. He was discharged to the Friendship in March 1787 and arrived in Sydney in January 1788 as part of the First Fleet. Hudson was probably the youngest male convict (when sentenced) to be sent to New South Wales.
Between 1787 until the termination of the system in 1853, Australia received over 160,000 convicts, approximately 26,500 of whom sailed from Ireland [see footnote 4].
One of the most prevalent crimes in Australia is sexual assault, with the largest proportion of victims being female.
Theft was the most common type of crime, accounting for 43% of all reported offenses in 2019-2020.
The New South Wales Governor Lachlan Macquarie endorsed the name Australia to replace New Holland in a dispatch to the Colonial Office in London in December 1817, and the name came into common local usage.