Alex McDermott - Australian History For Dummies

For those who Macquarie coaxed into the Hyde Parke Barracks, there was no more task work and knocking off when the job was done at about midday. Now work would continue from sunrise to sunset, with two short meal breaks. Finally, 30 years after the so-called prison colony was founded, something resembling a prison to put the convicts in was opened. Convicts were still allowed out on weekends, and they made the most of it — thefts and arrests for drunkenness rose steeply at the end of each week.

Macquarie may have said that he only wanted to let ex-convicts be readmitted to their previous rank in society, but everyone could see it was much more than that. To Macquarie, your previous ‘rank’ in the British social hierarchy didn’t matter. If you made a great success of yourself and your operations in NSW, Macquarie welcomed you. This would cause problems for Macquarie among the ‘Exclusives’ within the new colony and, eventually, with the Colonial Office in Britain.

Most of those who’d arrived free in the colony mingled, cohabited and married with the convicts and ex-convicts without any real worries. But a small minority (there’s always some …) went out of their way to hold themselves aloof and ‘exclusive’ (which became their nickname) whenever possible.

The Exclusives were a small group of free colonists who had kept themselves separate from close social involvement with the convicts and the emancipated. They were a handful of families who, although themselves from generally humble or low-class backgrounds, had made it very rich in the colony. But while they had all had close business involvement with convicts and ex-convicts (it was impossible to get anything done otherwise), they had made sure to marry and socialise with those others who had no taint of past criminal conviction. This made for very small tea parties, and a great deal of social anxiety.

With the arrival of Macquarie, the Exclusives found themselves dealt a governor who not only insisted on appointing ex-convicts along with Exclusives to positions of responsibility — as magistrates, for example, or as fellow board members on public trusts — but also enjoyed their company so much he invited them to receptions at Government House, to pleasant Sunday dinners and christenings.

This was exciting stuff — for everyone bar the Exclusives. For these people it was frightening. The stigma of coming to a convict colony was bad enough. If word started getting back to Britain that felons and free settlers intermingled easily throughout society, just think of the disgrace! They feared social contamination. And, more than that, they thought, strongly, that if you’d committed a crime and been transported, it just wasn’t right that afterwards you’d be treated like everyone else.

The Exclusives in NSW sent impassioned letters about the state of affairs under Macquarie to various people in power and with influence in Britain. And most people in Britain completely shared the Exclusives’ attitudes.

Although Macquarie and people in NSW might have thought it perfectly reasonable that an emancipated convict shouldn’t be forever marked, socially and legally, by their previous crime, in Britain it was shocking. There, a person convicted of any of the various larcenies, embezzlements, forgeries or assaults that those transported had committed was ejected forever from respectable society. There could be no coming back. And your legal status was forever altered too — even after serving time, a convicted felon couldn’t give evidence in court or hold property.

In NSW, the economic and legal order would simply collapse under the regimen upheld in Britain — convicts owned more than half the wealth in the colony, frequently used the courts to sue and protect their various rights, and were involved with just about every economic transaction that took place. Different realities had bred different attitudes, which Macquarie discovered and then championed.

While the Exclusives were the singular minority in the colonies, their attitudes reflected what most people thought back home. Members of the British Parliament, and readers of popular periodicals, were duly outraged when they heard and read that a society made up largely of ex-criminals had so lost its sense of respectable decency that ex-thieves not only enjoyed the most luxurious mansions in Sydney town but also served as magistrates and dined regularly with the governor. Had the whole colony gone completely mad?! This was a world too topsy-turvy for good sense.

Trouble was brewing for Macquarie among the Exclusives in NSW and those in power in Britain. The situation was then made worse by forces largely outside Macquarie’s control — in particular, the end of the Napoleonic War.

If Macquarie might have learned a moral from his time in NSW, it might have been a rueful ‘Be careful what you wish for’. His request for more convicts to keep the engines of prosperity and growth turning over had been roundly ignored for the first five years of his administration. However, from 1816 it was answered with a deluge to make up for the scarcity of the last 25 years.

In 1815, the Duke of Wellington combined his British forces with Prussian and other forces at the Battle of Waterloo to defeat Napoleon’s French Army and end, finally, the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. These had been raging, on and off (with more on than off), for some 25 years. Just as an outbreak of peace in the early 1780s led to a rapid rise in crime from returned soldiers and sailors in Britain (refer to Chapter 3) so here, too, the defeat of Napoleon meant 400,000 soldiers found themselves demobbed (stood down from their jobs). They returned to a Britain of stagnant economic growth, with few jobs on offer. A dramatic spike in the number of convictions and transportations ensued, as ex-soldiers took to crime.

Macquarie found himself dealing with three or four times the annual number of convicts that previous administrators had received, while simultaneously being dealt an almost biblical set of ecological catastrophes: Droughts, floods and caterpillars destroyed much of the harvests after 1816. He had little choice but to put most convicts back on the public store (for work on public projects) and re-establish large-scale government farms and projects to soak up the surplus convict labour. The increased expenses charged back to Britain reduced Macquarie’s standing with the Colonial Office even further.

Male convicts under government charge tripled between 1817 and 1819, while those in the private sector halved between 1818 and 1820.