Foreword

Summary

Convict Workers forces us to re-assess the foundations of those values which we recognise as distinctively Australian. In two hundred years we have developed from a British open prison to an independent nation enmeshed in the economies of Asia and the Pacific Rim. That remarkable development has coloured the way in which we have viewed our past.

In 1888 convictism was viewed as a stain on our history, a deep embarrassment to an affluent society in which workers were building one of the world's first Labor parties. In 1938, the transported criminals had been retrospectively pardoned. Australian school children were taught that those who were really guilty remained back in Britain: the convicts were victims, pushed into poaching or theft by poverty, and often sent to Australia for their political persuasions. In my generation a new historical vision emerged, expounded most brilliantly by Manning Clark. I was taught that we had to be more honest about our past — and that honesty meant coming to terms with our unsavoury beginnings, and recognising that those transported were unskilled hardened criminals. But, as Manning Clark himself emphasised recently, each generation has the task of re-interpreting its history, of viewing the past from a new present. Convict Workers is just such a radical challenge to prevailing orthodoxy.

At a time when our immigration policy has become a matter of debate, Convict Workers examines transported criminals as migrants.