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Why Were There No Poor Laws in Australia?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 October 2011

Brian Dickey
Brian Dickey
Affiliation:
The Flinders University of South Australia
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Extract

There were no paupers aboard the First Fleet, nor any poor laws. There were paid officials of the central state under the direction of the Home Office; there was a military force of Marines, some with their families; and there were convicts, state dependents who legally were no longer the responsibility of a parish but were under the control of the Home Office. The labor of the convicts, but not their persons, was assigned to Governor Phillip, who in turn would assign that labor as he thought fit in the colony, subject of course to instructions from his superiors. Who needed a poor law in a jail?

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Policy History , Volume 4 , Issue 2 , April 1992 , pp. 111 - 133
Copyright
Copyright © The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA. 1992

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References

Notes

1. The most recent studies of pre-industrial English social welfare are in Continuity & Change 3.2, (1988), especially the articles by Henderson, Mclntosh, and Laslett. See also Smith, R. M., ed., Land, Kinship and Lifecycle (Cambridge, 1984)Google Scholar, especially the essays by Smith, , Wales, , and Brown, ; and Slack, Paul, Poverty and Policy in Policy in Tudor and Stuart England (London, 1988)Google Scholar. It is in the essays of the two collections cited here that the analyses of welfare has been most effectively set out under the categories of life-cycle, crisis, and work-related poverty. That these categories can be used in the investigation of aid to the poor beyond that provided by the state is shown by Fissell, Mary, “The ‘Sick and Drooping Poor’ in Eighteenth-Century Bristol and Its Region,” Social History of Medicine 2.1 (April 1989): 35–58.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed

2. Katz, Michael, In the Shadow of the Poorhouse: A History of Welfare in America (New York, 1986)Google Scholar. Joanna Innes has explored the eighteenth-century debate in England on the identity of the poor in a paper presented to the Social History Society Conference, January 1990, “Poverty, Welfare and Self-Help.”

3. Recent studies include Brundage, A., The Making of the New Poor Law: The Politics of Enquiry, Enactment and Implementation, 1832–39 (London, 1978)Google Scholar;Dunkley, P., The Crisis of the Old Poor Law in England, 1795–1835 (New York, 1982)Google Scholar; Snell, K.D.M., Annals of the Labouring Poor (Cambridge, 1984)Google Scholar, chap. 3; Mandler, P., “The Making of the New Poor Law Redivivus,” Past and Present 117 (1987): 131ff.Google Scholar

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5. Ibid., 118.

6. Atkinson, Alan, “The Primitive Origins of Parliament,” Push from the Bush 24 (April 1987): 47–65.Google Scholar

7. Smith, Babette, A Cargo of Women: Susannah Watson and the Convicts of the “Princess Royal” (Sydney, 1988)Google Scholar, chap. 8.

8. McVey, James, “Children in Need of Care: State-sponsored Institutions for Children in New South Wales up to 1833” (M.A. thesis, University of Sydney, 1988).Google Scholar

9. Historical Records of New South Wales (Sydney, 1893–1898), lGoogle Scholar, 2, 423.

10. McVey, chap. 2, is the most recent and reliable account of the emergence of this institution and corrects the simplistic work of Ramsland, J., Children of the Back Lanes: Destitute and Neglected Children in Colonial New South Wales (Sydney, 1986).Google Scholar

11. McVey, 92ff.

12. Salt, Annette, The Outcast Women: The Paramatta Female Factory 1821–1848 (Sydney, 1984)Google Scholar; Nicholas, , Convict Workers (Cambridge, 1988)Google Scholar, chap. 6 (Oxley).

13. Smith, A Cargo of Women, chap. 7.

14 Dickey, Brian, No Charity There: A Short History of Social Welfare in Australia, 2d ed. (Sydney, 1987), 12–17.Google Scholar

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17. This debate has been analyzed by Poynter, J. R., Society and Pauperism: English Ideas on Poor Relief 1795–1834 (Melbourne, 1969).Google Scholar

18. Dickey, No Charity There, 1–8. Much detail in this paper is documented in this study and will not be further referred to. See also Nichol, W., “Brothels, Slaughterhouses and Prisons: An Account of Hospital Conditions in New South Wales, 1788–1820,” Push from the Bush 22 (1986): 6–29.Google Scholar

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21. Merritt, Adrian Suzanne, “The Development and Application of Masters and Servants Legislation in New South Wales, 1845–1930” (Ph.D., ANU, 1981), 3Google Scholar, 11, 418. Dyster, Barrie, Servants and Masters: Building and Running of the Grand Houses of Sydney, 1788–1850 (Sydney, 1990)Google Scholar has some important points to make about industrial relations in the 1840s.

22. As the principal object of the Society put it: “to relieve the poor, the distressed, the aged, and the infirm, and thereby to discountenance, as much as possible, mendicity and vagrancy, and to encourage industrious habits among the indigent poor as well as to afford them religious instruction and consolidation in their distresses.” From the Annual Report of the Benevolent Society 1820–78: see also Rosemary Bereen, “‘To encourage industrious habits among the indigient poor’: An Examination of the Underlying Philosophy of Institutional Care for the Poor in the Colony of New South Wales in the Early Nineteenth Century,” paper presented to the Social History Society Conference, 1990. My thanks to Ms. Bereen for access to her paper.

23. Hirst, John, Strange Birth of Colonial Democracy (Sydney, 1988)Google Scholar, chap. 7.

24. Larcombe, F. A., The Origin of Local Government in New South Wales 1831 –1858 (Sydney, 1973)Google Scholar, chaps. 1–3.

25. Marsden, Samuel, Sermon on Matt. 25:35–40, Sermon no. 66 (Watermarked 1833)Google Scholar, Notes and Sermon Papers of Samuel Marsden, Archives Collection, Moore Theological College Library, Sydney.

26. Owen, David, English Philanthropy 1660–1960 (Cambridge, Mass., 1960), 93–113Google Scholar; Bebbington, 69–72.

27. 5 November 1843.

28. Annual Report, 1847–48, 19–20.

29. Annual Report, 1851–52, 20–22.

30. Board of Enquiry, Benevolent Society and Society for Destitute Children, New South Wales Legislative Council, Votes and Proceedings 1855, 1, 981ff.; Sydney Morning Herald, 16 October, 25 October 1855.

31. Relief to Poor Persons, Correspondence, New South Wales Legislative Assembly, Votes and Proceedings, 1861–62, i, 905ff.

32. Inglis, Ken, Hospital and Community: A History of the Royal Melbourne Hospital (Melbourne, 1958), 3–10.Google Scholar

33. Kennedy, Richard, Charity Warfare: The Charity Organization Society in Colonial Melbourne (Melbourne, 1985).Google Scholar

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35. Pike, Douglas, Paradise of Dissent: South Australia 1829–1857, 2d. ed. (Melbourne, 1967).Google Scholar

36. Dickey, Brian, Rations, Residence, Resources: A History of Social Welfare in South Australia since 1836 (Adelaide, 1986), 2Google Scholar. Detail on South Australia is drawn from this volume.

37. MacDonagh, O.O.G.M., A Pattern of Government Growth 1800–1860: The Passenger Acts and Their Enforcement (London, 1961)Google Scholar, chap. 2.

38. Dispatch of Colonial Secretary Lord Stanley to Governor Grey, 1 March 1842, Colonial Office 13/20/f561–70 (Australian Joint Copying Project reel 589).

39. Hirst, John, “Keeping Colonial History Colonial: The Hartz Thesis Revisited,” Historical Studies 21 (1984): 85–104.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

40. Brilliantly captured by Atkinson, Alan, Camden (Melbourne, 1988)Google Scholar, in the context of one estate, and discussed by John Hirst in Strange Birth, chap. 7.

41. P. 491.

42. Oxford 1918, reprinted 1969 (Melbourne), ii, 743.

43. Hirst, Strange Birth, chap. 13.

44. Dickey, Brian, “The Broken Hill Strike of 1892: Further Documents,” Labour History 11 (1966): 40–53CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Markey, Ray, The Making of the Labor Party in New South Wales, 1880–1900 (Sydney, 1988), 121–28.Google Scholar