Issue Details: First known date: 2015... 2015 Transported to Botany Bay : Imagining Australia in Nineteenth-Century Convict Broadsides
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AbstractHistoryArchive Description

'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form, while occasional letters from convicts to their families were printed and distributed, and of course there were unpublished letters plus word-of-mouth reports from convicts or soldiers who did return.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

  • 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

  • Appears in:
    y separately published work icon Victorian Literature and Culture vol. 43 no. 2 June 2015 10702203 2015 periodical issue

    'The Victorians’ driving interest in exploration and expansion is perhaps one of the best-known scholarly truisms about the age and its literature. While the British Empire was rapidly expanding and commercial competition began to stretch across the globe with a newly perceived urgency, Victorians at home throughout this expanding empire were at once fascinated and anxious in reading about the wider world. Armchair explorers might have confined themselves to a vicarious enjoyment of the gold-nuggets that seem to lay scattered throughout the expanding settler world, of adventures in an excitingly exoticised “bush,” and of shipwrecks and dubious impostors who sometimes seemed to return from the middle of nowhere...' (Publication introduction)

    2015
    pg. 235-259
Last amended 7 Feb 2017 13:34:06
235-259 Transported to Botany Bay : Imagining Australia in Nineteenth-Century Convict Broadsidessmall AustLit logo Victorian Literature and Culture
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