On 9 January 1868 the
In 1833 convict transportation peaked when 7,000 prisoners arrived in Australia but, by this time, public support for the system was already in decline. However, it wasn't until 1868 that convict transportation to Australia came to an end.
Samuel Speed, who died 150 years after the arrival of the First Fleet, is believed to have been the last surviving transported convict. Born in Birmingham in 1841, he was transported to Western Australia in 1866 after deliberately committing a crime - setting fire to a haystack - in order to escape homelessness.
The Hougoumont, the last ship to take convicts from the UK to Australia, docked in Fremantle, Western Australia, on January 9, 1868 — 150 years ago. It brought an end to a process which deposited about 168,000 convicted prisoners in Australia after it began in 1788.
Between 1788 and 1868, 160,000 convicts were transported to Australia. But this did little to deter crime in Britain. The government was unable to convince the "criminal class" that transportation was a terrible punishment when most convicts chose to remain in Australia after serving their sentences.
“The convict men were transported first and soon outnumbered women nine to one in Australia. You can't have a colony without women so the female convicts were specifically targeted by the British government as 'tamers and breeders'.”
This was an historic voyage across oceans to the other side of the world in order to establish the first European settlement, and penal colony, in Australia. The Fleet used two Royal Navy vessels as well as six ships to transport around 1,000 convicts as well as seamen, officers and free people.
Mary Wade
The youngest ever convict to be transported to Australia at the age of 11. Her hideous crime was that she stole another girls clothes and for that she was sentenced to death by hanging.
At nine years old, John Hudson a sometimes chimney sweeper, and the youngest First Fleet convict at the time of sentencing, was tried at the Old Bailey London on 10 December 1783, to seven years transportation for felony, but not for burglary.
Dorothy Handland (c. 1720- ), who, by 1786, was separated from her second husband and worked as 'an old clothes woman' (dealer), was estimated by Surgeon Bowes to be aged 82, and was recorded at Newgate Gaol as 60, was found guilty on 22 February 1786 at the Old Bailey, London, of perjury.
About 20 percent of Australians are descendants of convicts. Most of the first Australian settlers came from London, the Midlands and the North of England, and Ireland.
Only 12 per cent of the convicts transported to Australia were Irish. Yet people often automatically associate the Irish with transportation.
Why so many convicts? Life in Britain was very hard. As new machines were invented, people were no longer needed to do farming jobs so they moved to the cities. The cities became overcrowded.
Convict women were employed in domestic service, washing and on government farms, and were expected to find their own food and lodging.
Transportation did not cease until 1868, but it had been effectively stopped as a sentence in 1857 and had become unusual well before that date. During its 80-year history 158,702 convicts arrived in Australia from England and Ireland, as well as 1,321 from other parts of the Empire.
Samuel Terry (c. 1776 – 22 February 1838) was deported as a criminal to Australia, where he became a wealthy landowner, merchant and philanthropist. His extreme wealth made him by far the richest man in the colony with wealth rivaling that of England.
South Australia was an experimental British colony and the only Australian colony which did not officially take convicts.
Like "Assignment", most convicts would end up working for private employers, but unlike on assignment, convicts would be paid a wage. This was not a market wage (something considerably below – these were coerced workers) but a notable incentive, all the same, and usually a relief from hard labour on a gang.
Mary Wade (17 December 1775 – 17 December 1859) was a British teenager and convict who was transported to Australia when she was 13 years old. She was the youngest convict aboard Lady Juliana, part of the Second Fleet. Her family grew to include five generations and over 300 descendants in her own lifetime.
was the youngest female convict, at 13, on the First Fleet.
Hundreds of thousands of convicts were transported from Britain and Ireland to Australia between 1787 and 1868. Today, it's estimated that 20% of the Australian population are descended from people originally transported as convicts, while around 2 million Britons have transported convict ancestry.
It was usually 450 grams of salted meat (either mutton or beef), cooked again into a stew, and some bread. By 1826, the government also had a more established cattle stock available and so the meat served to convicts was fresher and taken from better-quality cuts than before.
They carried around 1400 convicts, soldiers and free people. The journey from England to Australia took 252 days and there were around 48 deaths on the voyage.
Admiral Arthur Phillip founded the penal colony of New South Wales on January 26, 1788 — still the controversial date of Australia's national day — and set convicts to work according to their skills, planting the seeds of the first European settlement to colonise the Australian continent.