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When I emigrated from Rhodesia to Australia in 1970 few people acknowledged their convict antecedents. Today many people actively search for convict ancestors. In forty years the devils have turned into angels, so I wondered whether convicts related to my discipline of mapmaking and surveying had been falsely accused of stealing sixpence or were mass murderers! Attitudes have changed dramatically since 1820 when the Reverend Samuel Marsden described Catholic immigrants as "the most wild, ignorant and savage race ... men who have been familiar with robberies, murders and every horrible crime since their infancy.. .they are very dangerous members of society, treacherous and fond of riot." (Fitzsimons 2012). I decided to examine the stories of nine convicts who became surveyors or landscape artists.
The following table illustrates the approximate numbers of convicts transported to Australia over eighty years (1788-1868):
The total number of convicts exceeded 160,000 of whom about 1.5% died on the way to Australia. Only 18% were female, an extreme imbalance resulting in some convicts consorting with Aborigines.
In the 1700s, London was a depressing place for poor people. In his etching Gin Lane (Fig. 1.) artist William Hogarth depicts a starving exsoldier, a drunken woman neglecting her child, a group quarrelling, a man hanged upstairs, and a building collapsing on a funeral. The unjust conditions resulted from overcrowded towns, the unanticipated effects of the Industrial Revolution and the Enclosure Acts which deprived people without property of the hunting and foraging opportunities they had previously enjoyed in the forests and common lands.
When Britain lost its American colonies in their War of Independence in the 1770s, it lost its dumping ground for convicts. These latter were consequently herded onto hulks before transportation to Australia where the vast majority worked unsung as labourers, farm hands or house servants. Five years after First Settlement, the visiting Spanish artist Fernando Brambila depicted one group of convicts used like oxen to pull and push a cart at Parramatta while another group waits under armed guard (Fig. 2.). Forty years later the famous artist Augustus Earle depicted some convicts still wearing leg-irons (Fig. 3.).
JOSEPH WILD
17737-1847
Convict, constable, assistant explorer
Joseph Wild was transported to Sydney in the Ganges in 1797 after being found guilty of...