Introduction

Transportation to New South Wales was the subject of numerous British official enquiries from the 1790s onwards. This chapter explores some of the themes examined by these investigations and the conflict of views which emerged. Such conflicts reflected the ambivalence of the arguments put forward about the efficacy — economically and penally — of transportation and the way in which enquiries of this sort could be ‘stacked’ by the selection of witnesses whose views were well known and whose first-hand knowledge of Australia might be small or even non-existent.

Transportation of convicts involved both penal and economic objectives. The penal objectives were to rid Britain of criminals, to deter others from committing crime and to reform the convicts. The economic functions were referred to in the first Transportation Act of 1717: ‘in many of His Majesty's colonies and plantations in America, there was a great want of servants, who by their labour and industry might be the means of improving and making the said colonies and plantations more useful to this nation’. Australian colonies were eventually substituted for the American ones, but the economic role of transportation remained that of labour supply.

The purpose of this chapter is to bring into perspective the working of the convict system by examining the views of certain contemporaries who gave evidence to parliamentary inquiries on the economic and penal elements in transportation, the relationship between these elements and the question of whether by the end of the 1830s the system was failing to fulfil either set of objectives adequately.