Death or Liberty

DEATH OR LIBERTY: Rebels and Radicals Transported to Australia 1788-1868

By TONY MOORE

Pier9, 2010, 431 pages, $34.95 (pb)

Review by Phil Shannon

Britain’s rulers were faced with a dilemma in the nineteenth century – how to punish the empire’s rebels and reformers. They could be fined but this would allow them to remain at large to spread sedition. Prison would eventually allow them back onto the streets. Whipping was not appropriate for the more gentlemanly subversives. Hanging would only create martyrs.

Transportation to the Australian extremity of the empire, however, offered many advantages. Escape and communication were as good as zero. It was like death but without the political drawbacks. Its other bonus was as a source of free labour for the empire. Death or Liberty is the history of Australia’s political convicts by Monash University’s Tony Moore.

The ruthless extension of the capitalist market system in 18^th century Britain had unleashed a crisis in social control resulting in 162,000 convict “casualties of change” transported to Australia between 1788 and 1868. The poor who were pushed into petty crimes were the vast majority but there were 3,600 political prisoners.

These included “social protesters” responding to economic distress through insurrection, riot, sabotage and union ‘combinations’; nationalist rebels fighting British political domination and economic exploitation; and political reformers who opposed the privileged oligarchy and tried to democratise British politics.

The “social protest” rebels included cottage industry weavers and rural labourers under their mythical leaders, Ned Ludd and Captain Swing, who faced the choice of “starvation or riot” as capitalist mechanisation shattered their livelihoods and who, in desperation, resorted to arson and machine-breaking.

They were joined by six working men from Dorset who, to raise agrarian workers’ wages from 6 to 10 shillings so that they might feed their families, formed the first rural labourers’ trade union in 1834. These ‘Tolpuddle Martyrs’ gave the lie to what Moore calls Jane Austen’s blinkered class gaze of deferential harmony reigning over an England that was in fact being torn apart by the capitalist juggernaut and experiencing class turmoil in a cycle of riot and repression.

The nationalist rebels included fifty French-Canadians who took up arms against British rule in 1839, accompanied by a hundred radical American democrats who aided their revolt. The Irish supplied over 2,000 political transportees, from the bourgeois liberal United Irishmen (Catholic and Protestant republicans with their rallying cry of ‘Death or Liberty’) to the peasant-based Defenders (“impoverished land-war insurrectionists”), from the gentleman-in-arms leaders of the Young Ireland movement to the Irish Revolutionary Brotherhood (the Fenians) who were the last convicts transported to Australia.

The political reformers shipped south included the Scottish Political Martyrs in 1794, convicted by rigged courts in notorious sedition trials because they advocated democratic reforms such as free speech and universal suffrage, and 103 ‘physical force’ Chartists from the first national mass workers’ movement which campaigned from 1837-49, almost invariably peacefully, for a political solution to workers’ hardships.

The outcomes of transportation were mixed. Political convicts of higher social status could receive privileges not granted to more plebeian rebels such as land grants whilst still under sentence, freedom of movement and communication, exemption from forced labour, assignment to more generous free settlers and less prospect of the lash. These privileges, however, could also be taken away on the whim of a gaoler or governor.

For most lower class political rebels, their lot was generally hard labour and the full range of physical punishments. Some died prematurely, many more had their spirit broken. The harsh penal stations of Norfolk Island, Moreton Bay, the Hunter coal mines, Port Macquarie and Van Diemen’s Land (a “nineteenth century version of Guantanamo Bay”) worked their way in encouraging, understandably, many to keep their heads down politically.

The colonies, however, were “a place of both cruelty and opportunity”, both “gulag and social escalator”. Targeted for transportation because of their ‘natural leadership’ qualities, trade skills and education, many political convicts were sought after by colonial employers. Their economic prospects in Australia were often better than those they had rebelled against at home and, with early pardons for good behaviour, many settled into “comparatively peaceful and uneventful lives”. Social mobility and advancement through business or government service was also on offer for a tiny few.

Political grievances also lost some of their sting. From the 1850s, for example, the Chartist demands for popularly-elected parliaments began to be realised in Australia as colonial liberals adopted a strategy of managing rather than inflaming class conflict.

Political dissent did not disappear, however. The spirit of solidarity and defiance amongst the Irish, for example, posed real problems for social order in the colonies, prompting Governors Hunter and King to plead for fewer of these ‘most desperate and diabolical characters’. The high point of Irish resistance was the Castle Hill Rebellion in 1804 at Parramatta, an armed rising with more insurrectionary potential than the Eureka Rebellion.

Legal challenges to transportation, political lobbying, publishing projects and a succession of daring escapes (seemingly just “a row boat and a passing whaler away”) kept other political convicts in the forefront of resistance. Combined with a colonial anti-transportation movement (which sought more colonial autonomy, a free labour market and humanitarian treatment), and modern communications, a campaigning press and vigorous international solidarity, convict transportation became increasingly ineffective in silencing Britain’s political enemies.

Australia advanced from penal settlement to bourgeois democracy ahead of Britain but this, argues Moore, was not inevitable. It was achieved through “ordinary people making extraordinary sacrifices”, prime amongst them the political convicts who “sacrificed their own freedom to help achieve the freedoms we have today” - suffrage, free speech and assembly, workers’ rights and social justice which “all arrived in the colonies in chains”.

Written in the theory, style and spirit of the great Marxist practitioners of ‘history from below’ (E.P. Thompson, Eric Hobsbawm and George Rudé), Tony Moore has resurrected the “unsung rebels of field and factory” to their leading role in the transformation of Australia from a gaol to a land of social and political struggle for a more just, more free, society.