The last convict ship arrived in Western Australia on 10 January 1868. Many convicts were transported for petty crimes, while a significant number were political prisoners. ... Around 90% of modern Australians are descended from transported convicts.
According to Ernest Scott (1868-1939), the professor of history in the University of Melbourne in a book "A Short History of Australia", Australia's US Mayfair equivalent event looked something like this:
On May 13, 1787, the ‘First Fleet ‘sailed from England. It consisted of the ships SIRIUS, the SUPPLY, three store ships, and six transports carrying the convicts: eleven vessels in all. Phillip arrived in Botany Bay on January 18, 1788, and two days later the whole of the ships were safely at anchor there.
The total company which arrived was over 1,000. The staff of officers, marines, and extra hands, with women and children, numbered 290, and the convicts who reached Botany Bay were 717, of whom 520 were males. This was the stock with which the new colony was settled.
http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks02...
‘The Australia Solution’ was a concept conceived and enacted by politicians in England in the 1780′s who were forced to deal with their overcrowding and ‘wretchedly insanitary’ goals. To the pressured politicians, it seemed that ‘The Australia Solution’ would eradicate England’s convict problems forever, because it called for 80 years of systematic transportation of 160,000 of them to a land down-under, some 13,000 km away.
In terms of nationalities, the vast majority of the convicts to Australia were English and Welsh (70%), Irish (24%) or Scottish (5%), although some convicts had been sent from various British outposts such as India and Canada. There were also Maoris from New Zealand, Chinese from Hong Kong and slaves from the Caribbean.
Parents can pass criminality on to children
IF YOUR father is a criminal, you have a crooked mother and you are a man it is more likely than not you too are headed for a life of crime.A study by the Institute of Criminology has looked at the likelihood of criminal tendencies being transferred from parents to their children.Fathers convicted ... Kathleen Folbigg and Andrew Krakouer.
Previous studies have found that criminal fathers do have an influence on their sons, but this was the first time a mother's impact has also been examined.
The study, published yesterday, found sons with criminal fathers and law-abiding mothers had a 48.5 per cent chance of committing a serious crime in their lifetime. If the mother had a criminal record, but the father was clean, the probability of the son offending was 33 per cent.
But if both parents had criminal records it created a ''multiplier effect'' and the probability the son would commit a serious crime increased to 67 per cent.
This compared with an 18.7 per cent chance of offending if neither parent had a record.
''The more severe the criminal offending history, the greater likelihood of intergenerational transmission,'' Dr Adam Tomison wrote in the report.
The study was conducted by tracking the criminal history of six extended Tasmanian families, all known to police. Of 313 family members identified, 99 men and 60 women had criminal records for serious offences, including car theft, assault and stealing.
There have been high-profile examples where sons and daughters of criminals have also been convicted. Kathleen Folbigg was convicted in NSW of killing her three infant children in 2003. During the trial it was revealed she had learnt as an adult that her father had stabbed her mother to death in 1968.
The AFL player Andrew Krakouer and his brother Tyrone Krakouer both spent time in jail for an assault outside a Fremantle nightclub in December 2006. Their famous footballing father, Jim Krakouer, had been jailed in 1996 for drug trafficking.
Dr Tomison said the study highlighted the importance of intervention programs for children known to be at risk.
Britain Sent Thousands of Its Convicts to America, Not Just Australia
The joke about Australia is that it was founded by a bunch of criminals. And from 1788 until 1868, Britain did send roughly 164,000 convicts to the land down under. America’s dirty little secret? The same exact thing was happening here. In fact, experts estimate that over 52,000 British prisoners were shipped off to colonial America.Britain had been shipping convicts to America for decades before they started sending them to Australia. In fact, it was precisely because of America’s fight for independence that the Brits had to start sending their criminals to Australia. But from 1718 until 1775, convict transportation to the American colonies flourished. Some estimates claim that almost 10 percent of migrants to America during this time were British convicts.
Typically, getting banished to America was for a term of either seven or fourteen years, after which the convict could theoretically come back the Britain. Escaping home early, however, was punishable by death. And it wasn’t just men. Some female convicts were transported to the American colonies as well, for crimes such as being “lewd” and “walk[ing] the streets after ten at night.”
Many Australians have more or less embraced their convict history. But if you’re an American who had no idea that your country’s founding included a huge prison population, you’re not alone.
Historically, Americans have not been too keen on discussing the fact that convicts came to what would eventually become known as the United States.
As Anthony Vaver explains in his book Bound With An Iron Chain, historians have sought to cover up the fact that so many prisoners were sent to America:
Through the 19th century, most historians simply ignored the institution, and those who did recognize it usually claimed that nearly all of the people who were transported were political prisoners.No less a figure than Thomas Jefferson himself tried to downplay the history of penal transportation to America. Writing in 1786, Jefferson insisted that even if British criminals had been sent, they must’ve been small in number:
The Malefactors sent to America were not sufficient in number to merit enumeration as one class out of three which peopled America. It was at a late period of their history that the practice began. I have no book by me which enables me to point out the date of its commencement. But I do not think the whole number sent would amount to 2000 and being principally men eaten up with disease, they married seldom and propagated little. I do not suppose that themselves and their descendants are at present four thousand, which is little more than one thousandth part of the whole inhabitants.Except that this wasn’t true. British convicts came over in droves, and free Americans weren’t too happy about it. In fact, even before the Transportation Act of 1718 really opened the doors for Britain’s dumping of undesirables in America, some colonies tried to pass laws that would prohibit the practice. In 1670 authorities in Virginia passed an act that prohibited convicts from being sent to the area. This, unsurprisingly, was overruled by the king.
Pennsylvania tried to do something similar in 1722 by passing a tax for the importation of any people for servitude who had been found “guilty of heinous crimes.” The king, naturally, said that this wasn’t allowed either, proclaiming in 1731: “Whereas acts have been passed in America for laying duties on felons imported, — in direct opposition to an act of Parliament for the more effectual transportation of felons, — it is our royal will and more pleasure that you approve of no duties laid on the importation of any felons into Pennsylvania.”
Many of those sent to the American colonies were put to work doing manual labor. From an 1896 paper on the subject by James Davie Butler:
Planters both in the West Indies and in Virginia, which was reckoned a part of them far on in the eighteenth century, needed laborers, and welcomed a supply from whatever quarter. [...] As Virginia’s staple was tobacco, it naturally became a centre of white as well as black servitude, whether its victims were indented or not, and criminal or not.Americans have rather romantic ideas about how their country was founded. We’ve long been fond of the mythology surrounding persecuted people freely traveling to the New World and building the greatest country on Earth. But, like all history, it’s much, much messier than that. Our history includes plenty of genocide, slavery, and just a dash of prison folk — and the latter may be news to many Americans who wouldn’t hesitate to make jokes about Australia being populated by the descendants of criminals.
But Australia really wasn’t special in that regard. Shipping criminals halfway around the world was part of America’s sordid history, too.
Conclusion: Aborigine people face criminal discrimination from descendants of criminals who are also prone to life of crime.
