Introduction

Men working together, not the labour of individuals working separately, accounted for much of the early economic growth and development of Australia. Gangs of men and women cut stone, worked in metal, made clothing and shoes, repaired roads, constructed bridges, carried water, unloaded ships, ploughed the fields, gathered the harvest and laboured in the commissariat store. Small scale tasks, like making nails, hinges or locks, and large construction projects, such as building the barracks or cutting a road over the Cumberland, were undertaken by gangs. But the gang system as a work organisation has received little attention from historians. Public work gangs have been depicted as brutal instruments of punishment rather than as means of organising useful work. As flogging came to form the centrepiece of work relations in the government sector, historical attention has come to be focused on the iron gangs where convicts were punished by hard labour and denied the right to work ‘on their own time’. In contrast, the recent historiography on assignment has emphasised the creation of a viable system of private production. Given incentives, it has been argued, the assigned servants were efficiently organised for work unlike those in government service where shirking, loafing and malingering vied with the whip as a characterisation of everyday life. In contrast to the public work gangs, the teams which ploughed and threshed on the large estates were a productive way of performing agricultural tasks.