G – FOR GENDER IMBALANCE – FORCE OF NUMBERS – -COLONIAL BREEDERS
1786 -Whitehall, 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,Admiralty. Frank Murcott Bladen, Historical Records of New South Wales, Vol. 1. Parts 1 & 2
***********
‘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. Bladen. Ibid.
************
‘It was the custom in the eighteenth century for the authorities to consider the sex problems of convicts or others in similar positions’. Bladen, Commentary.
**********
‘Later in the [American 1775-1783] war special army companies composed entirely of convicts were sent to West Africa’. Roger Knight, First Fleet Studies from Terra Australia to Australia, ed. John Hardy and Alan Frost, 1989.
***********
‘Rape is a biological possibility for the male”. This biological fact; when situated in a culture in which men monopolize political, economic, legal, military, religious and other forms of power has the potential to create a disposition amongst men to view sexual intercourse as one additional piece of weaponry in their armour of power, one that they can use whenever and upon whomsoever pleases them’. Anne Summers, Damned Whores and God’s Police, Penguin, 1975
*************
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) male criminals. See: The Ketch Connection
Œ
Portsmouth – 1787, 13 May: Commanded by Captain Arthur Phillip RN a large amphibious army in eleven (11) ships, known in Britain and Australia as the ‘First Fleet’, sailed from Portsmouth, England to invade the island continent of New Holland known now as Australia.
Overwhelmingly male the fleet’s complement, 1500 souls, consisted of two hundred (200) Royal Naval personnel, two hundred and forty-five (245) garrison marines, four hundred and forty (440) merchant seamen, twenty (20) officials, nine (9) physicians, Chaplain Richard Johnson his wife Mary, thirty-one (31) marine wives.
The expedition’s five hundred and eighty (580) male convicts, rationed ‘without distinction…as soldiers serving in the West Indies’,were their ‘service was for the state’ were available for combat.
There were approximately fifty (50) free children on the ‘First Fleet’. Twenty-two (22) born during the voyage of eight (8) months.
Most were children of traditional ‘camp-followers’ selected specifically from among the one hundred and ninety-three female prisoners, for the use of officers.
Then there was the mysterious Mr. Smith. Described as a stow-away. However evidence garnered by the late Dr. Bryan Gandevia suggest he was Australia’s first ‘Foreign Correspondent’.
§
‘The administration gave no consideration to the date of expiry of sentences and several of the First Fleet convicts had been tried as early as 1781 and 1782. As seven [7] years transportation was the most common sentence, many had already served five-sevenths of their time on embarkation and six-sevenths on disembarkation at Sydney’. Dr John Cobley, Crimes of the First Fleet, Angus and Roberson, Sydney, 1982
By December 1792 the Sydney settlement had received 3,346 male and 766 female convicts. By then upwards of three hundred and fifty (350), mainly young men, had completed their sentences.
They had their villainy rewarded with grants of Aboriginal land. Free, stranded 13,000 miles (21,000 km) from home, they lived isolated lonely lives. Most, after many years of ‘situational homosexuality’, hungered for heterosexual intercourse
While other European nations included convicts in their settler-mix Britain’s invasion and occupation of Australia was unique. The initial four (4) decades 1788-1823 the white population was almost exclusively male, criminal and military.
The First Nations’ women bore the ‘gross irregularities and disorders’ flagged in Whitehall’s ‘Plan for Botany Bay’. By force of numbers hey were conscripted as ‘comfort women’ for both criminal and conqueror.
The seeds of the Stolen Generations came with the ‘First Fleet’. James Lavell, the first named Anglo-Aboriginal child was born at Sydney in 1788. His mother’s name is not known. His father Henry Lavell was one of very few convicts who returned to England a free man. See: A Viscous Circle – The Hangman’s Noose
§
GENDER – ENGLAND – PUSH FACTORS
Following closely on the invasion of New Holland in 1788 came the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars (1793-1815). After Britain’s victory at Waterloo in 1815 unemployment in Britain ballooned.
‘Before 1850 men greatly outnumbered women in the Australian colonies. For this there were three [3] main causes. First and by far the most important the British Government transported…six [6] times as many male convicts as female. Colonial Eve, Ed.Ruth Teale, Oxford University Press, Melbourne 1978
Demobilised soldiers traumatised by years of brutal warfare joined desperate paupers whose ranks were swollen already with Admiral Nelson’s men paid-off after the English fleet’s decisive defeat of the French and Spanish fleets at Trafalgar in October 1805.
Second, army and naval personnel on active service [with families] in Britain…Third, the major sources of [colonial] income, whaling, sealing, farming and sheep breeding, were male preserves’. Ruth Teale. op.cit.
GENDER – AUSTRALIA – PULL FACTORS
‘The colony required that as many male convicts as possible should be sent thither, the prosperity of the country depending on their numbers; whilst, on the contrary, female convicts are as great a drawback as the others are beneficial’. Dispatch, Governor Lachlan Macquarie, 30 April 1810
Land, lots of land combined with an acute shortage of labour in the ‘male preserves’ saw a steady rise in numbers of criminals, the unemployed and paupers being criminalised and transported beyond the seas’.
By 1820 there were nine [9] white men in New South Wales, and ten [10] men in Van Diemens Land [Tasmania] for every white woman’. Stephen Garton, Out of Luck, Poor Australians and Social Welfare 1788-1988, Allen and Unwin, 1990
The census of 1828 put Australia’s mainland white population at 27,000 men and 9,000 women.
§
ENGLAND ‘FEAR OF THE MOB’
Great Britain’s cities and towns teemed with pick-pockets and petty thieves. Ruthless highwaymen terrorised country roads. Hungry foot-pads and hardened criminals roamed city streets and dark alleyways.
The deserving ‘impotent poor’ starved to death slowly in parish work-houses. The ‘undeserving poor’ displaced rural, worn-out domestic and factory workers, eked out a living in slave-like conditions. They threw their support behind organised revolutionaries such as Ludities and Blankeeteers.
Mutinous Royal Navy sailors rioted at Spithead and Nore for better wages and relief from brutal disciplinary practices.
The disastrous ‘Irish Famine’ was exacerbated by greedy absentee English landlords demanding more agricultural products be exported to fill the already groaning dining tables of Britaiin’s elite.
In Scotland the savage removal of tenant-crofters from both Highlands and Lowlands caused widespread dislocation and destitution. Many angry brutalised Scots migrated to Australia and The First Australian’s bore the brunt of their savagery.
Jurist Sir Samuel Romilly sought radical penal reform.He fought to end such horrors as ‘the accused be taken from this place to a place of execution to be ‘hung, drawn and quartered’.
Post- war Romilly’s efforts probably contributed post-war to a up-tick in ‘transportation from the realm’.
By the end of 1831, approximately 56,000 British convicts had been transported to Australia. From 1832 Britain shipped out her prisoners at the rate of 5000 per year – 73% male, 27% female.
Intellectuals, John Tooke and John Wilkes, agitated for a Bill of Rights. Other reformers, among them, Anthony Ashley-Cooper the7th Earl Shaftesbury, advocated for a ten (10) hour working day.
He also called for a halt to the use of boys as young as four (4) years being squeezed into the deepest, darkest spaces of coal mines and from being prodded up stifling ash-filled chimneys.
Shaftesbury’s Mines Bill was passed in 1842. It also sought to assure that women could no longer be forced to work semi-naked in coal mines where temperatures could exceed 100 degrees Fahrenheit.
Convict transportation to New South Wales ended in 1841. After 1841 both male and female convicts were sent directly to Tasmania.See: Stranger Danger
During the period 1803 to 1852 approximately 67,200 convicts – 54,650 men and 12,595 women were transported directly to Tasmania.
WHITE EMIGRANTS
‘With the cessation of transportation to the eastern mainland thousands of assisted migrants were brought to supply the labour market’. Russell Ward, Australia, 1965.
A ‘bounty’ system was established to assist emigrants escape the gin filled hell-hole that was Queen Victoria’s England. Paupers strong enough to survive the horrendous rigours of vile parish work-house were bundled onto cargo ships.
Then came ne’er-do-wells; disgraced sons of Britain’s upper and merchant middle classes whose families paid them to disappear ‘beyond the seas‘.
Most of this class of migrant could read and write. They rose quickly to positions of power from where they lorded over the ‘other’ – blacks, poor whites and **on and on and on .
As if two (2) genocidal gender assaults – convicts and paupers – were not enough a third wave threatened the future biological integrity of Australia’s First Nations’ Peoples.
This time greedy men in search of the ‘golden goose’.
‘In the sixty [60] odd years after the First Fleeters landed at Sydney Cove the population increased slowly to 405,000. In the decade of the Gold Rush, 1851-1861, this figure [405,000] grew to about 1,146,000.
In these ten [10] years the white population of the continent nearly trebled, while that of the infant colony of Victoria increased six-fold from 87,000 to 540,000′. Ward. ibid.
§
‘Historians have argued that…imbalance [of the sexes] was responsible for a high incidence of male sexual violence towards women in the colony’. Garton. ibid.
Mainly men, from Great Britain 500,000; England and Wales contributed 300,000, Ireland 100,000, Scots 100,000. Odds and ends – Americans, Europeans and New Zealanders numbered about 5,000.
‘By 1859 there were around 50,000 Chinese in Australia. David Walker, Anxious Nation, Australia and the Rise of Asia 1850-1938, University of Queensland Press, 1999.
Between 1842 and 1859, with Britain the aggressor, Britain and China were engaged in the Opium Wars. During this period Australia’s ‘Britishness’ – laws of pride and prejudices held sway – ‘there was to be no intermarriage’ with the Chinese.
Fear and hatred of the First Australians by, what were now second and third generation ‘currency’ white Australians, collided with the British ‘horror‘ of Chinese diggers.
Further cause for hatred sprang from the Chinese work ethic. Their work practices were collaborative, to benefit the group.
This was in stark contrast to both the Brits and home-grown whites. They too worked hard. But individuals, in secret dominated by self-interest.
In New South Wales ‘the rush that never ended’ began at Bathurst. In July 1861 battle-lines of war snaked across the world from China to a little outpost of the British Empire – Lambing Flats- now the peaceful town of Young, where cherry blossoms bloom in the spring.
In 1861 fear that the Chinese lust for gold would be matched by their lust for white women ‘sparked a battle for supremacy’ that culminated in the Battle of Lambing Flats.
1851-1871: The primary decades of the gold rush 1851-71 saw Australia’s total population rocket to one and 3/4 million (1.75,000,000). The vast majority were men.
1870: In September 1870 the 18th Royal Irish Regiment, last of twenty-five (25) regiments of British Infantry serving between 1788 and 1870 and, who Dr Peter Stanley recognised, ‘participated in the great struggle at the heart of the European conquest of this continent’ departed for Britain.
EPILOGUE
‘To believe that Britain can forget its history is to believe that the Russians should not discuss the crimes of Stalin or the Germans the crimes of Nazism.…There is a need for a re-writing of history, for the purging of some guilt by its contemplation’. Donald Horne, God is an Englishman, Penguin Books, 1969
**Airbrushed – Sex – Genocide in plain sight
It is undisputed when, in April 1770, Captain Cook RN made landfall in Botany Bay the people were naked, uniformly black and without smallpox pitting.
It is undisputed, eighteen (18) years later, in January 1788 when Captain Arthur Phillip RN made landfall in Botany Bay, the people were naked, uniformly black and without smallpox pitting. See: Dead Aborigines Don’t Eat
Before the end of 1788 Captain David Collins described seeing a First Nations’ woman trying to brush what she perceived as ‘dust’ from her tiny baby’s legs .
In all probability the baby was James Lavell. His father was probably Henry Lavell one (1) of very few convicts who returned to England a free man. See: A Vicious Circle – The Hangman’s Noose.
Tags: convicts, First Fleet, women