The largest number of convicts in Australia were drawn from London and other cities. Rural rebels and minor criminals were also more numerous than is sometimes supposed (Griffin 2014). Many were employed in rural occupations in Australia. A study of ‘Captain Swing’ rebels going to New South Wales on the Eleanor in 1831 suggests that their life might have been rather similar to what they had left behind (Kent and Townsend 2002). Many came from farming villages in Hampshire, Wiltshire and Berkshire. They were separated from their families and unable to return to England or to bring their relatives out. Rural convicts were essential to Australian agriculture, as were the assisted migrants who followed them from similar counties. Many of these migrants were less conservative than in hierarchical England, or even radical, and eventually had much better access to their own land.

Serious unrest in Great Britain began to decline from the 1840s, with movement into towns and cities, emigration, trade unions of skilled workers and English patriotism. Politics settled down to parliamentary concentration on a developing two-party system, with many leading positions still in the hands of the landed aristocracy and their relatives. Some of this was copied in Australia into the 1890s, when the party labels were changed into Free Trade and Protection, a division that also influenced Britain. Discontent among the English and Irish rural populations helps to explain the radical liberalism that characterized many parts of rural Australia during the second half of the nineteenth century. It was not revolutionary, because land was often freely available, and former labourers could become farmers. But neither was it conservative and deferential.

Australian rural labourers had the vote between 30 and 50 years before those they had left behind in England and Scotland. While the landed classes and the Anglican Church had influence in the older settlements in New South Wales, Victoria and Tasmania, many rural Australians were Methodists or Presbyterians, owned their own farms and ‘touched their hat to no man’ as Henry Lawson put it. Moreover, many rural settlers were Irish and had their own churches and radical traditions, as did many Scots (Partington 1994). The literary England of Jane Austen created a misleading picture of passive rural English – a picture that remains dominant to the present.