by Rosetta Taylor

Created on: March 27, 2010   Last Updated: June 11, 2011

The essential characteristics of a country's population and national identity are normally shaped over a long period of time.  In the world's central landmass of Europe, Asia and North Africa, successive waves of migration spanning millennia have created a varied mix of ethnic types and national traits which blur and mingle at geographic or political borders.  North and Central American populations have been shaped by more recent migrations from all over the planet during five centuries, whilst geographically isolated peoples in southern Africa, Polynesia and parts of South America were essentially left alone to develop within their own borders.  There remains one part of the world which is unique in having an isolated native population until a particular breed of Europeans were forcibly implanted on their soil just over two hundred years ago.  Thus it was that the future of Australia was forcefully shaped by the arrival of large numbers of convicts from Britain and Ireland.

The success of the revolutionaries in the American War of Independence in the 1780’s left Britain with nowhere to send the growing numbers of convicts who had previously been shipped to penal colonies in North America.  The British government therefore resolved to establish a penal colony in the great southern continent which had been claimed for Britain by the explorer Captain James Cook in 1770.  The first fleet of settlers arrived in 1788, comprising British naval officers and seamen, vastly outnumbered by the 780 convicts they brought with them as prisoners.

The majority of the convicts were derived from the poverty-stricken and uneducated underclass of London and the rural population of Ireland.  Both groups were often sentenced to transportation to the penal colony on trivial charges, never to return to their homeland.  Although some convicts were able to obtain their ‘ticket of leave’, which amounted to conditional freedom, after years of hard labour and good behaviour, many were doomed to end their lives in imprisonment.

When convict transportation finally ended in 1868 the population of Australia stood at around one million, and approximately 162,000 convicts had been transported in the previous eighty years.  These men and women had been the backbone of the new colony, doing the majority of physical labour even after free settlers began to arrive in 1816.  Convict transportation only ended when the free

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