Читать книгу Australian History For Dummies - Alex McDermott - Страница 117

If Macquarie might have learned a moral from his time in NSW, it might have been a rueful ‘Be careful what you wish for’. His request for more convicts to keep the engines of prosperity and growth turning over had been roundly ignored for the first five years of his administration. However, from 1816 it was answered with a deluge to make up for the scarcity of the last 25 years.

In 1815, the Duke of Wellington combined his British forces with Prussian and other forces at the Battle of Waterloo to defeat Napoleon’s French Army and end, finally, the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. These had been raging, on and off (with more on than off), for some 25 years. Just as an outbreak of peace in the early 1780s led to a rapid rise in crime from returned soldiers and sailors in Britain (refer to Chapter 3) so here, too, the defeat of Napoleon meant 400,000 soldiers found themselves demobbed (stood down from their jobs). They returned to a Britain of stagnant economic growth, with few jobs on offer. A dramatic spike in the number of convictions and transportations ensued, as ex-soldiers took to crime.

Macquarie found himself dealing with three or four times the annual number of convicts that previous administrators had received, while simultaneously being dealt an almost biblical set of ecological catastrophes: Droughts, floods and caterpillars destroyed much of the harvests after 1816. He had little choice but to put most convicts back on the public store (for work on public projects) and re-establish large-scale government farms and projects to soak up the surplus convict labour. The increased expenses charged back to Britain reduced Macquarie’s standing with the Colonial Office even further.

Male convicts under government charge tripled between 1817 and 1819, while those in the private sector halved between 1818 and 1820.