Difference between revisions of "Early Australian Convict Transportation"

Revision as of 08:27, 5 February 2016

The vast majority of the 162,000 convicts sent to Australia between 1787 and 1868 were transported by private contractors. And for the first three decades, from 1787 until around 1815, these contractors, and their agents on board the ships - the ships' officers, the surgeon, and the crew members - were responsible for the day-to-day management of the convicts. Thereafter, the ships' owners and operators continued to play a significant role in the process of transportation, but day-to-day management of the prisoners themselves was primarily the responsibility of government-appointed surgeon superintendents.

With the exception of Charles Bateson in his 1959 classic, 'The Convict Ships', and Michael Flynn, in the introduction to his biographical database of the Second Fleet (1993), historians have paid little attention to the emergence and development of the transportation system.

No one has closely studied the series of contracts that cascaded from the Navy Board (and from 1794, the Transport Board) to the convict contractor to the ship owners, to the ship's master to the individual members of the crew, and how these contracts were enforced. To date, no historian has explained the legal framework that allowed private contractors to punish convicts at sea, or the system of law and administrative practice that enabled convicts to protest at their treatment.

There is still no definitive account of life among the convicts on the lower deck - how the convicts were housed; how they were clothed and fed; what were the toilet arrangements; how and how often the prisoners were washed; what arrangements were made for the sick; what private property they were allowed to take; why some of them were able to buy provisions and trade goods on the outward voyage; how some of them were employed by the ships' officers.

Little is known about the early convict contractors, and what little has been published has often been wrong. Not much is known about the ships or the ships' officers.

In recent years, a number of academic studies have looked at mortality rates, but (influenced by Bateson) they have focused on 1815 as the turning point, the year after surgeon superintendents were appointed. Recent research by the moderator of this site, and some of his academic colleagues, shows that while mortality rates did fall after 1815, they fell a great deal more around 1800, following a series of reforms initiated by an Irish surgeon and inspector of convicts, Jeremiah Fitzpatrick.

This wiki is a study of how convict transportation actually worked. It draws upon the research of Gary L. Sturgess for a forthcoming book on the transportation system, and seeks to make available to professional researchers and family historians, the results of more than fifteen years of research in British and Australian archives. This vast archive of material will be published over time, as time permits.

Gary L. Sturgess holds the New South Wales Premier's Chair of Public Service Delivery at the Australia and New Zealand School of Government and the University of New South Wales. He is also Professor of Public Service Innovation at Griffith University in Brisbane, Australia. He is a leading international authority on the design and management of public service markets, and brings to the study of convict transportation a practical understanding of the design and management of effective public service contracts. He is the former Director General of the NSW Cabinet Office and was awarded the Order of Australia in 2005 for services to government.

His great, great grandfather, James Sturgess, was sent to Australia in 1847 for stealing books.