Chapter Thirteen - A New Past

Summary

How did Australian historians get it so wrong? In place of a cross section of the British and Irish working classes they saw a criminal class; rather than an inflow of literate and fit young men and women with useful skills they emphasised an uneducated, viceridden mass of unskilled labourers; instead of an efficient labour market they identified the allocation of convict labour as a ‘giant lottery’. This traditional interpretation of the convict workers distorts our past, leaving the convict settlers without positive achievements and without a culture. Even the convicts' most obvious physical accomplishments — the roads and buildings — stand merely as symbols of endurance to a harsh and brutal system of forced labour, where work was extracted by the lash from a physically and psychologically demoralised workforce.

The convicts' only achievement was survival. There was no massive resistance to convictism and no class solidarity against a repressive regime. Convict insurrections, such as Castle Hill in 1804 and Norfolk Island in 1834, were the exception. Historians, sympathetic to the plight of convicts, have uncovered mainly passive protest to the system whose basic parameters were widely accepted by the transportees. Perhaps the convicts' most widespread form of protest was malingering, hardly the stuff of which heroes are made. Indeed, malingering confirms the convicts as lazy shirkers, crafty, scheming criminals intent on avoiding hard work. Small wonder that mateship (honour among thieves), hatred of authority and individual acquisitiveness marked for most historians the meagre cultural baggage that the convicts brought with them to Australia. These singularly unattractive values were the convicts' only contribution to the formation of Australian culture.