Hundreds of thousands of convicts were transported from Britain and Ireland to Australia between 1787 and 1868. Today, it's estimated that 20% of the Australian population are descended from people originally transported as convicts, while around 2 million Britons have transported convict ancestry.
The settlement at Botany Bay was intended to be a penal colony. The convicts of the First Fleet included both men and women. Most were British, but a few were American, French, and even African. Their crimes ranged from theft to assault.
Only 12 per cent of the convicts transported to Australia were Irish. Yet people often automatically associate the Irish with transportation. Use these resources and surprising pathways to explore Irish convict history.
Until 1782, English convicts were transported to America. However, in 1783 the American War of Independence ended. America refused to accept any more convicts so England had to find somewhere else to send their prisoners. Transportation to New South Wales was the solution.
Hundreds of thousands of convicts were transported from Britain and Ireland to Australia between 1787 and 1868. Today, it's estimated that 20% of the Australian population are descended from people originally transported as convicts, while around 2 million Britons have transported convict ancestry.
European Discovery and Settlement to 1850: The period of European discovery and settlement began on August 23, 1770, when Captain James Cook of the British Royal Navy took possession of the eastern coast of Australia in the name of George III.
Dorothy Handland (c. 1720- ), who, by 1786, was separated from her second husband and worked as 'an old clothes woman' (dealer), was estimated by Surgeon Bowes to be aged 82, and was recorded at Newgate Gaol as 60, was found guilty on 22 February 1786 at the Old Bailey, London, of perjury.
South Australia was an experimental British colony and the only Australian colony which did not officially take convicts.
Mary Wade
The youngest ever convict to be transported to Australia at the age of 11. Her hideous crime was that she stole another girls clothes and for that she was sentenced to death by hanging.
Of the convicts and settlers, most were members of the established Church of England with lesser numbers of Nonconformist Protestants, Catholics and other faiths. The first religious census in 1828 divided the early colony into four groups: Protestants, Catholics, Jews and Pagans.
These ancestry responses are classified into broad standardised ancestry groups. In the 2021 census, the most commonly nominated individual ancestries as a proportion of the total population were: English (33%) Australian (29.9%)
The Irish famine of the 1840s caused large numbers of people to migrate due to poverty and difficult living conditions. They worked in Victoria as whalers, fishermen and farm hands and in townships as labourers and factory workers. A few became property owners and professionals.
Australian English arose from a dialectal melting pot created by the intermingling of early settlers who were from a variety of dialectal regions of Great Britain and Ireland, though its most significant influences were the dialects of Southeast England.
We all know Australia has a black history, but there's another lesser known way in which his country's origins are black. On the first fleet there were eleven convicts who were freed slaves from America, and who for various reasons found themselves on a long and dangerous journey to what became the colony of Sydney.
During the second period, from 1814 to 1842, just over 5400 female convicts arrived. In 1840, the number increased significantly when transportation to New South Wales ceased, and all female convicts were shipped to Van Diemen's Land.
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.
Samuel Speed, who died 150 years after the arrival of the First Fleet, is believed to have been the last surviving transported convict. Born in Birmingham in 1841, he was transported to Western Australia in 1866 after deliberately committing a crime - setting fire to a haystack - in order to escape homelessness.
As it turned out, most ex-convicts never returned to Britain but stayed in Australia to become landowners or wage workers. The number of convicts transported to Australia increased dramatically when more ships became available following the Napoleonic Wars (1804–1815).
Samuel Terry (c. 1776 – 22 February 1838) was deported as a criminal to Australia, where he became a wealthy landowner, merchant and philanthropist. His extreme wealth made him by far the richest man in the colony with wealth rivaling that of England.
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.
At 10 years old, Mary took voyage, the youngest ever convict, aboard the Lady Juliana. Forming part of the Second Fleet, the Lady Julianna carried only women and girls. Conditions on penal ships were typically atrocious, leading to high death counts.
It is true that there has been, historically, a small number of claims that there were people in Australia before Australian Aborigines, but these claims have all been refuted and are no longer widely debated. The overwhelming weight of evidence supports the idea that Aboriginal people were the first Australians.
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.
After Dutch navigators charted the northern, western and southern coasts of Australia during the 17th Century this newly found continent became known as 'New Holland'. It was the English explorer Matthew Flinders who suggested the name we use today.