Pride And Prejudice

In case any of you have missed it, Blogville's resident and admirably boobed historian, the wonderful Kate has been delving into Australia's murky past to satisfy her passion for interesting dead guys (a lot less trouble than the live sort, as she points out).

Kate mentioned the fact that bushrangers such as Thunderbolt and Ned Kelly were seen by poor tenant farmers as heroes fighting against oppression and injustice, to the extent that ordinary families would offer them shelter, food and even horses to keep them from the hands of the magistrates and the gallows.
It's difficult these days to understand why a lawbreaker should be regarded as the good guy until you delve a little deeper like Kate has done.

Let's have some boring historical perspective, shall we?

Once upon a time, way back before even old Dive was born, when Terra Australis was "uninhabited" (hokay, so for the purposes of this post we'll conveniently ignore the 900,000 people already living there), good old Britannia was going through a bit of a transition.
Before that time we revolting peasants only had a parasitical and tyrranical aristocracy to fight against. But then came the industrial revolution and the opportunity for capitalists to make obscene fortunes from the labour of the rest of us.
The urban populations started to swell; the rich got richer and the poor … well, nobody was poor … at least nobody who mattered.

With the golden dawn of capitalism, the children of the labouring poor could be put to work at age six, slaving fifteen hours a day in mines and mills, beaten and whipped by overseers whenever they slacked and mangled in the whirling metal mill machinery when they dropped from exhaustion.

The Georgian era was indeed a golden age for the top one percent of the population. For the rest it was the filthy, miserable Hell of Hogarth's Gin Lane and abject poverty ruled working people's lives.
Little wonder then that starving families, crammed thirty to a room in damp, unheated cellars with no rights of tenancy were reduced to thieving and beggary and took the odd loaf of bread to stay alive. And in that age a loaf of bread could cost you your life.

There was no effective police force back then; just the thuggish private armies of the landowners and mill owners and the venal "thieftakers"; bullying bounty hunters who would denounce anybody for the fifteen shilling reward, while at the same time extorting around ten pounds a head not to denounce the innocent.

The result of this explosion of penniless and mercilessly exploited working families forced into choleric urban slums was that the privately run gaols were overcrowded way beyond breaking point.
To save capitalism from anarchy and revolution a solution had to be found.
Much as they would have liked to, it was impractical to hang everybody who broke the rules so in George the First's reign they had the bright idea of sending the buggers to the colonies as slave labour.

Now I'm not talking Australia here. Oh, no…
For the past couple of centuries, Australians have been haunted and stigmatised by what they called "The Stain"; their "shameful convict past".
Around 160,000 convicts were transported to Australia, but before that, at least 40,000 convicts were sent to America.

Modern America has done a pretty good job of brushing its convict past under the carpet and has replaced it with a rosy fiction where just about everybody is descended from a shipload of incompetent Puritans in Massachussets.
"Oh, no! We had "indentured servants" but there are no convicts hiding in the branches of our family tree."

Listen up:
In 1611, 300 "disorderly persons" were dragged from English gaols and shipped as slave labour to the plantations of the Virginia Company.
That worked so nicely that a new policy was drawn up: "all offenders out of the common gaols condemned to die should be sent for three years to the Virginia Company".

Which worked even more splendidly, with the result that after 1717 "minor offenders" sentenced to flogging and branding were shipped over to America for seven years of slave labour, while those under sentence of death were to serve fourteen years.
Every state from Massachussets on down to Florida gladly took 'em. Over forty thousand of the buggers. A lot more than the tiny Plymouth colony that seems to have (incredibly fecundly) founded every WASP family.

And what happened to them when their sentences were served?
Where the Hell were they going to find the money for passage back to England?
And who wanted to go back to Gin Lane and the workhouse anyway?
No.
They stayed and became Americans.

After the Revolution, all that changed, of course. There were plentiful black slaves to be had and they worked a lot harder than the poor white folk shipped over from England.
So George III had to look elsewhere to ease his overcrowded gaols and hulks.
He looked at Australia.
Uninhabited (HA!).
Unimaginably distant.
The unwanted dregs of society's underclass could take a one way ticket to Botany Bay.

And so it was that between 1787 and 1868, some 160,000 men, women and children were transported to Australia, Tasmania and Norfolk Island to provide slave labour to grow cheap wool and meat for England.

Convicts.
Felons.
Scum.
But were they?

Like those sent to America, these people were simply ordinary folk, trapped and made desperate by bitter and unjust circumstance.
The theft of a loaf of bread, a hunk of cheese, or a "gentleman's" handkerchief could lead to your being hanged (even children) or transported to Botany Bay.
To a life of servitude, slave labour, beatings, floggings, rape … and at the end of your sentence, "secondary punishment" (as you had no money for the passage home) of farm labour for brutal landlords … the same people who sent you down there in the first place.

The children of those transported, known as "currency lads and lasses" were used as forced labour by "settlers" - usless younger sons of the aristocracy sent to the new land to exploit the captive labour force (what became known in America at least as "old money" … a term that should rightly be tainted with shame and ignominy and be without honour).
And a brutal regime of vicious armed police and venal magistrates under a sorry series of corrupt and incompetent Governors kept the people in their place.

Bushrangers - Kate's heroic and romantic dead guys - were seen quite rightly as desperate men standing up for their rights against "The System" (our government's delightful euphemism for forced penal labour until death) , by a people burning for social justice.
Decent people, who had been oppressed and victimised in England and were now being oppressed and victimised in this new world aided the bushrangers as best they could and as much as they dared, risking brutal punishments if discovered.
And gradually, over the bodies of the beaten and the hanged, the decent people beat "The System" and it was closed down.

Which begs the question why has Australia been so long ashamed of it's "convict" past?

It is England who should be ashamed for creating such a system.
Australians (and any Americans with enough balls and honesty to face up to the truth) should be proud of having survived such horrors and from their experiences forged their own fiercely independent identites and their sense of justice.

Kate, I'm afraid we kept the real criminals; the people we sent you were our very best.
On the behalf of my crap country, sorry, cobber.