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    Transported to Botany Bay: Imagining Australia in Nineteenth-Century Convict Broadsides

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    Elliott_2015_BotanyBay.pdf (1.452Mb)
    Issue Date
    2015-02
    Author
    Elliott, Dorice Williams
    Publisher
    Cambridge University Press
    Type
    Article
    Article Version
    Scholarly/refereed, publisher version
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    Abstract
    The speaker of this ballad (circa 1828) laments the fact that, though he was born of “honest parents,” he became “a roving blade” and has been convicted of an unspecified crime for which he has been sentenced to “Botany Bay,” a popular name for Australia. Although he addresses his audience as “young men of learning,” the rest of the ballad implies that he, as is conventional in the broadside form, is a working-class apprentice gone astray. Like this fictional speaker, approximately 160,000 men and women convicted of crimes ranging from poaching hares to murder – but mostly theft – were transported to one of the new British colonies in Australia between the years 1787 and 1867. Minor crimes such as shoplifting, which today would merit some community service and a fine, yielded a sentence of seven years, while other felons were sentenced for fourteen years to life for more serious crimes. While non-fictional accounts of the young colony of New South Wales were published in Britain almost as soon as the First Fleet arrived there in 1788, these were written by people with at least a middle-class education, whereas the vast majority of the convicted felons who were transported came from the working classes. Since books and newspapers were expensive and the level of literacy among working-class people varied considerably, few of them would have had access to such accounts of the new colonies. Several descriptions, mostly borrowed from the writings of the officers who accompanied the First Fleet, were published in cheap chapbook form, while occasional letters from convicts to their families were printed and distributed, and of course there were unpublished letters plus word-of-mouth reports from convicts or soldiers who did return. But none of these were broadly disseminated among working-class people.
    URI
    http://hdl.handle.net/1808/21414
    DOI
    https://doi.org/10.1017/S1060150314000539
    Collections
    • English Scholarly Works [308]
    Citation
    Dorice Williams Elliott (2015). Transported to Botany Bay: Imagining Australia in Nineteenth-Century Convict Broadsides. Victorian Literature and Culture, 43, pp 235-259. doi:10.1017/S1060150314000539.

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    Contact KU ScholarWorks
    785-864-8983
    KU Libraries
    1425 Jayhawk Blvd
    Lawrence, KS 66045
    785-864-8983

    KU Libraries
    1425 Jayhawk Blvd
    Lawrence, KS 66045
    Image Credits
     

     

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