Convicts, Slaves and Prison Inmates: The Voyage to Australia in Comparative Perspective

In the wake of his 1832-38 tour of the Australian penal colonies, Quaker George Washington Walker concluded that the health of prisoners in Van Diemen's Land (Tasmania) was generally inferior to that of the working classes in England. He attributed this not to conditions in the convict colony, but to the dissolute lives that convicts had lived in the British Isles prior to their arrest and transportation. In fact, he thought that the "salubrity of the climate" combined with "the ample allowance of food" and "moderate labour... tend in considerable degree to counteract the mischief thus incurred." Walker's positive description of the conditions faced by convicts is at odds with many popular depictions. Thus, according to the nineteenth-century convict ballad, Jim Jones at Botany Bay, prisoners exiled to Australia toiled for "day and night in irons clad like poor galley slaves"-a cycle terminated only by death, whereupon their bodies were used "to fill dishonoured graves." By using the testimony of convicts and the records employed to regulate their lives, it is possible to test Walker's hypothesis.