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Criticism 45.3 (2003) 285-299



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Transportation and the Reform of Narrative

Toby R . Benis


BRITISH AUTHORITIES ESTABLISHED a penal colony in Australia in 1788 to resume a practice that had shaped the nation's justice for a century: banishment. Before it was interrupted by the American Revolution, transportation had become a cornerstone of criminal sentencing, enabling the development of a legal code whose hundreds of capital crimes were in practice frequently punished by the less severe judgment of exile. 1 The British knew little about Australia beyond the sketchy reports produced by Captain James Cook's voyage some 17 years previously. Such ignorance finally did not stop the government from establishing a penal colony there, so desperate were authorities to dispose of a growing backlog of convicts who were sentenced to transportation during the 1780s. During this decade the many convicts who formerly would have been shipped to America had nowhere to go; typhus epidemics caused by overcrowding in jails and prison ships along the Thames meant death sentences for many who supposedly had eluded capital punishment. 2

In reinstituting transportation, the Pitt ministry believed it had taken a key step in stabilizing the legal and social status quo. But the birth of the Botany Bay colony would coincide with new challenges to British institutions brought on by the struggles of domestic political reformers, the French Revolution, and the ensuing continental war. These developments led to a popular revision of transportation's significance, a revision given added force by the new penal settlement's location at the opposite end of the world. In particular, representations of seditionaries bound for Botany Bay, of their passage to Australia, and of life in the colony were colored by social and political developments in Britain. On one hand, early British accounts of Botany Bay emphasized its utter strangeness. Robert Hughes notes that new arrivals saw the continent as "a land of inversions," where the seasons and even the stars displayed themselves in reversed or unfamiliar forms. 3 However, the widespread sense that everything in Australia was symbolically, as well as geographically, upside down enabled observers to use British conventions to [End Page 285] describe the experience of transportation and exile in ways that indicted legal and social practices back home. By reinscribing the experience of courtroom trials and resulting exile within the concerns of a world left behind, convict writers and their sympathizers attacked injustice and sought legal redress that may have eluded the accused in Britain. 4

This preoccupation with authority—what constituted it, and how to defend or defy it—permeates accounts of the early colony by officials, as well as the writings of and about the condemned. In representations of convicts and transportation itself, the struggle to appropriate political, as well as moral, authority emerges perhaps most strikingly through the recurring trope of mutiny. In this context, mutiny can both define a specific act—overthrowing military, usually naval, command—or it can stand in for a spectrum of challenges to claims for power. Paul Carter contends that mutiny can serve as a paradigm for any articulation of transportees' experiences at odds with the official interpretation of crimes and their punishment: "To let the convicts speak for themselves would have been to entertain the unthinkable: mutiny, another history." 5 Taken in its most general sense, as a rebellion either against powerful groups or against ideas claiming particular validity or legitimacy, mutiny is one way of categorizing the political crimes with which many of the most famous convicts of the 1790s were charged. 6 During this decade in particular, criticism of the government became identified with the punishment of transportation, as 14 years of Australia became "the normal sentence for routine sedition cases." 7 In trial records, personal accounts and other public forums, transported seditionaries and their sympathizers in turn sought to recast their activities as legitimate, and the real mutineers—against laws of reason, political justice, or human sympathy—as the authorities responsible for their conviction and exile. On a formal or aesthetic level, these texts present the opposition between mutiny and legitimacy in...

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