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When you think of Australia's convict colonies, petty thieves and fraudsters likely spring to mind — along with lashings and hard labour.
After all, it was "the British Empire's Guantanamo Bay", as historian Tony Moore puts it.
But arriving with the criminals were exiled members of political movements, and they helped turn one of the most unfree and unequal places on Earth into a democracy.
"Freedom, democracy and responsible government weren't handed to the Australian colonies without a struggle," says Dr Moore, who is leading the Conviction Politics project investigating the link between convicts and democracy.
The project is giving us fresh insights into the two broad groups who "lay the foundations for democracy in Australia" — political prisoners, and the everyday convicts who fought for their rights.
'The Chartist's democracy'
Among them was Thomas Muir, a Scottish radical with a hankering for democratic reform. In 1793 he was sentenced for sedition and transported to New South Wales for 14 years.
A gifted lawyer, Muir made the case for freedom and liberty in the fledgling legal systems of the colonies.
"[He argued] persuasively that the Scottish Martyrs' continued imprisonment was illegal," Dr Moore explains.
"As their punishment was banishment, they were entitled to the rights of free Britons as long as they did not return home.
"London rejected this as a striking a blow at the system of convict transportation itself."
Muir would eventually stage a daring escape from the colony, but not before his oratory and advocacy helped plant a democratic seed.
In Britain, his radical proposals of universal suffrage and working-class inclusion had helped to birth a political reform movement known as Chartism.
In the early to mid-19th century, the Chartists were articulating a new radical vision for British politics.
Their advocacy for a six-point plan known as the Charter centred on peaceful action, but often spilled into violence.
The Chartist Charter:
- All men to have the vote (universal manhood suffrage)
- Voting should take place by secret ballot
- Parliamentary elections every year, not once every five years
- Constituencies should be of equal size
- Members of parliament should be paid
- The property qualification for becoming a member of parliament should be abolished
Veterans of famous Chartist rebellions like the Swing Riots and the Newport Uprising escaped the noose and ended up in Australia, bringing their radical ideas with them.
"Australia is often called a Chartist's democracy because by 1856 and the decade following, many of the key six points of the Chartists had been realised in Victoria and New South Wales," Dr Moore says.
"This is because their leadership was transported from 1839 to 1848."
One leading Chartist, William Cuffay, transported for allegedly planning an uprising, became one of Australia's first trade unionists.
His most influential campaign was against the Master and Servant Act, which Dr Moore says tethered "a free labour force to their employers" and limited their rights.
Under the act, employees who left their employment without permission could be hunted down by authorities.
For decades after he was pardoned, Cuffay continued to organise and agitate for democratic rights for convicts.
His activist efforts, regularly reported on in the media, involved public appearances and speeches at so-called Monster Meetings, which could draw up to 1,500 people.
The colonies of Australia began to grant universal male suffrage in the late 1850s.
Ahead of their time
But Chartism wasn't the only cause that brought political convicts to the other side of the world.
Irish radicals also featured in the convict colonies.
Kevin O'Doherty, a young medical student, was transported for sedition in 1848.
Granted a "ticket of leave" in Van Diemen's Land, he contributed to the publication of a magazine called the Irish Felon.
It "raised all sorts of issues of colonisation, including criticising the treatment of Indigenous Australians, well before their time", Dr Moore says.
When he was finally pardoned, O'Doherty emigrated to Queensland and eventually became its first health minister, introducing a range of health reforms.
Another Irish revolutionary, William Smith O'Brien, became a key figure in the fight to end convict transportation to Australia.
While in solitary confinement at the maximum security prison on Maria Island off the Tasmanian coast, he became, as Dr Moore describes him, "a Nelson Mandela figure".
From his prison cell, he emerged as a leading figure in the anti-transportation movement.
The popular movement, says Dr Moore, called for an end to convict transportation to Australia.
"[It] gained support from the working class as well as business owners, who wanted Van Diemen's Land to move away from plantation servitude to a modern and fairer economy," Dr Moore says.
O'Brien also wrote a book drafting the ideal democratic constitution, echoing the Chartist agenda.
"The things that he stands for, legitimated through the global campaign for O'Brien's release, were gradually enacted in Victoria, New South Wales and Tasmania from the late 1850s," Dr Moore says.
"But Ireland had to wait till the 20th century."
Collective action in the colony
Many other convicts were transported for crimes of opportunity borne from poverty.
Petty theft — even of the most menial items — was enough to be shipped to the other side of the world.
In the face of unpaid labour, limited food and harsh punishments, many of these men and woman were politicised upon arrival.
Collective action became a method of resistance.
Michael Quinlan, a labour historian, estimates that there were at least 400,000 occasions on which convicts were tried for dissent — an astonishing stream of resistance.
"On average a convict was brought before the courts on over six occasions," he says.
"The great majority of those prosecutions were for work-related dissent."
Collective absconding, strikes and refusal to work were common.
"Some of them tried to escape the colonies entirely by stealing boats but many just moved to different areas and just tried to obtain work and escape the binds of and earn a wage," Professor Quinlan says.
"If you look at how democracy is built, it's not built by individual narratives — it's built by collective action by people demanding greater says."
The new insights into the collective organising of everyday convicts are emerging in a very 21st century way.
The detailed convict records have all been digitised in Tasmania as part of the Conviction Politics project.
The aggregated data is showing the patterns of walkouts, and other collective actions — what may have seemed to be an individual court appearance for some form of work protest turns out to have involved four other people, for example.
'Convicts resented the inequality from the start'
By the late 19th century, thanks to its rapidly forming democratic institutions and progressive social policies, Australia was known as the social laboratory of the world.
Dr Moore says that fact is rarely celebrated.
"We achieved democratic constitutions, in the sense of the Chartist's demands for working-class political participation, well in advance of the UK," he says.
"And we don't even celebrate or understand that.
"In Australia the push for equality started in the mid-19th century, as convicts resented the inequality from the start."
Not long after the colony was granted responsible government, it gave the vote to all British men, and payment for members of parliament.
Many of the freedoms and institutions that Australians enjoy today can be traced to the often-forgotten resistance efforts of convicts: some already radical, some radicalised upon arrival.
"One of the least-free jurisdictions on the planet become quite free and quite democratic in the late 1850s and 1860s," Dr Moore says.
"Australia wasn't just the arse-end of the world.
"Australians do ourselves injustice if we dislocate ourselves from world history."
However, Dr Moore says "the struggle for democracy and human rights is never over" and points out the plight of Indigenous people in the same period.
"The colonisation, dispossession, imprisonment and persistent disenfranchisement enacted on Indigenous Australians by the colonisers was a blight on this achievement," he says.
"Treaty-making and enshrining Indigenous participation within federal and state constitutions remains unfinished business of Australian decolonisation and democracy."
"That is the subject of activism today."
Topics: history, community-and-society, government-and-politics, crime, law-crime-and-justice, human-interest, 18th-century, rights, australia, united-kingdom
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