Chapter Seven - A Labour Aristocracy in Chains

Summary

Introduction

The identification of the convicts with the criminal class has denied the transported workers membership of the ordinary working class. Not surprisingly, few Australian historians have asked if elite workers, members of a skilled upper stratum of labour aristocrats, were transported to New South Wales. True, Lelia Thomas, in 1919, identified among the convicts a ‘labour aristocracy [which] was exceedingly independent and often insolent, creating a danger centre in the labouring classes which the government viewed with uneasiness’. According to Thomas, ‘For the germ of the labour movement, we do not look to the freeman, but to the government convict, particularly to the mechanic …. This restless and favoured labour aristocracy was already instinct with a strong labour consciousness’. But more recent labour historians have not shared this view. R.W. Connell and T.H. Irving agreed that there was an educated and skilled convict elite, but argued that they were divided from the rough, uneducated and vice-ridden mass of labouring convicts. First and foremost they were divided along ideological lines from the convict lumpenproletariat. This division was reinforced by the authorities, who provided privileges for skilled workers and sometimes physically segregated the educated convicts (because they were regarded as especially threatening). As a result Connell and Irving argued that the literate and skilled convicts failed to provide the leadership necessary to resist the excess of the penal system and to organise convict workers into ‘combinations’.