Читать книгу Australian History For Dummies - Alex McDermott - Страница 119

The strange thing about NSW was that it was begun as a place of punishment, yet for many convicts who arrived in the period up to and including Macquarie’s rule, it had proved to be a place of freedom and opportunity. Macquarie’s idea of a society of second chances (building on the reality he’d found on his arrival and undoubtedly popular in a colony chiefly made up of convicts and ex-convicts) cut less mustard in Britain, where the late 1810s saw greater scrutiny and debate about the nature of life in NSW.

In the House of Commons, a parliamentarian denounced the rule of Macquarie for being both expensive and chronically slack. The story of D’Arcy Wentworth, last seen leaving England after being caught as a highwayman and now the Chief of Police in Sydney, was repeated with anger.

Originally, the general impressions most people in Britain had of NSW and Van Diemen’s Land were vague, hazy ones based on the idea of a Botany Bay hellhole. NSW and, later, Van Diemen’s Land, were assumed to be places of hard labour, little food ‘and constant Superintendence’. This made the place ‘an object of peculiar Apprehension’. Now, however, the real stories were getting back — about thieves, pickpockets and highwaymen being freed on arrival and going on to achieve wealth and respectability unlike anything they’d had before.

Earl Bathurst, running the Colonial Office, decided to send out Commissioner John Thomas Bigge, ex-chief justice of Trinidad, to conduct an inquiry into what was really happening in NSW. Bathurst’s instructions outlined the problem as he saw it.

Transportation, the second worst punishment aside from execution, was now being explicitly requested by those convicted of even minor crimes. And transportation only worked as a deterrent, clearly, if people didn’t want to be sent. Something had to be done to make transportation once again ‘an Object of Real Terror to all Classes of the Community’. Bigge’s job was to work out what, and how. Bathurst warned him to avoid letting any ‘ill considered Compassion for Convicts’ lessen transportations main purpose: The all-important ‘Salutary Terror’ that would keep potential British crims in check.