'The main reason for the settlement of Australia in 1788 was the difficulty in dealing with the prison population of Great Britain. The stark fact was that England had 100,000 convicts in 1787, and 40,000 of these were awaiting transportation. Hence, a Committee of the House of Commons reported that it was necessary "to establish a colony of convicted felons in any distant part of the Globe."

This was nothing new. For centuries it had been the custom to transport convicts overseas. A law of Queen Elizabeth I had provided for the banishment of rogues and vagabonds; and James I had sent "absolute persons" to Virginia from the earliest days of that settlement. The combination of convicts with "maids of virtuous education, young and handsome," was thought to be the best way of colonising.

All through the Stuart and Hanoverian centuries, the punishment was frequently inflicted, often illegally. Criminals and political offenders... were exiled to the American plantations, and at times the poor and friendless were trapped and sent overseas. Few, if any, protests were made against the system on humanitarian grounds. Indeed, there was a general feeling of resentment when the American colonists preferred negro slaves to 

white convicts, and when, even before the outbreak of the War of Independence, they objected to receiving England’s gaol population.

By this time England had a very pressing problem, and, of course, the bitterness aroused by the American War of Independence intensified it still further. The main point, however, is that the problem would have arisen even had there been no War of Independence. Under the penal laws of that time, the annual accumulation of rogues was too great to be handled by the hangman or the gaoler, especially now that Howard was insisting that prisoners should be treated humanely.

By the eighties, the problem had become so pressing that further delay was out of the question. The gaols were crowded, so much so that even “the black assize” — the pestilence that would sweep away prisoners, gaolers, and even judges themselves — could no longer make sufficient room. The hulks in the ports and rivers were equally packed; and it was costing the State three millions a year to feed the prisoners.

Here entered the last argument for colonising. A convict in the hulks cost £26 15s 11d a year and was a recurrent charge; but he could be transported ten thousand miles away for less than £20, and the theory was that he could pay for his own keep as soon as he landed in a temperate colony. The economic argument for transportation was thus a very strong one. It was this argument that appealed most to responsible statesmen like Pitt and Sydney, although it must be added that they genuinely believed that the convicts, once they landed in Australia, would be able to live an open-air life and grow their own food. To an England accustomed to Howard’s protests against conditions in the gaols this seemed a very good exchange.

On the other hand, it would be erroneous to interpret transportation as a humanitarian movement. The one idea in most people’s minds was to remove “the infamous assemblies” from the hulks and gaols of England. It was assumed that “so large an expanse of territory under such latitudes must be capable of producing sufficient to subsist millions of people.” Nobody wondered what would happen if the assumptions were false.

So far I have written of the gaol problem that had to be solved by the mechanics of transportation. Behind that problem, however, was a wider social problem of which the gaols were only the expression; and, in writing of this, it is very difficult to keep one’s sense of historical proportion. Not unnaturally, it has been assumed that most of our convicts were cherry-stealers or poachers, and that they were sent out because of an infamous penal code which acted as a trap to the poorer classes of Englishmen. While there is some truth in this, and while it is clear that thousands of convicts were transported for crimes that would have earned light penalties today, the undeniable fact is that most of them were sentenced for offences that we would have severely punished. Political prisoners, of course, are in a special category, but the shipping lists in the Mitchell Library, which give full details of individual convicts, show that you would find on an average transport as pretty a collection 

of criminal rascality as you would get anywhere.

In other words, the interpretation of England as a land infamously run by a clique of rich men and corrupt judges is probably false. England of the French Revolutionary period may not have been the “Merry England” of our popular ballads, but it was far from being a land in which a woman or labourer could be hauled off to the hulks or to Botany Bay for looking at a cherry tree or having a rabbit snare in his pocket. Although social conditions were bad, most Englishmen were free. After all, there were not more than 100,000 convicts and gaol out of a population of nine million; and the total number of convicts sent out to Australia over a period of eighty years was certainly no greater than 160,000.

The penal code that could have produced such results was undoubtedly severe; but it was not more so than that of any other European country at the time. The merest glance at the conditions of France and the German States will demonstrate this, and even Beccaria’s reforms had produced little result in Italy.

Moreover, after the founding of Australia, many persons were transported where they would formerly have been executed, and to this extent transportation was a relief.

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Most of the persons committed for trial at this period were accused of petty larceny, and the great majority of the guilty were dealt with in England. Dr. Eris O’Brien, analysing the English returns for the year 1795, has shown that, of 940 convicted criminals in that year, 218 were executed and 168 were sentenced to transportation. The rest were kept at home.

On the whole, it seems that offences against property were harshly dealt with, while those against the person were treated as they deserved. In particular, seven years’ transportation for petty larceny, especially in the case of children, seems very hard.

The plain fact was that eighteenth-century England was a society of landed proprietors; hence the severe penalties on those who infringed property rights. Unfortunately such offences were on the increase, because the small farmers and the agricultural labourers were hit by the Enclosure Acts; and the uncontrolled conditions in the new factory towns engendered a feeling of discontent amongst the factory operatives. The Poor Laws, too, worked deplorably, so that it was an easy step from indigence to larceny, and thus to Botany Bay. Indeed, the offender was lucky if he escaped in this way, because, up to 1828, a man could be hanged in England for stealing more than a shilling.

Two hundred offences were punishable by death, including cutting hob-binds or destroying silk in the loom; but many sentences were commuted. There was a great difference between the letter of the law and its practical application. Oliver Goldsmith wrote in 1760 that every Englishman broke some express law every hour of his life, and it is estimated that, if the law had been rigidly enforced, a tenth of the population would have been in gaol. It was not this lack of uniformity that was the worst result of the system. It was not so much the fact that one cherry-picker was sent out to Botany Bay as that nine others were not. Transportation, at least on the larceny side, was thus an ill-fated lottery in which one man no more guilty than thousands of others suffered.

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Taking the social background as a whole, it is difficult to come to a fixed conclusion. Persons were transported who today would have been fined; that is clear; but it is quite unjustified to argue from this to the conclusion that anybody in England might wake up and find himself on a transport, or to say that ninety per cent of the convicts were guiltless men. Most of them were guilty of what we would call serious crimes. The political prisoners and industrial strikers, the cherry-pickers and the rabbit-snare users were always in a minority. Many of the serious offences, of course, were the result of a social system that needed reforming; and many of the exiles were persons who could have been reformed by other methods. But the historical answer to that is that, a generation earlier, they would have met the hangman in Newgate.

In 1787, however, the problem appeared simpler. Forty thousand men had to be transported. America would no longer take them; if they went to Africa, they died like flies; Newfoundland was not big enough; so there went to Botany Bay, and those who survived the journey out had a chance of redeeming themselves in a new land.​