Beyond the Convict Taint: George Barrington and the Colonial Cure

Abstract

The unprecedented influx of French emigrants into Britain during the 1790s was the mirror image of another forced migration: the groups of convicts transported to Botany Bay, Britain’s first imperial venture instituted solely as a means of containing and punishing its criminal classes. After American independence ended transatlantic transportation, a backlog of convicts in the 1780s overcrowded gaols where disease and alarms over prisoner uprisings were endemic. This problem assumed even greater urgency in the 1790s, when authorities came to see the lower orders in general as poised to move against their betters and duplicate the French revolutionary experiment at home. The solution for disposing of the criminals created by economic and political crisis in the later eighteenth century became Australia; as historian Frank McLynn notes, “The fleet that sailed for Botany Bay in 1788 took with it the prisoners who had been in limbo since 1784, men not dangerous enough to hang but too much of a social menace to pardon. Some were veterans of the Woolwich hulks like George Barrington, who had fulfilled the direst prophecies about future recidivism by graduating from petty pickpocketing to the more skilled variety at racetracks” (293).