G – FOR GENDER
Saturday, December 19th, 2015Whitehall – 1786, 8 August: ‘His Majesty [King George 111] has thought advisable to fix upon Botany Bay…to form a military establishment [with] two companies of marines. Orders [were] issued for the transportation of six hundred and eighty [680] males and seventy [70] female convicts to New South Wales’. Lord Sydney Home Secretary to Treasury.
London – 1786, August: An unsigned ‘Heads of a Plan for effectually disposing of convicts [and] the establishment of a colony in New South Wales’ was circulated via the Home Office to Treasury and the Admiralty
‘Without a sufficient proportion of that [female] sex it is well known that it would be impossible to preserve the settlement from gross irregularities and disorders’. Heads of a Plan for Botany Bay, Historical Records of New South Wales, Vol. 1. Parts 1 & 2
Between 1788 to 1868 Britain transported 163,000 convicted criminals to Australia. Only 25,000 were women. Of these 12,595 went directly to Tasmania.
Between 1858 and 1868 West Australia, an embryonic white settlement, received 10,000 male and zero female prisoners. Hougoumont, the last convict transport, reached Fremantle in 1868 with two hundred and eighty (280) convicted criminals.