AustLit
Transported to Botany Bay : Imagining Australia in Nineteenth-Century Convict Broadsides
single work
Issue Details:
First known date:
2015...
2015
Transported to Botany Bay : Imagining Australia in Nineteenth-Century Convict Broadsides
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'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form, while occasional letters from convicts to their families were printed and distributed, and of course there were unpublished letters plus word-of-mouth reports from convicts or soldiers who did return.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.' (Publication abstract)
Notes
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Epigraph: ==
Come all young men of learning a warning take by me,
I’d have you quit night walking & shun bad company,
I’d have you quite night walking or else you’ll rue the day
When you are transported & going to Botany Bay.
From “The Transport, or Botany Bay” (Hugh Anderson 62)
Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of
Last amended 7 Feb 2017 13:34:06
235-259
Transported to Botany Bay : Imagining Australia in Nineteenth-Century Convict Broadsides
Victorian Literature and Culture
Subjects:
- Farewell to Judges and Juries : The Broadside Ballads and Convict Transportation to Australia, 1788-1868 2000 anthology poetry criticism diary autobiography
- The Penguin Book of Australian Ballads 1964 anthology poetry
- Felons and Folksongs 1955 single work criticism
- Damned Whores and God's Police : The Colonization of Women in Australia 1975 single work non-fiction
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