The forgotten political history of Australia's convicts

Historians Hamish Maxwell-Stewart and Tony Moore are hoping Australians will rethink some aspects of the convict story. (Supplied: State Library of NSW)

Among the convicts that were transported to colonial Australia, there was a small group accused of very different crimes to the others.

Of the roughly 162,000 convicts sent here from 1788 to 1868, there were at least 3,600 political prisoners including trade unionists, democracy advocates and Irish revolutionaries.

And far from abandoning their politics when they arrived, these people — along with many others — banded together to bring political resistance to the colonies.

It’s a part of the convict story that’s been lost, according to historians Hamish Maxwell-Stewart and Tony Moore, who have worked on a touring and online exhibit called Unshackled, currently showing at the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery.

As part of a four-year project, their team used huge swathes of digitised information from Australia’s UNESCO-listed convict archive, analysing trends across the decades of transportation and beyond.

“[We’ve] seen, for the first time, the scale of resistance,” Professor Maxwell-Stewart, a heritage and digital history expert from the University of New England, tells ABC RN’s Late Night Live.

Who were the political prisoners?

During the era of convict transportation, Britain was in the midst of the Industrial Revolution. This saw huge leaps forward in technology and development, but at a great human cost.

Pushback came from groups like the Luddites and the Swing Rioters, who protested wages and conditions. Some of these people fell afoul of authorities and were sent to what is now Australia.

George Loveless, for example, was a Methodist lay preacher and labourer. He led a six-person union, from the Dorset village of Tolpuddle, called the Friendly Society of Agricultural Labourers, who protested the lowering of workers’ wages.

“There were unions in the north of England. That was permitted. But not in the south, on these grand landed estates,” explains Dr Moore, the head of communications and media studies at Monash University.

In 1834, the six men were convicted with swearing a secret oath and transported to Sydney and Hobart, becoming famously known as the ‘Tolpuddle Martyrs’. After protests back home, they were pardoned in 1836 and returned.

There were also convicts who Dr Moore calls “the revolutionaries and rebels”. This included more than 2,000 Irish radicals, from groups like the United Irishmen and Young Ireland.

In all, these political prisoners were “a who’s who of colourful movements”, Dr Moore says.

He specifically cites the Daughters of Rebecca, a group of “cross-dressing breakers of tolls and turnpikes” who were angered at the privatisation and tolling of roads in Wales.

And while current research puts the total number of political prisoners sent to Australia at around 3,600, Dr Moore says it could be more than 4,000.

Some convicts were classified as “rioters or breakers of the peace or things that aren’t political, like theft”, he says. But when they looked into the records, they found they were on strike.

“So the count goes on.”

The adventurous Thomas Muir

Thomas Muir is one of Dr Moore’s favourite political prisoners.

Muir was an idealistic Scottish lawyer who advocated for democratic changes to the political system, leading the Society of the Friends of the People.

“He had the temerity to talk to and organise workers in 1790s Scotland and he had the temerity to be a media activist,” Dr Moore says.

“[He was] writing, pamphleteering … distributing banned books such as [Thomas Paine’s] the Rights of Man.”

As part of the British government’s crackdown in the wake of the French Revolution, he was found guilty of sedition and transported.

But Muir later managed to escape NSW on an American fur-trading ship.

He sailed across the Pacific Ocean and had a series of misadventures from Vancouver Island to Mexico City to Cuba, which included losing an eye when one of his ships was fired upon.

“This now-mutilated [but still] handsome young man made it to France. He’s proclaimed a citizen of the republic and joined the directory of Scotland in exile,” Dr Moore says.

The convict project

Many convicts undertook political action in the Australian colonies during their sentences.

But Professor Maxwell-Stewart and Dr Moore say there needs to be a rethink of the broader convict project in order to properly understand this.

“The convicts were in fact, an unfree labour force used and exploited … to build the colonies, to build the economy and to enrich the employers in those colonies,” Dr Moore says.

“We’ve not really understood this in Australia — that [transportation] was a massive machine for building colonies.”

In other words, many thousands of convicts were exploited under horrendous conditions to take the land of First Nations people and develop it for agriculture and other projects.

Professor Maxwell-Stewart also points out that “one of the tricks that transportation pulled off was [it] greatly increased sentences”.

“If you were sentenced to a stint in prison in Britain or Ireland, it’s likely to have been measured in months [because] sending somebody to prison is insanely expensive … But if you got sentenced to transportation, the minimum sentence was seven years,” he says.

“This is like minting 2 million years of unfree labour that the British can use. Effectively what they did is … steal time from [mostly] thieves to steal a continent.”

So convicts rose up against this brutal — and lengthy — existence.

“Until now, we thought that there was really no solidarity from below,” Professor Maxwell-Stewart says.

“But by digitally piecing together lots of court records and lots of punishment records of convicts, we now know that there were at least 11,000 collective actions across NSW and Van Diemen’s Land that featured convicts protesting together.”

The Battle of Castle Hill of 1804 was just one of these.

After a failed rebellion in Ireland in 1798, hundreds of Irish convicts were transported to NSW.

In 1804, many from this group planned to attack colonial government sites, commandeer a ship and return to Ireland to continue the fight there.

“The cry of ‘Death or Liberty’ rang out,” Dr Moore says.

But the Castle Hill rebellion was unsuccessful, with its leaders and participants hanged without trial while others faced punishment like being banished to the Coal River (Newcastle) chain gang.

Women convicts

Conditions were especially harsh for the female convicts sent here.

“We are able to show that every day that a female convict was put in solitary [confinement], knocked 10 days off life expectancy,” Professor Maxwell-Stewart says.

“[And] their sexuality was policed.”

But the team’s research showed that women protested against these kinds of conditions on an enormous scale.

“They ran away at a greater rate than male convicts and this is the only British unfree labour colony where that is true,” Professor Maxwell-Stewart says.

“They also campaigned vigorously against being forced to work on a Sunday, which was notionally the day off for convicts.”

Take Fanny Jarvis for example, whose story was uncovered by researcher Dr Monika Schwarz during the project.

Fanny was a servant in Staffordshire who, at age 16, stole clothes from her master and was transported to Van Diemen’s Land in 1836.

She was a member of the “Flash Mob” gang and involved in one of the major riots at the Cascades Female Factory, where the women took control of the site.

“There was a network of protests and this young teenage convict was right at the centre of them,” Professor Maxwell-Stewart says.

Convict stereotypes

It wasn’t just strikes and other workplace actions undertaken.

“There was [also] media activism by the political convicts — they’re editing newspapers whilst they’re convicts here,” Dr Moore says.

He also cites William Cuffay as someone who had a significant impact.

Cuffay was a Chartist leader, a trade unionist and a descendant of slaves. He was known as a gifted public speaker, often taking his message to the masses.

But in 1848, Cuffay was accused of “conspiring to levy war” against Queen Victoria and sentenced to 21 years in Van Diemen’s Land.

He was later pardoned but chose not to return to Britain, instead staying and campaigning for workers’ rights and democratic reform.

“He becomes the Bob Hawke of Tasmania. He becomes a union leader, against the draconian Master and Servant Act [which was] a kind of Jim Crow-ish attempt to keep convict-ism after it’s abolished.”

Both Professor Maxwell-Stewart and Dr Moore hope their work will challenge some of the convict stereotypes.

“Convicts have either been seen as a situation comedy, like ‘aren’t those rascals lucky enough to come over to Australia where it’s sunny’, or the [author] Marcus Clarke version of the gulag from hell … where they lack agency,” Dr Moore says.

“Whereas we are saying no, they collectively resisted, and they resisted at a great scale.”

In doing so, “they were able to shape the beginnings of the labour movement” here.

And what were once considered radical or even treasonous ideas around workers rights, egalitarianism and democracy took root in the Australian colonies in the mid-to-late 19th century and continue to define us today.